Podcast
Science Fiction
Hosted by Damien Walter · EN
Join writer and storyteller Damien Walter on an exploration of the world as seen through a science fiction lens.
22episodes
Episodes
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The most overrated director VS the greatest myth
1w ago00:28:46Tap to summarizePicture 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 going to form an unbreakable, egalitarian bond, run across the sunlit beaches of the Aegean, and embark on a sweeping, heartwarming adventure to discover the true meaning of friendship – – the boy’s grandfather steps forward, raises a bronze blade, grips the stallion by the mane, and calmly slits the animal’s throat. The horse collapses in a geyser of hot blood. And the boy? He doesn’t scream. He doesn’t cry. He doesn’t look away. He stands perfectly still, breathing in the copper stench of the arterial spray, and he learns from it. Because in this world, to be a man is to kill. And to be a king is to kill other kings. Because this ain’t Disney. This is Mary Renault’s The King Must Die. And you can’t handle the Greeks. Well, here we are. After months, years even, of hype, on July 16th 2026, Christopher Nolan released his $250 million adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey, starring Matt Damon. It is the biggest cinematic event of the summer. And I am just about to watch it. But. Before I say anything I am going to hand you over to Damo (Past) who has NOT seen it, but is going to make 3 predictions about Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey… # …that this will be the *tamest” ever telling of Homer’s epic. The big story in the days before The Odyssey released was the search for tickets to see Nolan’s new IMAX spectacle in full resolution, possible in only 41 cinemas worldwide. Because Nolan is the master of the technical spectacle. Nobody knows how to shoot 65mm IMAX format like Nolan. He is famed for shooting entirely on celluloid, packing the cinema screen with visual splendour. But as a fully rounded creator, Nolan is the most overrated auteur director of the century. Think of Nolan as the rich man’s Michael Bay. Both specialise in IMAX spectacle, but Nolan comes packaged for a more upwardly mobile demographic. Scifi action blockbusters, with a patina of philosophical depth, but nothing to make it feel too much like homework. Nolan struggles as a storyteller. But he compensates for this by bolstering every story with a narrative gimmick. Time runs backwards. Memories recompiled. Dreams within dreams. When people call Nolan movies clever, they mean clever like Sudoku. Nolan gives us logic puzzles we can feel smart for solving, to cover the lack of anything to make us actually feel. So Nolan’s Odyssey is guaranteed to be visually magnificent. But assuming he doesn’t restructure Homer into seven criss-crossing timelines…which he very well might…what will Nolan’s Odyssey…be? Well, I think we can predict it will be incredibly tame. Nolan’s entire MO, his Modus Operandi, is to take the most out there, crazy, mind-bending mythic stories, and make the tamest possible version. Just look at the filmography. Interstellar. You have cosmic horror, infinite black holes, relativity, and a higher-dimensional future humanity reaching back to manipulate our present through a tesseract. This movie should shatter the human ego. It should be Silent Running on acid. 2001 on amphetamines. Instead…Nolan uses a 5th-dimensional construct to deliver a Church of England sermon: “Love is the one thing that transcends time and space.” The infinite, terrifying universe is entirely subordinated to a Sad Dad trying to get back to his daughter’s bedroom. <img data-attachment-id="16635" data-permalink="https://damiengwalter.com/2026/07/19/the-most-overrated-director-vs-the-greatest-myth/paprika/" data-orig-file="https://damiengwalter.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/paprika.webp" data-orig-size="650,366" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0","alt":""}" data-image-title="paprika" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://damiengwalter.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/paprika.webp?w=650" width="650" height="366" src="https://damiengwalter.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/paprika.webp?w=650" alt="" class="wp-image-16635" srcset="https://damiengwalter.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/paprika.webp 650w, https://damiengwalter.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/paprika.webp?w=150 150w, https://damiengwalter.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/papr...
