Author Archives: Damien Walter

HG Wells vs Vladimir Lenin

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”

What is the difference between fantasy & myth?

What is the difference between fantasy & myth? A common response to our discussions of PHM as MPF was “all fiction is fantasy”. One commenter angrily insisted that “Shakespeare is fantasy”. Incorrect. Fantasy fulfills a psychological need for power, eros, status. A lot of fiction is fantasy, but far from all. Shakespeare is the oppositeContinue reading “What is the difference between fantasy & myth?”

A note for listeners of the Science Fiction podcast

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”

Project Hail Mary is a Male Pattern Fantasy

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

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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.

Is God better than the alternative

It’s worth noting that Project: Hail Mary is called Project: Hail Mary. After the Hail Mary (American) football pass thrown in the final seconds to a catcher a loooong way down the pitch in a desperate attempt to win the game. Which is the basic plot of Project: Hail Mary but with a starship insteadContinue reading “Is God better than the alternative”

What is the PROBLEM with transhumanism?

We’re exploring The Machine in the new series of video essays on the Science Fiction channel… …and one upcoming essay in that series is Those Transhuman Bstrds : a history of transhumanity. Here’s a little preview. The modern world is built around a powerful mythic image THE MACHINE We think of reality as a bigContinue reading “What is the PROBLEM with transhumanism?”

All warfare is narrative warfare

All warfare is narrative warfare. The tanks and bombs, or drones and robodogs, the explosions and killings, the military dominance and monopoly on violence are all about one thing. Whose story wins. Imagine you woke up tomorrow and everyone around you spoke German and Japanese. White Americans are the underclass. The history youtube channels allContinue reading “All warfare is narrative warfare”

Scifi For Dummies

Consumer capitalism makes people dumb THE CONSUMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT (as long as they keep consuming) Consumerism tells you that the measure of EVERYTHING is your emotional response Imagine if we did science this way “Einsteinian relativity didn’t work for me, I’ll be sticking with good ol’ Newton” And we ARE doing science this way,Continue reading “Scifi For Dummies”