Damien Walter @damiengwalter - Tumblr Blog

The most hated philosophy Ah, yes, POSTMODERNISM The most hated of all obscure philosophies. The "postmodernists" like Lyotard, Baudrillard, Foucault etc were big in the 80s then drifted out of fashion......

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Hauntology Which future from the past haunts your now? If you’re alive and watching this in 2026 you are likely haunted by one of two great stories of the future....

Why do Leftists always lose? A (partial) defense of Contrapoints

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…

The myth that made Interstellar

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…

2026 : the year World War 3 begins

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,…

Woke Marxist Social Justice Warrior Space Hippies….With Guns

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…

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You don't understand science fiction

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…

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Chani vs Chani

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…

HG Wells vs Vladimir Lenin

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?

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.…

A note for listeners of the Science Fiction podcast

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…

Is God better than the alternative

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…

Reviews vs Critique

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…

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Becoming K1

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…

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Death Star vs Enterprise

It’s in no way a coincidence that the two biggest scifi mythoi of the 20th century both feature a mythic representation of the same aircraft carrier. The Death Star is the nuclear powered American super-carrier CVN-65 that served in the Vietnam war, launching over 13,000 missions in the war that inspired George Lucas to base the Rebel Alliance on the Viet Cong. And the starship Enterprise was…

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What is the PROBLEM with transhumanism?

We’re exploring The Machine in the new series of video essays on the Science Fiction channel… …and one upcoming essay in that series is Those Transhuman Bstrds : a history of transhumanity. Here’s a little preview. The modern world is built around a powerful mythic image THE MACHINE We think of reality as a big machine. Society as a machine we can shape with laws and policy. And we think of…

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All warfare is narrative warfare

All warfare is narrative warfare. The tanks and bombs, or drones and robodogs, the explosions and killings, the military dominance and monopoly on violence are all about one thing. Whose story wins. Imagine you woke up tomorrow and everyone around you spoke German and Japanese. White Americans are the underclass. The history youtube channels all tell you America lost WW2. The statue of liberty…

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Damien Walter