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AI is a mass psychotic delusion
Jun 2400:27:13Tap to summarizeIn 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 from the earth. The fields would spontaneously yield grain. Sickness and old age would be eradicated. But, as with all divine contracts, there was a catch. To trigger this utopia, the spirits demanded an act of supreme faith. The Xhosa had to slaughter all of their existing cattle. They had to burn their crops. They had to destroy their stores of grain and empty their water reserves. They had to liquidate their entire present economy to prove they were worthy of the future. And so, they did. Historians estimate that the Xhosa slaughtered over 400,000 cattle. They burned their own fields to ash. They waited for the sun to turn red and the ancestors to arrive. But the sun remained yellow. The ancestors did not rise. The utopia did not materialize. Instead, the resulting famine killed tens of thousands of people and shattered the Xhosa civilization. It stands today as one of history’s most devastating examples of mass psychotic delusion, a society so thoroughly captured by a spiritual mythos that it happily engineered its own starvation. Watch the full video essay as a member SubscribeSubmitting form Log in Or watch on YouTube Welcome to 2026 and the era of the Artificial Intelligence IPO. The American people and the broader West feel they are in decline. The people are poorer, their portfolios and 401ks are at risk. The precious oil is scarcer and more expensive. The newly powerful Chinese threaten American global hegemony. But the billionaires and venture capitalists of Silicon Valley have an answer. They will summon the machine god AGI, and it will provide the productivity boost needed to achieve abundance. Robot workers will clean our offices, and LLMs will fill in the spreadsheets. The capitalist promise of a post-scarcity economy will be made real….for those who invest early. Because there is a cost. To achieve AGI we must burn all of the remaining fossil fuels so that the AGI god will gift us the power of fusion energy. We must pump our water into the gaping maw of the AGI god who will show us how to mine ice asteroids in return. We must invest all of our capital into data centre construction so the super-intelligence can awaken. The future science fiction promised us is there for the taking! Think of this as an intelligence test for humanity. A test we are failing spectacularly. <img data-attachment-id="16601" data-permalink="https://damiengwalter.com/2026/06/24/ai-is-a-mass-psychotic-delusion/10-2/" data-orig-file="https://damiengwalter.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/...
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Backrooms is avant-garde art for normies
Jun 1700:14:17Tap to summarizeIt’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 coming for me? Woodsy’s pudgy face appears over the box, and his annoying older brother Rick who works in Dixons the electronic store. They’re laughing. “Damo you twat” Rick roars “you’re in the backroom of Dixons”. Because there are no liminal spaces. Only backrooms. Become a member to watch the full video essay SubscribeSubmitting form Log in Mainstream cinema is choking on its own product. Every movie is a perfect 3-act structure, complete with Inciting Incident, Rising Action, Crisis, Climax and Resolution. Every hero has a meaningful journey that will hit at least nine of Joseph Campbell’s seventeen stages. Every location up to and including alien worlds and Heaven above is an exercise in logical worldbuilding realised as a CGI model in a supercomputer. Everything is a reboot, a prequel, a mashup and an exercise in fan service. And now even the most normie of normie audiences are sick of the product. When along comes a movie that hurls The Writer’s Journey in the bin and treats narrative structure like dated fashion trend its refusing to wear. A movie that follows characters who have no desires to drive them, whose only arcs are traced through non-euclidean liminal spaces. And a movie whose one notable location is the kind of storage room found behind most large shops. The Backrooms, directed by 20 year old Kane Parsons, extending his super successful webseries, itself inspired by the “creepypasta” backrooms meme. A movie that … well … is basically a mid 1990s video art installation straight out of MoMA or Tate Modern. But now in a multiplex near year. Because Backrooms is avant-garde art for normies. Hey guys. Just taking a moment to share a personal confession, that I like many of you often struggle to get a good night’s sleep… …because of the crushing weight of living in capitalist realism. Until I found the solution…and no it’s not one of those “sleep trackers” that induces the exact cycle of low grade anxiety guaranteed to shatter your rest. Introducing the NoClip mattress from BackroomBeds. Their patented Liminalweave technology allows one half your body to rest in the dreary reality of having to get up at 7:30am for another day in the office, while the other half clips off on an adventure in non-euclidean spacetime. You won’t feel any better rested but you will at least feel some hope that there is anything, anywhere beyond another trip to the shopping mall. Get your NoClip mattress from BackroomBeds by walking through the wall of any good basement near you. <img loading="lazy" width="500" height="353" data-attachment-id="16583" data-permalink="https://damiengwalter.com/2026/06/17/backrooms-is-avant-garde-art-for-normies/cremaster/" data-orig-file="https://damiengwalter.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/cremaster.jpg" data-orig-size="500,353" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0","alt":""}" data-image-title="cremaster" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://damiengwalter.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/cremaster.jpg?w=500" src="https://damiengwalter.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/cremaster.jpg?w=500" alt="" class="wp-image-165...
