Science Fiction

We are living in strange times. Politics. Society. Culture wars. Things have gone weird. We're looking for knowledge and wisdom to guide us in strange times. I can think of no better guide to the year 2022 than Philip K Dick. The author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the inspiration for Blade Runner, is best known as a science fiction writer. But after his infamous spiritual awakening and the events of 2-3-74, Philip K Dick became something more....a visionary prophet who saw our strange times coming.

Star Trek and Star Wars are both dying. Star Trek turns 60 in 2026 with nothing in production. Star Wars just posted its lowest box office opening ever. So. Who killed Star Trek Wars? HINT: it's not JJ Abrams, "woke" or Rey! Featuring: Star Trek at 60, Star Wars, Andor, Disney, Paramount Skydance, Rey, the Prime Directive, Romulus and Remus, and the Pledge of Allegiance. Prompted by @FeralHistorian's video on Star Trek at 60 - https://youtu.be/TQEIHGM-EyQ?is=oSTnY8_V681sd0xH PKD made me make this tshirt - https://damosays-shop.fourthwall.com New to the channel? Start here - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc7I2hzudyX-dUh7nGMt19sNUVHihRaBl&si=ShXxZXGkPOOHFjd_

In 1973's Soylent Green, Charlton Heston discovers the miracle food is made of people. In 2026, we're being sold something similar. There is nothing artificial about artificial intelligence. The name was a branding exercise, invented at Dartmouth in 1956 by a man who didn't want to argue with Norbert Wiener about cybernetics. Strip out the god and what's left is the accumulated cognitive labour of humanity, compressed and sold back to us for twenty dollars a month. Not artificial. Collective. Which changes the question from "will the machine wake up" to "who enclosed the commons this time?" On Dartmouth, the Enclosure Acts, Marx's Fragment on Machines, and Vince Gilligan's Pluribus. PKD made me make this tshirt - https://damosays-shop.fourthwall.com New to the channel? Start here - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc7I2hzudyX-dUh7nGMt19sNUVHihRaBl&si=ShXxZXGkPOOHFjd_

This is how a god dies, not with a cosmic explosion, not with a descent into eternity, but with the face of a pissed off Englishman calling it a big pile of bollocks. If five years ago you had asked me for a single symbol to express the first meeting of Humanity and AI, I Continue reading "Ed Zitron killed the god of AGI"

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“A government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class.” — Bernie Sanders What does it mean when Apple CEO Tim Cook makes a personal donation of $1 million dollars to Donald Trump’s inauguration? Or when Disney CEO Bob Iger comes out to virtue signal that the hypercapitalist entertainment corporation really Continue reading "“F*** you, pay me.” Welcome to techbros feudalism"

Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Thiel are obsessed with living forever, making transhumanism the unspoken ideology of the 21st century. From the cyberpunk dystopias of Altered Carbon to the real-world data empires of Palantir, the push to upgrade our biology and upload our consciousness isn't just science fiction—it's the blueprint for a techno-feudal nightmare. As the technocratic elite increasingly treats the human body as a depreciating asset to be engineered away, what is the ultimate, mind-expanding philosophical answer to the transhumanist trap? Get your PKD tee here - https://damosays-shop.fourthwall.com Become a member of the Science Fiction community to continue the discussion Website - https://damiengwalter.com Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/DamienWalter Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/groups/324897304599197/

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After 42 years we have 1 minute and 10 seconds of Neuromancer on a screen. What does it tell us? Now on the Science Fiction channel 🔗👇👇👇👇👇 Listen to the podcast audio here

Science Fiction with Damien Walter is a search for the 21st century mythos. You can watch some of the channels best episodes here : https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc7I2hzudyX-dUh7nGMt19sNUVHihRaBl&si=q4g0mW6s9sVbPzHv

Get your MYTHOS tee here - https://damosays-shop.fourthwall.com Become a member of the Science Fiction community to continue the discussion Website - https://damiengwalter.com Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/DamienWalter Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/groups/324897304599197/

It’s 1990. This morning I found an open door in the shopping centre of the dull commuter town I live in. Beyond the door are a series of large empty rooms, poorly lit, with large boxes. Backrooms. I phoned my friend Matthew Woods. Woodsy. He pedaled over his BMX and together we’re going to explore Continue reading "Backrooms is avant-garde art for normies"

Get your PKD tee here - https://damosays-shop.fourthwall.com Become a member of the Science Fiction community to continue the discussion Website - https://damiengwalter.com Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/DamienWalter Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/groups/324897304599197/ Subscribe to the Science Fiction podcast feed for long-form commentaries on these video essays https://damiengwalter.com/podcast/

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 Continue reading "2026 : the year World War 3 begins"

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 Continue reading "You don’t understand science fiction"

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin is a novel written at the beginning of the future. It’s hard to remember today, after Logan’s Run, The Handmaid’s Tale and Hunger Games made “dystopia” an entertainment genre, but when Yevgeny Zamyatin was writing in the early 1920s, it was only beginning to dawn on humanity just how bad the future might be. Or Continue reading "The First Dystopia"

Terminator is an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Arnold’s physique is the star of the film The progressive decay of the Body into the Machine is his co-star With the special effects that animated the Terminator as best supporting actor Or watch on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfbNARASn9Y Imagine if Ron Perlman had passed his audition for Terminator? You can’t. Continue reading "Terminator 2 isn’t only the greatest action movie"

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 Continue reading "HG Wells vs Vladimir Lenin"

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. Continue reading "A note for listeners of the Science Fiction podcast"

It's Scifi. It's Romance. It's Fantasy. It's SciMANtasy 😱 Let's see if we can make Gary an Amazon bestseller so he doesn't ask for his money back. 🔗👇 The Last Sysadmin in Sector 7 : a SCIMANTASY novel https://amzn.to/4lXiqjF # The Ultimate Male Pattern Fantasy ​What if the greatest science fiction dream isn't discovering alien life or saving the human race, but simply being left completely alone in a room to do math? ​Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary is a masterpiece of hard sci-fi engineering, but beneath the astrophage and the orbital mechanics lies a deeply comforting psychological trope. We are looking at the "Male Pattern Fantasy"—the idea that the ultimate hero is just an ordinary, highly competent guy who solves the universe's problems in absolute, blissful isolation (and somehow looks exactly like Ryan Gosling while doing it). ​Whether you find this trope to be a lovely, optimistic vision of human competence or a pathetic retreat from social reality, it is currently dominating modern science fiction.