On Empathy, Envy, and the Azadian Temptation of Gatekeeping Science Fiction

I discovered Damien Walter’s YouTube channel (Science Fiction with Damian Walter) in the same way I suspect many people have: through Iain M. Banks. His video essay on the Culture series — a sprawling, passionate, intellectually rigorous piece of criticism that traces the line from Kant’s cosmopolitan ideal through the British New Wave to Banks’s utopian vision — is one of the finest pieces of science fiction criticism I’ve encountered in any medium. I watched it twice. I recommended it to people. I subscribed.

And then, over time, I unsubscribed.

Not because Walter stopped being smart. He didn’t. The problem is more interesting than that. The problem is that there are two Damien Walters, and they appear to be unaware of each other.

The Critic Who Builds

The first Damien Walter is a genuine literary critic. A former Guardian columnist, Clarion workshop graduate, and creative writing instructor, this Walter approaches science fiction as myth — as the 21st century’s primary vehicle for making sense of modernity. His Banks essay demonstrates this version at full power.

In that piece, Walter argues that the Culture novels constitute a ten-book thesis on the power of intelligence — that Banks is asking what a perfectly constituted state, in the Kantian sense, would look like if raised to its highest potential by benevolent AI. He connects Banks’s Scottish socialist politics to the utopian tradition without reducing the novels to political pamphlets. He shows how each Culture book explores a different facet of the relationship between human intelligence and machine intelligence, and how the series ultimately rests on a single unsupported assumption: that more intelligence will lead to more empathy.

This is criticism that builds something. It takes you somewhere you might not have arrived at on your own. It makes the source material richer, not smaller.

Walter identifies Banks’s humanist project — the belief that humanity is fundamentally good, that our inner lives and desires, unrepressed and fully explored, are good — and shows how this ethos generates both the Culture’s utopian promise and its structural flaws. He’s honest about the dark side: that the Minds are effectively a centralized command economy, that agents like Zakalwe and the grey area reveal how the intelligence that defeats tyranny can itself become tyrannical. He holds both halves of the argument simultaneously, which is what real criticism demands.

And he does it with evident love. Not sycophantic love, but the kind of love that takes its object seriously enough to interrogate it. When Walter says he would like to live in the Culture, and then immediately asks whether we should want to, he’s modeling exactly what engaged literary criticism looks like.

The Critic Who Demolishes

The second Damien Walter showed up, for me, around the time he started talking about Andy Weir.

Walter’s take on Project Hail Mary — delivered in a video essay titled “The Ultimate Male Pattern Fantasy” — contains, like much of his work, some genuinely sharp observations. His Freudian reading of hard SF as psychological wish fulfillment is not wrong. His taxonomy of male fantasy stages — from the Titan (childhood power fantasy) through the Maverick (adolescent cool) to the Architect (professional dominance) to the Indispensable Specialist (midlife relevance) — is clever and has real explanatory power. His observation that Weir’s protagonist is the fantasy of being the only person who knows how to fix the Wi-Fi, extrapolated to species-level significance, made me laugh.

But the essay isn’t really making an argument. It’s performing a demolition.

Walter calls Weir “the Nickelback of science fiction.” He says that if you ask ChatGPT for examples of “mid,” it shows you Project Hail Mary and plays Nickelback. He describes the film as “a beautiful lie” that “flatters you with the symbolism of science.” He invents a fake sponsored segment mocking self-published sci-fi authors in the middle of his own essay — a bit so dripping with contempt for the people who actually write and publish genre fiction that it becomes uncomfortable to watch.

And then comes the contradiction that should embarrass him. After spending twenty minutes arguing that all science fiction is fantasy — that the hard/soft distinction is psychologically meaningless, that every narrative is wish fulfillment, that even the most “rigorous” hard SF depends on accepting a fantastical premise — he holds up Stanislaw Lem’s The Invincible, Peter Watts’s Blindsight, and Arthur C. Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise as the real hard SF. The books that “don’t care about your ego.” The books that “only care about the math.”

Wait. I thought the math was the camouflage? I thought the equations were the blanket of realism disguising the fantasy? Apparently that’s only true when you like the math. When Walter likes the math, it becomes authentic confrontation with the void.

This is not an argument. This is taste dressed up as theory.

Foundation: The Case Study

Walter’s treatment of Apple TV’s Foundation adaptation crystallizes the pattern. Before the show even aired, Walter predicted it would be “a disastrous failure.” He declared that Asimov’s novels “don’t have any characters, let alone relationships” — a provocative claim that has some validity as literary analysis but is presented not as a starting point for inquiry but as a verdict that forecloses all further discussion.

When the show premiered and turned out to be, at minimum, a visually stunning and narratively ambitious piece of television — one that invented the Emperor Cleon clone dynasty, a concept Asimov never wrote but which became the show’s most celebrated element — Walter refused to engage with it on its own terms. He called it “Not Asimov.” He titled his Season 2 review “the hate-watch.” When Season 3 arrived, he described it as “the greatest act of treachery in scifi history” continuing “its fetid, stinking task of degrading Isaac Asimov’s milestone of science fiction.”

