Ep 17: Damien Walter Part 2 - The Sociology of Science Fiction

The Science in The Fiction

This is part two of our conversation with Damien Walter, the science fiction guru. He is the host of the Science Fiction Podcast and Science Fiction Facebook group. He is also a critical thinker about culture, and a prophet of the emerging mythos of science fiction. In our last episode we presented the part of our conversation about individual psychology as it relates to the structure and function of story-telling, and in this episode we take the conversation to the larger sociological and cultural issues at play in the creation of a new, unifying mythos based on science and science fiction. We discuss the neo-religious structures emerging from science fiction today: the messiahs of Dune and the Matrix, Ray Kurzweil’s Singulitarians, L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientologists and Nic Bostrom’s Transhumanists. We talk about the trend towards humanizing the mechanistic worldview we’ve inherited from modernism and post-modernism, about emerging from the worship of the machine and re-humanizing people, and perhaps even expanding our sense of humanity to include all sentient beings. We contemplate what it might be like to be a bat, or a cat, or even a field of wheat. It’s an amazing conversation and a perfect example of the kind of thinking we love to do on the Science in The Fiction.
Damien Walter – "The universe is made of stories, not atoms." (damiengwalter.com)

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