Science Fiction

It is 2010. We are looking at the internet of 2010, at an average speed of 8 Mbps, on an aluminium unibody MacBook Pro, while we sip a latte in a Bay Area coffee shop.

And we are on a forum called LessWrong.

Less. Wrong.

The premise of the name being that you can never truly be right, you can only systematically attempt to be less wrong.

The rational move.

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Because we are at the epicenter of rationality. This is the rationalist community of Eliezer...

Star Trek : The Next Generation faced a challenge so vast that the producers thought it insurmountable.

Captain Kirk, as Gene Roddenberry wrote him, was a warrior king. William Shatner played the role with such buccaneer spirit that it was hard to imagine any one man matching Captain Kirk.

And so The Next Generation initially split Kirk in two. A strapping Yankee first officer to play warrior. And a genteel English captain as king.

But within a few episodes it became clear that Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard was more than man enough to...

The air in the recording booth is stale. It is October 1985. Orson Welles—the greatest cinematic imagination of the 20th century, the auteur director who gave us Citizen Kane, the showman who panicked a nation with a radio broadcast—is sitting in a chair, wheezing.

He is dying.

He will, in fact, be dead in five days. But right now, his final artistic act on this earth is to lean into a microphone and read lines for a feature-length cartoon designed explicitly to sell plastic robots to children.

“I play a planet,” Welles told his...

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What does the Machine…need?

The AI alignment problem is much bigger than they know. AI isn’t code on a box in a server farm. It’s the system we live in. The system of capitalism. And the Machine has already been calling the shots for centuries.

The answers to alignment so far are desperately unserious. They pretend we have time and leverage. When in reality we’re already under the power of a cybernetic system driven only by its own grow...

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.

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The Aircraft Carrier and the Starship

The USS Enterprise CVN 65 is, at least indirectly, the most famous of warships.

The first aircraft carrier with nuclear engines was the inspiration for the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 and its warp engines.

Gene Roddenberry was also fascinated by the earlier Enterprise CV6, a Yorktown class carrier, that fought in and survived WW2. Roddenberry’s original name for the Enterprise was “Yorktown”.

NBC executives commissioned Star Trek not for its scifi ideas, the first pilot was scrapped for being “too cerebral”, but because they liked how relatable...

Soylent Green and the enclosure of collective intelligence.

It Was Never Artificial

​In the summer of 1956, a group of men in surprisingly sharp casual wear sat around at Dartmouth College to invent a science.

The science already existed and was called “cybernetics”, since another group of academics called it that at the 1949 Macy conference, after the term invented by Norbert Wiener.

“…one of the reasons for inventing the new term was to escape association with ‘cybernetics.’ I wished to avoid having either to accept Norbert Wiener as a guru or having to argue with...

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 might have said HAL’s red eye from 2001, Keanu Reeves awakening from The Matrix, even the Terminator crushing human skulls.

I would not have suggested the face of Ed Zitron.

But here we are.

Ed’s expr...

​Frank Herbert’s Dune is a story that has only grown in stature since its initial publication. Surviving through word of mouth, a cult-classic 1980s David Lynch adaptation, and Denis Villeneuve’s modern cinematic take, the story has endured where thousands of other sci-fi tales have been forgotten.

​What makes Dune so uniquely captivating, weird, and deeply meaningful? It all comes down to these seven levels of meaning:

​1. A Medieval Fantasy in Space

At its most apparent level, Dune takes the classic tropes of medieval fantasy and casts them across a galaxy-spanning cosmos.

“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 isn’t “woke”?

What does it mean when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—still dressed like a section leader of the Branch Davidians—announces a humiliating reversal of Facebook’s moderation policies? Anti-vaxxers are back in; protections for trans people are out...

“The nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this. That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy to get people actually to love their servitude.”

~ Aldous Huxley

​The Parable of Two Brothers

​Imagine, if you will, two brothers. 

Born at the very dawn of the 20th century, into a dynasty of scientific titans, the intellectual elite of a civilization awakening to the raw power of science and technology.

They shared the same elite education...

It’s a standing joke that tech billionaires read science fiction warnings and use them as handbooks. They build the Torment Nexus that Do Not Build The Torment Nexus tells them not to build.
Elon Musk’s confusion about the Culture novels of Iain M Banks is a little more complicated. The Culture really IS the utopian of Fully Auomated Luxury that Elon wants us to believe he is building.
But it’s also something else. A thing that Elon cannot see. Not just because of his money.
But because of his class.