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Why do Leftists always lose? A (partial) defense of Contrapoints
Jun 100:24:21Tap to summarizeChess 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 of it. Then it made its way to Europe, where the Europeans, in their infinite wisdom, decided what the game really needed was a phenomenally powerful, hyper-mobile Queen, presumably because medieval European men desperately needed a strong maternal figure to tell them where to go and who to kill. But through all of these iterations, from the dust of India to the pristine digital boards of chess.com, chess has remained fundamentally the same thing. It is a map. A map… of POWER. Become a member to watch the video essay here Members get access to all my videos, essays and posts SubscribeSubmitting form Log in Just let that sit there for a minute. A map of power. If you’ve come here for a whimsical romp, you’re in the wrong place. We’re doing structural analysis of power dynamics using board games. We’re doing the coolest scifi novel ever written about gameplayers. And we’re doing a brutally honest look at Why Leftists Always Lose. But first we need to talk about Contrapoints. Buckle-up. Contrapoints: The Online Left’s Token Liberal The Liberal centrist is a dying breed. They stay on their reserves in the mainstream media, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times. Channels nobody watches. Newspapers nobody reads. Meanwhile the Left, the actual Left, is online. And the online Left is very VERY Left wing. If you’re outraged by Hasan Piker you need to know he is the LEAST Left the online Left gets. And with good reason. Gen Z and the rest of us have been living through the “slow cancellation of the future” named by the much missed Mark Fisher. A future imagined in the 60s and 70s built on widespread redistribution of wealth has been replaced with an 80s cyberpunk future where a tiny oligarchy uses all the money to build the torment nexus. It’s no surprise the most googled subject among unemployed young people is how to build a guillotine. The online Left has formed from ideologies of utopian socialism, Marxism and anti-Imperialist Leninism that were made for such unequal times. And that, to be perfectly blunt, do not have the best track record of success. Which brings us to Natalie Wynn, AKA Contrapoints. The Left’s answer to the shrieking hysterical vitriol of Right wing streamers is…the gentle understated irony of the video essayist. Contrapoints is, or was until more recent entrants like FD Signifier, the biggest YouTube video essayist on the Left. Kind of. In her own words Contrapoints costumed, trans identity videos are “communist coded” attracting a much more Left audience than her actual politics. Wynn describes herself the social democratic end of liberal, but to her detractors she is just plain vanilla liberal. A shitlib, as they say on the Left, that uses such terms for anyone right of Lenin. <img loading="lazy" width="1024" height="576" data-attachment-id="16544" data-permalink="https://damiengwalter.com/2026/06/01/why-do-leftists-always-lose-a-partial-defense-of-contrapoints/cn3/" data-orig-file="https://damiengwalter.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/cn3.jpg" data-orig-size="1920,1080" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0","alt":""}" data-image-title="Cn3" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://damiengwalter.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/cn3.jpg?w=750" src="https://damiengwalter.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/cn3.jpg?w=1024" alt="" class="wp-image-16544" srcset="https://damiengwalter.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/cn3.jpg?w=1024 1024w, https://damiengwalter.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/cn3.jpg?w=150 150w, https://damiengwalter.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/cn3.jpg?w=300 300w, https://damiengwalter.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/cn3.jpg?w=768 768w, https://damiengwalt...
