Damien Walter

Science. Meets fiction.

The Science Fiction podcast with Damien Walter explores the best in SF storytelling & asks what happens when logos meets mythos, reason meets imagination and science…meets fiction.
Damien Walter writes on technology, culture and science fiction for The Guardian, BBC, Independent, Wired, Buzzfeed, SFX and Aeon. He teaches The Rhetoric of Story & Writing the 21st Century Myth to over 35,000 students worldwide.

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Insights and interviews on the art of modern myth making.


Interviews


Authors


The Rhetoric of Story

Learn the 7 foundations of powerful storytelling


Based on over a decade of research, and bringing together ideas from today’s most successful storytellers and story theorists, The Rhetoric of Story is an essential course for all creative writers, screenwriters and novelists.


Essays


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 artists will have encountered. You hit some creative milestone. Your new book is finished maybe, and a well-meaning friend responds, “I wish I had time to write / paint / sing / INSERT CREATIVE DREAM.” Yes,…

Only a creator culture can save us

We’re trying to rebuild a failed consumer culture. We need to make a new creator culture instead. Published in Culture – A Reader for Writers, editor John Mauk, Oxford University Press. I arrived in Leicester in the late ‘90s as a student, a year after losing my mother to cancer. Having little support, I worked…

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 it’s true, but in practice things don’t work that way. While crime, romance and thrillers all remain as coherent genres of fiction, it’s been decades since sci-fi could be comfortably understood by any shared generic criteria.…

Digital nomads are a 21st century counter culture

Slouching Toward Nimmanhaemin Digital nomads are a 21st century counterculture. The choices they make today will shape how we live and work tomorrow. Words and pictures by Damien Walter The global network enables us to react to the world as a whole” Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media The center was not holding. But that was a…

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 but not published until 1977, it marks the boundary between PKD’s mid-career novels that were clearly works of science fiction, including The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and his…

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“The universe is made of stories,

not of atoms.”

Muriel rukeyser from “the speed of darkness”.

Damien Walter

Writer & Storyteller

Damien Walter BA / MA / PGCHE / HEA is a writer and storyteller. His research and critical writing have been published in The Guardian, Wired, BBC, The Independent, Aeon and with Oxford University Press. He is a former director of creative writing at the University of Leicester, a member of the Higher Education Academy, and a graduate of the Clarion writers workshop. He consults widely for businesses in technology, healthcare, and manufacturing to help them tell great stories.