Damien Walter

Chess is the King of Games. It just is. It’s not Buckaroo. It’s not Kerplunk. You don’t see political strategists huddled in a bunker in the Pentagon trying to model geopolitical implications by extracting a plastic stick from a tube so that the marbles don’t fall. No. They play chess. ​Chess is the King of Games because it is a map. ​If we look at the brief history of chess we see a game that…

Longterm members of our community know about myth, but new members might be scratching your heads. Myth is old stories about why the sun rises etc. Science fiction is the extrapolation of scientific FACT. They are NOT the same. Let’s talk. In fact that idea about myths being stories to explain the sun rising (etc) is a product of colonialism. Myths never have such direct meanings. Myths do…

To my Gen-X compatriots, to the Boomers and Millenials, and to Gen-Z who will have to clean up this mess we all made… …can we agree that Star Trek is the future we would all like? A future in which poverty is eradicated, disease is a mere curiosity of the past, humanity has put aside petty squabbles over resources, borders, and skin melanin and replaced all of that sh*t with a collective,…

I don’t remember if the Culture was my first experience of trans charcters, but it must have been close. I read the books at around the same time as The Sandman when I was about fifteen. So it was probably one of those. Trans characters barely existed in UK media of the early 90s. The only depictions I recall were “transvestites” shown as burly men in fishnets as “criminal of the week” in The…

There is a single narrative technique that connects almost every multi-billion dollar science fiction franchise ever made. It is the invisible engine powering the most successful stories of the last century. And yet, if you ask ten working Hollywood screenwriters what it is, nine of them will give you a blank stare—and the tenth will probably try to sell you a $200 course on…

So. Why are the fanboys enraged about Zendaya’s performance as Chani? Sean Young’s Chani in Lynch’s Dune is an archetypal “anima”. Basically, she’s the princess that the young adventurer meets on his Hero’s Journey. Zendaya’s Chani ain’t that at all. Put aside all the complex systems fiction stuff, Frank Herbert’s Dune was a bestseller because young, and not so young, men can really get into…

The year is 1920.  The Empires of Europe have spent the last half decade blowing each other up with bombs, guns and heavy artillery. As World War 1 burns itself out, men who survived the fighting begin to wonder if a better world, a world without empires and wars, is possible. These working class men return home to grinding poverty and the brutal conditions of factory work. Many still do not…

What is the difference between fantasy & myth? A common response to our discussions of PHM as MPF was “all fiction is fantasy”. One commenter angrily insisted that “Shakespeare is fantasy”. Incorrect. Fantasy fulfills a psychological need for power, eros, status. A lot of fiction is fantasy, but far from all. Shakespeare is the opposite of fantasy. Macbeth doesn’t fulfill your need for power.…

We are in a war on podcasting. Podcasts are one of the last survivors of Web1.0, the era that gave us cool things like Wikipedia and the Blogosphere, back when “information wanted to be free”. Today information wants to generate clickthrough ad revenue. The Science Fiction podcast is hosted on damiengwalter.com on an RSS feed. That means I just upload an audio file to a post, and you…

It’s worth noting that Project: Hail Mary is called Project: Hail Mary. After the Hail Mary (American) football pass thrown in the final seconds to a catcher a loooong way down the pitch in a desperate attempt to win the game. Which is the basic plot of Project: Hail Mary but with a starship instead of a football. BUT Hail Mary is also a core Catholic prayer, that book and movie can’t escape…

Critique and reviews are not the same thing. Reviews are marketing for the corporate entertainment complex. Telling you if something is “good” or “bad” is a way of focusing attention on it. Reviews are from the mass media age, when publishers did reviews to attract ad-soend from entertainment corps. I don’t have any interest in reviews, I never looked at them. Nothing I have ever done has…

It seems likely that humankind does not survive World War 3 It also seems likely that, with war in Ukraine and Russia, Iran and America, Israel and Gaza and more that we have been in WW3 already for some years. In this episode of the Science Fiction podcast recorded in the early days of Russia’s war against Ukraine, I think about the science fiction history of our final war. Many idiotic…