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 exploreContinue 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 asideContinue 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 willContinue 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. OrContinue 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 menContinue 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.

The best way to understand the broken, crazed, indulgent filmography of the Wachowski’s is as a quest to make the Matrix movie the Matrix would never make. Time. Is money. And in the cold unfeeling eyes of Hollywood a “movie” is just a business strategy to convert two hours of your time into shareholder value.Continue reading "How the Matrix reclaimed the Red Pill"

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