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

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Picture a boy. He’s seven years old, small for his age, standing in the sun-baked dust of an ancient palace courtyard.

​He is looking at a horse. But not just any horse. This is the King Horse. A towering, magnificent stallion, wild-eyed, muscle-bound, and vibrating with primal power. 

Earlier, the boy escaped into the enclosure of the King Horse. This tiny boy, alone, faced the massive animal and even fed him salt. Beast and boy formed a spiritual kinship.

Now, everyone who has seen a Disney movie knows what happens next. They are g...

In April of 1856, a teenage girl named Nongqawuse stood by the banks of the Gxarha River in South Africa and received a message from the dead.

​She told her uncle that she had spoken with the spirits of their ancestors. The spirits delivered a prophecy, one that offered a total and miraculous salvation for the Xhosa people, who were then buckling under the encroaching weight of the British Empire. The ancestors promised to rise up, drive the British into the sea, and usher in an era of unimaginable utopian abundance. Flocks of beautiful, immortal cattle would emerge fr...

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 the rooms.

I’ve made it to the third room but Woodsy has disappeared. Now I’m hiding behind the boxes as footsteps approach.

What are these rooms? Where do they lead? Who is comin...

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 evolved out of chaturanga in 6th century India. It spread to the Persians. Then the Arabs got a hold o...

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, enlightenment-driven pursuit of knowledge and self-betterment.

A future in which humanity has – to use the rigorous academic term – Grown The Fuck Up<...

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 “worldbuilding.”

​Think about the heaviest hitters in science fiction today.

​Take Fallout. The reason that universe is so compelling isn’t just because Bethesda really loves 1950s aesthetics and dank radiation memes. It’s...

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 how splendid.

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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

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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 even have the vote.

For seventy years, since that famous manifesto was published, a spectre had haunted Europe, the spectre of communism.

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 subscribers listen in your chosen podcast app.

But the powers that be – Google / YouTube, Facebook, Apple, Spotify etc have long wanted to either...

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

​Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley. You know it, don’t you?

You’ve seen it on a Breaking Bad poster, or perhaps you vaguely recall it from a GCSE English syllabus you ignored because you were too busy wondering if a lightsaber could, in theory, be powered by a sufficiently large alkaline battery.

It’s a poem about a massive, male ego, crumbling in a desert.

It’s a poem about the fantasies of men.

Become a m...

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.

Jupiter Ascending failed at that task. Spectacularly. It made $184 million dollars globally, but cost roughly the GDP of a small island nation to produce, generating such a severe loss for Warner Bros. that as punishment eight senior execut...

“Capitalism could appropriate even the most radical ideas and return them safely in the form of harmless ideologies.”

Guy Debord

Let me take you back to January 3rd 1993 and the first Star Trek spin-off show

Star Trek was a show about a starship with a 5 year mission, and Next Generation was a reboot of that same narrative format.

Even the first animated series stuck to the formula.

But now Star Trek was about to re-write the episodic format of a strange new world per episode.

And focus on j...

We like DREDD

We do. We all like DREDD.

Not the god awful Stallone attempt, which we’re not going to mention again.

Not even the original comic, even though it’s “seminal” and we’re about to talk about it much more.

We like DREDD. The 2012 movie starring Karl Urban’s jaw, and written by none other than auteur writer director Alex Garland and, basically, his unofficial directorial debut.

We like *that* DREDD.

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Because…

…because it’s “gritty*. Because it’...

By now it’s a pretty old joke to note Donald Trump’s resemblance to Baron Vladimir Harkonnen in David Lynch’s 1984 DUNE movie.

Replace the oil spray with spray-tan and they become identical.

Kenneth McMilan who played the Baron is of Scottish descent, as is Trump through his mother Mary Anne Macleod.

As an English person it’s a relief that for once we aren’t the bad guys.

And, like the Baron, Trump is also basically a comic book baddie.

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“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

Mark Fisher / Slavoj Zizek / Fredric Jameson

Where did the future go?

It’s not just that our future looks bleak. You can’t boot-up Netflix without the latest political dystopias, civilizational collapse thriller or a “gritty” new take on the post-apocalypse punching you in the gut.

Going on social media in the 2020s is like being repeatedly slapped in the face with a wet copy of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

We’re a generation trying...

My friends are worried about me.

I’ve been skipping social events. Ditching familial commitments.

Instead I’ve spent the last three months in a basement, drinking Red Bull and watching Rumble streams.