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2026 : the year World War 3 begins
May 1600:32:47Summary readyTo 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 Watch the full video essay here SubscribeSubmitting form Log in Is Star Trek a future we can all agree on? Let us tune out the ideological zealots, the Tankies and the Nazis, who treat our planetary collapse as a competitive team sport, and among the exhausted, fact-based majority, agree on Star Trek as our shared prize. When we look at the USS Enterprise we do not just see a starship, we see a perfectly calibrated, post-scarcity society. It is the ultimate manifestation of what contemporary political theorists affectionately call FALC: Fully Automated Luxury Communism… in space. Let’s place ourselves at the intersection of eschatology, speculative fiction, and macro-economics and ask a question of Star Trek – specifically, the teleological trajectory required to actually achieve the utopian federation depicted within it. Put in layman’s terms–how the fuck do we *get* to Star Trek? Because there is, unfortunately, one catastrophic, glaring problem with this cultural lodestone. In the canonical lore of the Star Trek universe, this magnificent, post-scarcity utopia does not emerge from a peaceful, democratic transition. It does not arrive because a coalition of enlightened centrist politicians finally passed the right carbon tax. It happens exclusively on the other side of World War III – a global, thermonuclear, and genetic holocaust that wipes out a third of the Earth’s population and plunges the survivors into a radioactive dark age. And, according to the deeply unsettling timeline of the Star Trek universe, that war starts right here. Right now. In 2026. Check your watches, ladies and gentlemen. We are right on schedule. PART ONE: WW3 AND STAR TREK Signs of WW3 in 2026 I do not need to remind you that it is currently 2026, and the geopolitical dashboard is flashing red across every conceivable metric. We are witnessing an unprecedented convergence of systemic stressors that makes the Cuban Missile Crisis look like a polite disagreement over a parking space. Check your newsfeed, or simply look out the window We have the protracted, grinding meat-grinder of the Ukraine war, acting as a proxy battlefield for nuclear superpowers and playground for combat robot gen 1 Terminators. We have Iran and the broader Middle East locked in a collapsing spiral of kinetic retaliation, vaporising the very oil reserves America started yet another war to secure. We are drowning in an epistemological nightmare of disinformation, where shared objective reality has fractured into bespoke, algorithmically curated psychotic echo chambers so deranged they make Alex Jones look like a reliable source. Economic inequality has reached a velocity where billionaires are literally launching themselves into the exosphere while the proletariat attempts to crowdfund their insulin. Consequently, fascism is no longer a historical curiosity confined to black-and-white footage. It is once again a rising, viable, mainstream electoral strategy. Immigrants are being demonised and minorities persecuted. Germany and Japan are re-arming. If this all looks spookily like the events that drove us through WW1 and WW2 that’s because the systems which caused those wars are once again driving us towards global arma-fucking-geddon. Which is what we’re really here to think about, not human morality or high drama, but cold, machine logic, the systems driving us to war. And the one system that those of you in the know will see lurking behind all the others. A system whose name we shall not utter…until later. <p cl...
Summary
You don’t understand science fiction
Apr 2600:35:17Summary readyThere 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 built on one specific, structural cheat code. Look at Jurassic Park. The terror doesn’t actually come from the CGI T-Rex; it comes from one, very isolated scientific premise. Or look at the box office juggernaut Project Hail Mary – Andy Weir didn’t write a sprawling space opera, he built a meticulous puzzle box around exactly one new rule of biology. Members get full access to all videos and posts SubscribeSubmitting form Log in This isn’t just a modern blockbuster trend, either. This is the foundational DNA of science fiction. It is the exact same tool Mary Shelley used to accidentally invent science fiction with Frankenstein back in 1818 just because she was bored on vacation. It’s the same mechanism H.G. Wells used to absolutely terrify Victorian readers by showing them what it was like to be invaded by Victorian colonialists in The War of the Worlds. It is so deeply fundamental to the mechanics of creating a meaningful scifi world that every great from Arthur C Clarke to Ursula K Le Guin uses it without even giving it a name. Even fantasy writers, when they can stop calculating the exchange values of the seven major currencies in their world, actually do this. Even if J.R.R. Tolkien would probably rise from the grave to write a strongly worded letter in Elvish denying it. It’s RIGHT there in Lord of the Rings. Like a One Ring of power. Yes I did write that whole paragraph to make that pun. But it’s also true. Every great sci-fi writer is using this tool, whether they know the academic term for it or not. It is the ultimate storytelling power-up. And once you see it, you will never look at a “worldbuilding bible” the same way again. Right now I can divide you all into two groups. Group A are the ambitious power hungry young writers who want to be the next Brandon Sanderson by using this one easy trick. Group B are the creative purists who are recoiling in horror “NO! I will not sully my unique artistic vision with this HACK!” But all I’m doing is putting a new, powerful, sonic screwdriver in your scifi toolkit. What you do with it is all about you. And if you have no interest in telling scifi stories, this is also just a great way to understand them. Aaaand Group C…who already clicked ahead in the timeline to find out what the fuck I am talking about while muttering about getting to the point. So let’s get to the point. But before we get to the point of giving this thing its proper, intimidatingly academic name, let’s look at what screenwriters usually call it when they’re trying to sound smart in a pitch meet...
