Category Archives: Podcast-Archive

On the surface Lord of the Rings and 1984 look very different. But JRR Tolkien and George Orwell were men of the same generation, the same class, and the same culture, writing about the same matter – power.

00:00 Tolkien & Orwell
04:24 Surface Exterior vs Deep Interior
07:12 Symbols vs Symbols
12:14 Class & Communism
13:18 1984 is the future where Sauron won the Third Age
15:09 Meaning vs Nihilism
16:40 We would use power for good…but can we resist using our One Ring?

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Denis Villeneuve’s Dune opens with a sentence that is not in Frank Herbert’s DUNE. “Dreams are messages from the deep”. What do these words mean? And why does Denis Villeneuve choose to open his movie with them?

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Science fiction is a strange beast. A exploration of the hard edged future of science and technology, fused with the transcendent hunger for imagination and self-transformation. Can science fiction be a bridge between the two “non-overlapping magisteria” of Science and Religion?

This episode of the Science Fiction podcast is a crossover with my series commenting on the “Intellectual MMA” of YouTube philosophy. The Four Horsemen of Atheism – Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett VS The Four Horsemen of Meaning – Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Pageau, John Vervaeke and Bishop Barron. Who is who? And who won?

00:00 Science fiction bridges religion and science
01:04 What happens when Science meets Fiction?
02:21 The era of Intellectual MMA
03:43 Horsemen of Meaning vs Horsemen of Atheism
05:09 The rise of the YouTube intellectual
07:19 Which Horseman is which?
12:01 The Meaning Crisis
14:58 The problem of Self-Deception
20:52 So…who won?
22:12 We need a participatory philosophy
24:59 Religious dogma? BAD! Religious debate? GREAT!

The worst thing any adaptation of a science fiction classic can do is be less intelligent than the original. Apple’s FOUNDATION is dumbed down so far that readers of Isaac Asimov’s original novels can barely recognise it. But can rewrites, reshoots and some smart recasting help Apple recoup some of the $500M the show is reported to have cost?

00:00 Apple’s Foundation is dumbed down
03:48 The Science Fiction podcast with Damien Walter
05:09 $500 million is a lot of money
08:15 The most expensive flop in tv history
09:21 Could Foundation be salvaged?
10:42 Get rid of David S Goyer
11:52 The central character of Foundation is…Foundation.
14:11 Foundation is SOCIAL science fiction
16:16 The Empire is a technocracy
18:19 Hari Seldon – a prophet of science
19:34 Cast Lee Pace as Salvor Hardin
22:52 Hire science fiction writers
25:25 Culture is the intelligence of human civilisation
27:02 We are in a Seldon crisis

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Read Asimov’s original novels: https://amzn.to/31RVA7W

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The great project of science fiction has been the translation of science and its discoveries into our shared understanding as human beings. But what happens to science fiction if and when the science itself…changes? We’re in the midst of a paradigm shift in the understanding of physics driven by computation. And at the cutting edge of this new kind of science is Stephen Wolfram. In a recent podcast interview with Lex Friedman, Wolfram wondered if science fiction was the way to understand what it would be like to be a ‘cellular automata’. Is science fiction ready to answer the challenge?

Listen to the full Lex Fridman podcast with Stephen Wolfram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-SGpEInX_c

Follow the full course in Writing the 21st Century Myth : https://damiengwalter.com

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It’s interesting to realise that audiences today for The Green Knight, director David Lowery’s adaptation of the medieval poem, struggle to understand a story that would have been clear and obvious to audiences seven centuries ago. For all our knowledge and science – or perhaps because of them – the epic poem created by an unknown author as a kind of Arthurian fanfic now seems cryptically mysterious to us. But the deep meaning of The Green Knight is exactly why the movie has become a surprise hit. More than ever modern audiences are hungry for the gift of The Green Knight – death.

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Savior stories are at the core of many of the most powerful science fiction and fantasy. Neo in the Matrix. John Connor in the Terminator. Superman in all his manifestations. And of course Paul Atreides in DUNE.

The seventh workshop in Writing The 21st Century Myth explores how scifi saviors all have their origin in the original Savior to save them all, the central character of Christian mythology – Jesus of Nazareth. And how scifi stories can be shaped around the stages of transformation, to take audiences on their own personal journeys of Salvation.

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In August 2021 I was invited to speak at the 20th Indian Science Fiction Conference, on the theme of science fiction as modern mythology. Scifi as myth is the core thesis of my critical writing on the subject, and of my course in Advanced Scifi and Fantasy storytelling. It’s a thesis that does of course get pushback from some people. So in this episode of the Science Fiction podcast I take a deep dive into why mythology is the best lens through which to understand scifi.

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As the United States withdraws from Afghanistan, leaving behind it chaos and despair, the Science Fiction podcast looks at why the Prime Directive is such an important idea – both in Star Trek and in reality.

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