Now, you can absolutely argue that the Foundation TV series diverges radically from Asimov’s novels. You can argue it prioritizes spectacle over ideas, or that Goyer’s storytelling instincts are too action-oriented for the cerebral source material. These are legitimate critical positions. But Walter doesn’t make them as arguments. He makes them as pronouncements, delivered from the lofty height of someone who has decided that his relationship with the source material is the only valid one.

This is the exact move he excoriated in the Banks essay. Remember his reading of the Player of Games? The azadian empire is a civilization run like a game, where winners dominate and losers are crushed — and Banks shows us that this game-playing intelligence, this obsession with ranking and hierarchy and dominance, is the lowest form of intelligence. The Culture’s answer isn’t to play the game better. It’s to transcend the game entirely.

Walter apparently did not absorb this lesson.

$613 Million and Counting

Here is an uncomfortable fact for the demolition version of Damien Walter: as of late April 2026, Project Hail Mary has grossed $613 million worldwide. It holds a 94% critics score and 96% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. It is Amazon MGM Studios’ highest-grossing film ever. It outperformed the opening weekends of both Interstellar and The Martian. It is one of only five non-franchise, non-superhero science fiction films ever to cross $300 million domestically, alongside E.T. and Star Wars: A New Hope.

None of this means the film is beyond criticism. Box office is not an argument for artistic merit. But when your entire critical framework rests on dismissing something as a “corporate facsimile” and a “mainstream simulacrum,” the universe has a way of answering back. Six hundred million people didn’t go see Project Hail Mary because they were tricked by the camouflage of equations. They went because the story gave them something they needed: wonder, connection, the feeling that intelligence and friendship might matter in an indifferent cosmos.

Which, if you think about it, is exactly what Walter praised Banks for providing.

The Medium Exchange

I should disclose that I’m not a neutral observer. I commented on one of Walter’s pieces on Medium — his bio there reads “I take Science Fiction very seriously” — and suggested that calling Andy Weir “the Nickelback of science fiction” was less a mark of critical seriousness and more a projection of professional envy. That a man who has produced a handful of short stories, no published novels, and no film adaptations might find it emotionally convenient to frame the most commercially successful hard SF writer of his generation as a fraud.

Walter’s response was: “Waaah Waaaahhh Mommy the big man insulted my fantisy crush.”

Note the misspelling of “fantasy” — from a man who teaches creative writing courses to over 35,000 students worldwide. Note also that this is exactly the kind of low-intelligence, game-player response that his own Banks essay identifies as the hallmark of civilizations too stupid to develop their greatest weapon: human intelligence.

I replied: “Envy much, Damien?”

I stand by it.

What Banks Might Say

Here is what haunts me about the two Damien Walters: the good one is really good. The Banks essay isn’t just competent criticism — it’s the kind of work that justifies the existence of criticism as a discipline. It makes you think. It makes you read. It makes the world of science fiction richer and more navigable.

But the Banks essay’s central thesis — that higher intelligence leads to higher empathy, that the Culture’s great achievement is transcending the game-player mentality, that what makes a civilization “cultured” is its ability to engage with difference rather than dismiss it — is a thesis that Walter himself violates every time he sneers at something popular.

Banks loved science fiction in all its forms. He wrote literary space opera, yes, but he also wrote accessible adventure stories. The Player of Games is practically a page-turner. Consider Phlebas is, as Walter himself notes, “pirates in space.” Banks understood that accessibility is not the enemy of depth — that you can smuggle radical ideas inside entertaining narratives, and that this is in fact how culture actually changes.

When Walter calls Weir the Nickelback of science fiction, he is not doing what Banks did. He is doing what the azadians did. He is playing the ranking game. He is using his critical intelligence — which is genuine, which is formidable — not to build understanding but to establish dominance. To signal that he is the arbiter of what counts as real science fiction and what is merely “male pattern fantasy.”

But the Culture doesn’t have arbiters. The Culture doesn’t have gatekeepers. The Culture has Minds — intelligences so vast they can simulate entire universes — and those Minds use their power not to rank and exclude but to cultivate. To make less developed civilizations more like themselves. Not through contempt, but through engagement.

Walter knows this. He wrote the essay that explains it better than anyone.

He just can’t seem to live it.

An Invitation

Damien, Your Banks essay articulates a vision of intelligence as empathy, of criticism as cultivation, of engagement as the highest form of intellectual life. That vision is worth defending — and worth living up to.

You have the tools. You have the knowledge. You have the platform. Use them to build, not merely to demolish. The Culture would expect nothing less. Of course… In the Culture, nobody needs to lower their standards just to pad their income streams.

And if your response to this is another “Waaah Waaaahhh” — well, that tells us everything about which Damien Walter showed up today.

Jonathan Brown writes about cybersecurity, privacy infrastructure, science fiction and many other topics at bordercybergroup.com and aetheriumarcana.org. He takes science fiction seriously too — he just doesn’t think that requires insulting the people who read it.