Science Fiction

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. ​Knigh...

“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 Listen to the podcast audio here

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. Become a member to watch to full video Members get full access to all posts and videos SubscribeSubmitting form

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 Watch the full video essay as a member Members get full access to all videos and posts SubscribeSubmitting form

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.</p...

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...