Damien G. Walter

The difference between ebooks and the internet is minimal, and we should be glad the two are growing closer and closer. It’s easy to forget that the world wide web as we know it today evolved from an early attempt to put books on the internet. When Tim Berners-Lee envisaged what would become the world [...]

Science Fiction is often called a “literature of ideas”. Maybe it is better understood as a literature of change. Listen to the Guardian books podcast: Science Fiction now and tomorrow. Today’s Guardian books podcast, which I was lucky enough to be invited to take part in alongside Lauren Beukes, Alaistar Reynolds, Jeff Noon and Michael [...]

“People would never fall in love if they hadn’t heard love talked about.” Or read about it in books, we can assume. Which is all very well for Francois de La Rochefoucauld, French nobleman and writer of maxims, to say – but is much harder to live by. Yes, perhaps, in the postmodern sense love [...]

Recent SF novels dealing with the fall of western capitalism seem right on the mark. But do they offer any answers? It’s a truism that science fiction, however distinct its vision of the future, is always just as much a reflection of its present. The golden age of SF writers, including Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein [...]

(I was too ill to link this from my blog when it was published on The Guardian online, so here it is now.)     I am forced into speech because men of letters refuse to act without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing the publication [...]

Lavie Tidhars novel Osama makes me wonder why we can’t all just get along. No, really, why the fuck can’t we? One common problem for all science fiction writers is reconciling the wondrous world we could have with the one we have negligently stumbled into. At this exact moment in time, in an alternate reality [...]

If you could journey to any fantasy world, which would it be? I, like many millions of others, would have to choose JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth – although, given the option, I’d divide my time between Gondor and Rivendell, and skip the guided tours of Moria and Mordor. Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians and [...]

It’s hard to know what the future will bring: the only thing you can be sure of is that it won’t be the past. This is a truth that seems to have eluded the current government as they busily reshape our nation’s education system in preparation for the 19th century. The Tories have indicated a [...]

Rule 34 is a science fiction novel about cybercrime, maker culture and porn. But most of all, it’s a novel about you. It’s 9:30am on a painfully dull Thursday morning in the office. The boss has retreated behind her wall of pot plants after hovering over your shoulder like a huge and bothersome horsefly, peering [...]

A wealthy dynasty brought to its knees by popular revolt, the highest in the land caught in a web of corruption, and at the heart of it all a powerful woman with remarkable hair. If you see the Murdoch clan, Chipping Norton set and Rebekah Brooks in these archetypes then you have clearly been spending [...]