Summary
The First Dystopia
Apr 1400:13:52Summary readyWe 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 Log in Or watch on youtube https://youtu.be/gZHF0dP5_GI Zamyatin’s science fiction novel invented the future we now think of as dystopia. A lone individual awakens to the oppressive system they are trapped within and attempts a rebellion. Sometimes they achieve liberation, but mostly they…do not. The details change, the dystopian future remains the same. For most of human history there was no future. There was a date at a point ahead in time. But that date would be much like this date. Time was cyclical. Kings came and went, but there was always a king. The apocalypse or armageddon might strike, but those brought the end, not the future. The future needs progress. Progress needs technology. And technology needs science. With the explosion of science and technology during what we call the Industrial revolution progress began to accelerate to rates perceptible within a human lifetime. And then far faster. The future came into focus. Through science fiction. Philosophers, intellectuals and scientists began to speculate on what the human future might look like. From Johannes Kepler’s Somnium to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, science fiction made new myths for new times. At the heart of these speculations was the belief that the future could be made better with science and technology. Early science fiction like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and A New Amazonia by Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbet imagined futures of high technology and human equality, made possible with science and technology. Utopias were the standard for early science fiction. It may surprise us now but optimistic visions were once the scifi standard. Such stories caught the imagination of ordinary people and gave birth to “utopian socialism”. The dreams of early utopian socialism were bound up with the experience of early industrial capitalism. The workers in the factories could see the abundance their machines created. If that abundance were just shared fairly, not given away to the capitalists, a better world would surely be possible? These dreams were given a basis in logic and reason with the “historical materialism” of Karl Marx. In his critique of capitalism, Das Kapital, Marx claimed a scientific model of human progress, persuading millions that the future could be shaped by mankind as a better world, with the power of “scientific socialism”. So, as Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote We in 1921/22, he was reflecting on the decades-long dream of both utopian and scientific socialism that had suddenly become a reality. The chaos of World War One had sparked the revolution in Russia, and the communist Bolsheviks lead by Vladimir Lenin were, at least in name, intent on making the dream of socialist utopia a reality. The future long dreamed of had finally begun. And went instantly and horrifyingly wrong. Yevgeny Zamyatin was a revolutionary against the Russian Tsars who was arrested, tortured and imprisoned multiple times. We was written by a committed revolutionary to the socialist cause, who came very quickly to see that the revolution was going to succeed in creating a scientific socialist utopia. And that it would instantly become a dystopia. We was rejected for publication then became the first book banned by the Soviet state in the early 1920s. It was published in America in 1924 and from then on Zamyatin was persecuted by the Glavlit censorship board, until his exile in 1931 and then death in 1937. But even after its US publication, We did not find an enthusiastic readership. The primary audience of educated elites and intellectuals who might have read and promoted We were still too infatuated with visions of scientific socialism to entertain any critique of the socialist utopia. It was not until the wake of World War 2, as the US and Europe faced a heavily militarised Soviet Union, that the Western world found it needed reasons to hate its former ally, and We was “discovered”. It’s now well known that George Orwell’s 1984 was to some extent influenced by We. Orwell thought it “not a work of the first order” but “certainly an unusual one”. Orwell’s assessment of We is both accurate and biased. Its true that We is a didactic, one sided argument against scientific socialism. Orwell in 1984 sought to critique the Societ Union while retaining his argument first articulated in Animal Farm, that the socialist dream was possible, but had been subverted by the “pigs” of the oligarchy. It’s also unclear just how much of an influence We was on 1984. Orwell’s more direct influences were HG Well’s socialist utopias like Things To Come, which Orwell perceived as pr...