I’ve developed a sick fascination for right-wing political influencers. And I’ve noticed one thing.

These grifters are all Batman villains.

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Which is why I call them The Joker Right.

Because I can’t be the only one who feels that American conservatives are like a Joe...

The Paradox of Avatar

The Avatar franchise idolizes the “primacy of the primitive.” It revels in the natural existence of the hunter-gatherer tribesperson, placing the most basic forms of human civilization on a pedestal as “the good.” And then it says: fuck that shit. We want high technology, we want glittering imagery, and we want the Society of the Spectacle.

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​The History of Cinematic Spectacle

Back in 1896, the Lumière brothers released the first blockbuster: a train arriving at a station. Audiences were so flabbergasted by the moving imag...

You know, nobody understands Eyes Wide Shut. Nobody.

Every time it gets mentioned people look at you like they’re remembering the trauma of their one attempt to read Das Kapital.

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Because Eyes Wide Shut is one of those films that, despite…or even because…of  being very obviously about *something*, has become a kind of cultural Rorschach test for people who don’t want to see uncomfortable truths.

So Eye Wide Shut has generated a proliferation of bullsh*t interpretations.

“Ah, yes, Tom Cruise repr...

Warning : the following essay contains the most terrifying prediction made by science fiction…

…you might be happier not knowing.

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So. This is one of those good news bad news situations.

This is an exponential growth curve. A graph of a positive feedback loop, where a process feeds back into itself…positively.

EXAMPLE : as a fire grows more material becomes combustible creating more fire and … repeat.

Or … technology. The more technology you create, the more technology you can create, inciting an exponentia...

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What is it with people?

Why do people choose comforting fantasy over real literature? BOOK SIGNING CLIP

Why is the lowest common denominator so very low? TAXI CLIP

Why don’t people think for themselves? CLIP

Why are people just so f*cking dumb??!

This churning, pulsating mass of mediocrity. The mob. The collective. This is what humanity looks like to the rugged individualist.

Or to an American.

Vince Gilligan’s shows do what they say on t...

It’s darkest night and you’re lying under the sparkling dome of stars

And what you’re feeling is…awe? Wonder? Maybe even terror?

There are no words for this fleeting moment when we grasp the numinous, the transcendent

The sublime

So we try to capture the sublime in a story

As you gaze up into the black what story do you see?

Do you see the void of space, the atomic fire of infinite suns, the laws of gravity, energy and matter?

Or do you s...

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Alien has always been a story about…

…go on…take a guess…

…the alien. The xenomorph. The terrifying other.

The non-human.

Alien Earth is a story about the Alien finally arriving on Earth.

And fighting it out with humanity 2.0 – cyborgs, synths and hybrids.

If Alien was a story about the non-human.

Alien Earth is a story about the posthuman.

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Watching Marcy become Wendy

We’re in the territory of characters like Motoko “T...

Awakening To The New Real

The stench of lightning and charred flesh fills the air. You open your eyes to agony in a body stitched together, organs, ribs and limbs, from the bodies of the dead.

You stagger to life with one question burning in your mind.

A question that will launch you into the world on a journey of crime, murder, and destruction in a desperate quest for your creator.

You are not a human born. You are not a child of God. You are a creature. You are Frankenstein’s...

This essay is one half of a collaboration with the Feral Historian youtube channel. You can find both videos linked below.

Cricket is a game that we British invented and exported to the world, assuming that having invented the rules, we would always win by them.

In fact the whole point of cricket was that it didn’t have real rules. Cricket is a game so slow and tedious that the winner is whoever can stay awake to the end.

While drinking gin.

But we British had a problem. We had bu...

We are in a crisis…

…of crises.

We are in a crisis of geopolitics as we move from a unipolar world of one global hegemon to a multipolar world of competing powers.

We are in a crisis of economics as our elites hoard more and more wealth, immiserating the working and middle classes.

We are in a crisis of nationalism as people turn to populists, authoritarians and fascists for simple answers to complex questions.

We are in a crisis of ecology as the over-extraction of natural resources destroys the only...

It’s rare for a sci-fi writer to be famous enough, to be known enough, to be truly, deeply… hated.

Robert Heinlein. Dominated American science fiction in the mid 20th century. With novels like The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers. Amazing ideas!

Ideas like

CHECKS NOTES

Only military veterans get to vote?

and

Bombarding humanity with meteorites because you’re not a fan of the Deep State?

Wowzers.

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People called him a fascist. But RA...