Recent
Science fiction sold out. Let’s take it back.
Corporations love to take cool things and turn them to trash to make money. In the early 80s black artists took DJ music loops, rapped radical political lyrics over them, and invented hip-hop. Corporations took hip-hop and degraded it into “gangsta rap”, perpetuating stereotypes of black male violence to sell hip-hop to the masses. Corporations…
Essays
Genre fiction is the worst thing that ever happened to science fiction
When did the science fiction community start using “genre” as a proper noun? “It’s a common thing in Genre.”…
How does M John Harrison enter a story?
M John Harrison is one of the all time greats, a “science fiction writer’s science fiction writer”, a creator…
Neuromancer…still the best science fiction novel ever written
When life takes an unexpected left turn I do four things – tidy my room, go running, take 72…
How Philip K Dick’s 1960’s masterpiece nailed politics in the 2020’s
Is Europe welcoming desperate refugees, or being invaded by economic migrants? Is Donald Trump a serious President, or a…
The remarkable Neal Stephenson interview
Neal Stephenson – legendary author of speculative fiction – on Elon Musk and geek culture, the NSA revelations of…
7 literary Sci-Fi and Fantasy novels you must read
Every genre of science fiction began as literary fiction. For writers and fans of SF it’s useful to get…
The 8 Tribes of SciFi
Calling sci-fi a genre in 2016 is about as accurate as calling the United States one nation. In principle…
Transrealism: the first major literary movement of the 21st century
A Scanner Darkly is one of Philip K Dick’s most famous but also most divisive novels. Written in 1973…
You can be creative, or productive, but not both
We love the idea of productivity, but most productivity systems are killing our creativity Here’s a familiar event many…
No, the Handmaid’s Tale is NOT science fiction
Sci-fi sells us fantasies. Margaret Atwood’s classic novel is all about the danger of fantasy. Why should they be…
Game of Thrones was not a fantasy show (and that made some fantasy fans angry)
Damien Walter writes on scifi & fantasy for The Guardian, BBC, Wired, Oxford University Press, IO9, Tor.com and elsewhere.…
Mindfulness will fuck you up
Mindfulness is part of a demanding meditative path that suits only a few people. There are better ways to…
Journalism
Why am I worried that Cyberpunk 2077 will suck?
It looks like the slickest open world AAA video game ever made, but have CD Projekt Red found new meaning for old cyberpunk metaphors? Damien Walter writes on culture, politics and sci-fi for The Guardian, WIRED, BBC, Independent,…
Tolkien’s myths are a political fantasy
In a world built on myth, we can’t ignore the reactionary politics at the heart of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. What is the Rhetoric of Story? It’s a double-edged magical sword, being a fan of JRR Tolkien. On one…
Ted Chiang, the science fiction genius behind Arrival
In the small world of science fiction short stories, Ted Chiang is a superstar. It’s easier to list the major SF awards he hasn’t won than those he has, and he’s equally acclaimed in the broader field of…
The shameful joys of the franchise novel…and why the force is with them
Snobby attitudes to sci-fi and fantasy can mean missing out on great stories amid popular book series – a publishing genre that is sure to grow. Make of it what you will, but it’s a plain fact of…
How the Alt-right invaded geek culture
The Alt-right will do anything to outrage the liberal internet, knowing that outrage helps build their growing army of overwhelming white, male, and very geeky, supporters. Star Trek gave television audiences their first interracial kiss in 1968, and…
I read the Sad Puppies. It was not a pleasure.
For the last few years, the Hugo awards for science fiction have been campaigned against by a group of writers and fans calling themselves the Sad Puppies – mostly male, very white, and overwhelmingly conservative. Unhappy with sci-fi’s growing…
Bureaumancy. My new favourite genre of fiction.
There’s nothing wrong with being a bureaucrat. So you’re a tiny cog in a machine made of abstract rules, paperwork, and the broken dreams of those who do not understand either. So what? You’re just misunderstood. Without you,…
Big Dumb Objects. Sci-fi’s USP.
We humans love things we can’t explain. Witness the vast array of outlandish claims made about Stonehenge, from ancient calendar to alien stargate, when in all likelihood it was just a big clock or an early marketplace, a…
It’s not science fiction – it’s systems fiction
Seen in literary fiction as well as SF, this genre weaves together complex debates in a way that can offer a clearer view of the future – think Atwood, DeLillo and Asimov. Weirdly enough, science fiction is not…
I don’t just want a woman to be Bond, I want a woman to KILL Bond!
Why should we cast a woman as the next James Bond? To prove that women are dangerous and corrupt too. A woman actress as Bond isn’t a fantasy. It’s a chance to give Bond more realism. A new rumour…
Geek critique: Neil Gaiman and Kameron Hurley pick apart pop culture
Two new nonfiction collections – Gaiman’s The View from the Cheap Seats and Hurley’s The Geek Feminist Revolution – present contrasting perspectives on geek culture today. So what’s the state of it? Geeks were once like Victorian children:…
Dune deserves a new film adaptation
Confusing sequels, terrible prequels and poor adaptations aside, Frank Herbert’s masterpiece still stands up as the one of the truly great sci-fi novels. I first discovered Dune through David Lynch’s 1984 film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s SF masterpiece.…
Damien Walter 