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Terminator 2 isn’t only the greatest action movie
Apr 1300:34:59Summary readyTerminator 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 Log in Or watch on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfbNARASn9Y Imagine if Ron Perlman had passed his audition for Terminator? You can’t. The movie is unimaginable without its leading actor. Terminator’s leading actress gets stuck doing what leading actresses do in psycho-thriller movies Scream. Runaway. Scream some more. It’s true that Gale Ann Hurd and James Cameron made a movie about a waitress who saves the world by calling it Terminator and casting Arnie But its only by the end of Terminator we see who Sarah Connor is going to become. And get the hint that Terminator 2 is going to be a Linda Hamilton movie There are only two Terminator movies Sure, you may think there are more movies and books and games in the “franchise”, but these were all sent back by future Hollywood to terminate the Terminator when all the time paradoxes are resolved there are only two Terminator movies. Terminator 1 and 2 are a unified by paradox A saviour who sends his best soldier back to become the father of the saviour Who carries a photo of the mother, that won’t be taken until after he dies at a desert gas station as a storm comes in And words of fate that cycle in time Skynet sets humanities fate “in a moment” John Connor’s message to his mother is “the future is not set” But when the young John repeats this to his Terminator protector the idea has developed “there is no fate but what we make” Then as she decides to kill ...
Summary
HG Wells vs Vladimir Lenin
Apr 700:26:16Tap to summarizeThe 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. In 1918 soldiers returning to Russia joined a revolution and pulled down the empire of the Tsars, and established the first communist state. Men across Europe begin to believe that their dreams of a better world can become real. That the old order of empires and war could be torn down and in its place could be made a new order. Become a member to watch the full video Members get full access to all videos and posts SubscribeSubmitting form Log in Or on YouTube https://youtu.be/TFIRYo0h-ZU This is the story of a meeting between two men whose dreams of a new world order had a powerful impact on the 20th century. Vladimir Ilyvich Lenin was the most famous revolutionary leader in history. Aged 17 Lenin saw his brother executed for a plot to kill the Tsar Alexander III. Lenin dedicated his life to revenge, joining the revolutionaries and ultimately leading them to power in 1918. Lenin’s climb to power has all the drama of a Tolstoy novel. Bank robberies, exhile, imprisonment, intrigue, civil war and murder. While the facts are disputed, it’s very likely that Lenin took his revenge by ordering the death by firing squad of the Tsar Nicholas II and his family. Lenin was the definition of a brutal dictator. The Red Terror of 1918 to 1922 was a purge of hundreds of thousands of Russian military officers and bureaucrats. And purge means Lenin had all those people killed. Support Science Fiction with Damien Walter as a member Access to all videos, essays and community Join Here But Lenin also proved a dynamic leader of Russia, after centuries of stagnation under the Tsars, beginning the nation’s full industrialisation and electrification. Great leader? Or mass murderer? Either way, Vladimir Lenin carved his name into history, as one of the men who shaped the new order of the modern world. The man coming to meet Lenin, who will also have a powerful influence over the new world, is wait a science fiction writer?? H.G. Herbert George to his friends Wells <img data-attachment-id="16343" data-permalink="https://damiengwalter.com/?attachment_id=16343" data-orig-file="https://damiengwalter.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/h._g._wells_c.1890.jpg" data-orig-size="600,407" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"1","alt":""}" data-image-title="h._g._wells_c.1890" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://damiengwalter.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/h._g._wells_c.1890.jpg?w=600" src="https://damiengwalter.com/wp-content/uploads/202...
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A note for listeners of the Science Fiction podcast
Apr 600:21:02Tap to summarizeWe 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 own podcasts or kill them. And in the last year they have largely succeeded in the latter. Most podcasts have moved to video first formats on YouTube, and now Spotify and Apple are also going video first. Most of the podcast apps have been bought out and shutdown, or are forcing their own ads on podcasters. So this note for listeners explains what this all means for the Science Fiction podcast. The TLDR is : The podcast will continue ad-free with audio tracks of the main video essays. Video essays will be free but ad-supported on YouTube and Spotify Members can watch all the video essays ad-free on Patreon, Substack and damiengwalter.com The Great Content Audit : over the next two to three months I am adding all the content to every platform. This means some old content will be republished. Sorry for any confusion. To subscribe to the podcast feed search “Science Fiction with Damien Walter” in the app of your choice. Listen to the podcast audio
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