There’s an invisible community living among you. Writers, journalists, professional academics and amateur students of history and political science, and many others, all united by a single overlapping point of interest. Mention one of several now-obscure historical figures in casual conversation—Talleyrand, for example, or Admiral Kolchak—and they’ll nod knowingly. To confirm your suspicions, simply play a few key bars from Haydn’s “Oxford Symphony” and all will be revealed. They are fans of Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast, and that sting of pensive violins precedes each episode, now numbering more than 300. The historical portion of the podcast ran for 11 seasons, each chronicling a different revolution in chronological order and increasingly granular detail, ranging from the origins of the English Civil War to the Battle of Lexington, from the rise of the Paris Commune to the fall of Pancho Villa, finally concluding in 2022 in the twilight of the Russian Civil War.
Folks who unsubscribed in the interim may be surprised to find this deeply nonfictional, deeply wonky and scholarly podcast profiled on a speculative fiction blog. The series was conversational and at times a bit wry in tone, but it was entirely a synthesis of existing historical records and Duncan’s commentary on his research, putting everything in context without straying from the available sources. Season 12, however, which launched this October, is quite speculative indeed. “The Martian Revolution” is Duncan’s pivot from real-world history to future history, complete with holographic pop stars, corporate space battles, and of course, a healthy supply of unobtanium buried under the imperious peaks of Olympus Mons.
The world of Duncan’s Martian Revolution will be familiar to anyone who’s read a bit of intra-solar space opera like The Expanse series or enjoyed Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall. Five corporations dominate near future Earth after a deeply unsurprising ecological collapse. The largest, Omnicorp, operates an exclusive mining franchise extracting a shiny new energy source from underneath the mountains of Mars. This would probably be all well and good for everyone involved, were it not for an increasingly detached leadership class (kept alive by a slightly defective longevity serum) and an increasingly unequal distribution of haves and have not, which is generally how the ball gets rolling on these sorts of things. Push people around enough, even on Mars, and eventually they’re gonna start sewing flags and putting on red berets.
I discovered Revolutions at the height of the pandemic, and immediately devoured every available episode as fast as I could download them. It was an unexpected comfort during those tumultuous, dare I say unprecedented times, though not for the reasons the subject matter might suggest. Indeed, if there’s a common thread running through the series it’s that the middle of a political revolution is a bad place to be for pretty much everyone involved. The events detailed by Revolutions are generally violent, dirty, and precarious even in hindsight—focusing on the facts of the historical record tends to strip away any romantic notions listeners might have about the past. And even successful revolutions tend to be preceded by disastrous failed attempts and succeeded by schismatic infighting, neither of which seem like a great hang.
What Revolutions offers is an infinitely nested puzzle box of human motivations. Even the smallest historical moment represents a dozen different Rashomon-style stories competing to be considered “the truth.” Eyewitness testimony is notoriously imprecise, and it’s rarely presented by disinterested parties, especially during events that sweep nations into oblivion. History is often written by the victors—which presents its own set of problems and biases—but there’s plenty written by sore losers, as well as unreliable blowhards and the congenitally oblivious on both sides. Even the best textbooks and biographies must rely to some extent on less-than-the-best sources, and trying to make sense of those differing, subjective accounts, from source to source and book to book, makes for a compelling mystery in the right hands (see Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, for example, where the mystery author assigned the alleged crimes of King Richard III to one of her contemporary detectives). Duncan highlights the satisfying chains of cause and effect where possible, but he’s honest about what we don’t or can’t know about the past, and why that is.
It’s that last and unquestionably nerdiest component of The Martian Revolution, the patina of speculative historiography spread thick over everything, that’s truly exquisite. The podcast is presented from a perspective several hundred years after the events described, and is therefore dependent on the tenuous threads of information that link the present to the past, or in this case the far future to the slightly less far future. Wiped servers, hagiographic biographies, unreliable diarists, and a dozen other flavors of information decay feel authentically arranged over the central narrative of winners and losers. It’s a bit like an expert art forger artificially aging a pristine canvas until it’s indistinguishable from the work of a long dead master. After more than a decade producing the real thing on a weekly basis, Duncan’s is an expert forgery indeed.
In marrying the authority of fact to the possibilities of fantasy Duncan joins an eclectic group of nonfiction practitioners who’ve used the weight of their expertise to inform some delightfully crunchy and structurally unpredictable fiction. There are strong parallels to Last Letters to Hav, in which Jan Morris, the storied journalist and travel writer, created the quixotic polyglot city of Hav somewhere or other in the contemporary Mediterranean and set about writing a travel guide as though it were Venice or Hong Kong. Applying the rigorous techniques of nonfiction to a constructed environment allows a writer to use all the tools in their toolbox at once, to pit their creative abilities against their evaluative methods. The results, in both works, are stories that are both deeply familiar and evocative of a place that never was. There’s a German word (fernweh) that describes the feeling of being homesick for somewhere you haven’t been, and that’s an exceedingly rare quality that both of these stories share.
Duncan’s deft approach to nonfiction narrative is almost unchanged in this fictional iteration, right down to the Haydn music. This is a podcast that carefully guides the listener through to complex topics, exploring wherever possible the human motivations behind now-arcane rivalries like the Bolshevik/Menshevik split and the details of whatever it was the Continental Congress got up to. The big, iconic players of history become flawed, familiar characters in Revolutions, at least to the extent that the historical record supports it. Duncan has a gift for distilling distinct personalities out of amorphous and often contradictory historical profiles, and that skill is well deployed here. Just as the previous season featured wanton gadabouts, tortured heroes, and the “Great Idiots of History,” the Martian iteration already has a cast of colorful rabble-rousers and iconoclastic plutocrats to bounce off each other.
But there’s plenty of new territory to chart. Revolutions are often defined by the technological advances that preceded them, from the printing press to the machine gun, and the interplanetary logistics of the Martian Revolution lend some unique wrinkles to the narrative. Corporate statehood, privatized space exploration, and serum-addled gerontocracies mirror the excesses of the past in some ways, but they also provide new opportunities to speak to and consider our present era.
What’s ultimately so compelling about the Revolutions podcast, beyond the innate drama of political intrigue and palace coups, is the evidence that human beings much like us have weathered the great storms of history and come out on the other side. Maybe not all the human beings involved, and maybe not in the way they’d dreamed or planned, but enough to pass something of what they were fighting on to future generations to consider, and be inspired—even if it’s while we’re in the middle of folding laundry or doing dishes (or whenever you listen to your podcasts). It’s said that history is what was carried out of a burning building, and when the fires of revolution burn hot, what survives is all the more precious. It’s also a reminder that while the systems that surround us seem unchangeable and inescapable here and now, as Ursula K. Le Guin pointed out, so did the divine right of kings, once upon a time…
Do you have a favorite fiction/nonfiction hybrid? List them in the comments and let’s see how many of us are out there (bonus points for any that include Motel of Mysteries). And if you were already a fan of Revolutions—or any of Duncan’s previous podcasts—how do you feel about this pivot to speculative fiction?
