#Mike Duncan's Martian Revolution
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Welcome to The Martian Revolution (blog)
For those of you who may not be aware, Mike Duncan recently published some new audio files to his Revolutions podcast feed. This is big news because it's been quiet for the last 2 years!
Over the last 5 years I got deep into his work, listening to all of Revolutions during the COVID-19 lock down while it was on hiatus, then immediately going into his backlog and plowing through his History of Rome. His writing in fantastic and he does his homework.
And as he says in his intro to this new project, it's all been leading to this. He's going to take everything he's learned in the last 15+ years and do a speculative science-fiction piece about a future Martian revolution! The perfect intersection of my two favorite writing topics!!
aaaaannnnyyyy waaaaayyyyysssss
I'm starting this blog to try and drum up some interest and put any posts or art I come across in one place. I'm super hyped about this and anticipate some pretty amazing fan pieces to come out of this production!
Just as much to help me remember as anything, I'm probably going to use 3 different tags to help keep discussions about things straight:
The Martian Revolution: This is the core subject of the text. Fictional
Mike Duncan's Martian Revolution : This is the podcast. Real
Martian Revolution blog : This would be for meta discussion about this blog.
Yay postmodern meta-textualism! Hope you're as excited about all this as I am
--The Curator
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I am in tears over here.
"Everyone had seen what a disastrous waste mid-21st century tech oligarch space projects had been, which infamously culminated with the Epic Fail. That was when 250 people were conned into joining a moon colony expedition. The rocket they boarded, called the Epic, was supposed to launch them into a romantic new life in space. Instead, the Epic exploded on the launchpad, killing everyone instantly – hence the Epic Fail. Later investigations attributed the explosion to a complete disregard for safety protocols and basic principles of engineering and physics. Apparently, at the last minute a chemical compound had been added to the thrusters to make the rocket flames look black, which was supposed to make the Epic's launch look cooler, but instead it killed everyone and basically brought the first Space Age to a close."
??!!!?
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Mike Duncan, of the Revolutions podcast (which covered the English Revolution, American Revolution, French Revolution, Haitian Revolution, Latin American Wars of Independence, French Revolution of July 1830, Revolutions of 1848, Paris Commune, Mexican Revolution, and Russian Revolution), has started a new season covering, in the same documentary style, a fictional Martian Revolution in the 2200s.
It’s very interesting, because you can see the elements that are inspired by or parallel to some of the common patterns and major characters in the previously-covered historical revolutions. I’m going to jot down some thoughts so I can keep them on hand as the season continues.
Patterns
In his conclusion to the Revolutions series, Duncan concludes that the build up to a potential (but still far from inevitable) revolution begins when a system that had previously been stable – note, not necessarily good, just stable – becomes unstable, either because it fails to adapt to changes, or because it introduces new changes that alienate an important part of its power base.
The Martian Revolution begins with both. The setting is a corporate-ruled solar system in which Omnicorp is by far the dominant corporation out of five major ones, due to its control of an extensive but exhaustible resource that enables the generation of emissions-free energy. Mars is home to a lot of this resource, leading to the establishment of resource-extraction colonies by Omnicorp. The first stage producing instability is a long period of “extremely gerontocracy”, where CEO Vernon Byrd manages to get him and the company directors who are his cronies appointed to their positions “for life” when he is 100 years old. They then use secret life-extendeing drugs to just…keep living, but become more and more out of it, and their aides/exec assistants end up running the company.
(The importance of access to the person in power reminded me a bit of the sections in the Russian Revolution podcast on the months leading up to Lenin’s death, but there are plenty of other historical examples. In terms of the gerontocracy specifically and the way it prevents chamge and adaptation, the parallel that comes to mind is the very-long reign of Franz-Josef of Austria-Hubgary from 1849 to WWI.)
This led to a lot of things in the daily running of the company being neglected, and a black market of workarounds cropping up to keep things functioning, with Mars operating mostly on its own. This is a clear analogy to the period of “benign neglect” in the American colonies leading up to the American Revolution, and in this period a more distinct Martian identity develops.
Then things get further destabilized when the gerontocracy is finally forced out, and the new CEO – a rich kid who thinks he’s a genius, and has the asset of being one of the few with the social position and assertiveness to have challenged the gerontocracy – brings in a bunch of new, modernized rules that he thinks will getthings running smoothly again, but in fact only break them further.
This is, again, pretty clearly analogous to the kind of events producing both the American Revolution and the later Latin American Revolutions: a colonial power rapudly making changes (to increase the colonies’ profitability) that are highly unpopular with the people living in those colonies – even (or especially) with the higher echelons of the colonial population.
The other place where we have clear parallels with the historical revolutions Duncan has covered is in the layout of the class system. The Martian class system is made up of Class S personnel (top executives, mostly from Earth but a few born on Mars), Class A (other high- and mid-level managers, a mix of Earther and Martian), Class B (the intelligentsia and cultural professionals – doctors, lawyers, writers, artists, etc.), Class C (immediate supervisors, often from Earth on contracts of a few years, intending to earn some money and return home), and Class D (the majority, the regular workers who make the colony run, most of whom are Mars-born but some Earth-born). For extra vibes, the top three classes are referred to as the “SABs” (amazing how similar that sounds to SOBs) and the lower two are referred to by some SABs as the CDs (“seedies”).
Based on the previous seasons of Revolutions, this all gives a pretty clear sense of how things will play out. The Class B intelligentsia (especially the younger ones) are the core of upper-class revolutionary movements, joined by some of the Class S and A who are just too fed up with how badly Omnicorp is bungling things. Class D are the popular masses whom they have to ally with in order to win. Class C are roughly our stand-in for the lower-middle classes or petit bougeoisie (or, in Haiti, the lower-class white population): they despise the Class D personnel and resent the scornful or patronizing attitudes of the SABs, and tend to be the most counterrevolutionary; them being mainly on short-term assignment from Earth rather than identifying with Mars adds to this.
Oh, and there’s one major city (Olympus) and two lesser ones that resent Olympus’ primacy, which is going to give us some similar between-colony dynamics from the American and/or Latin American revolutions (the two went rather differently in how they played out and where they ended up).
Characters
There’s a few main figures who have been introduced so far.
1) José de Petrov, a young B-class radical who tries to launch a revolution with some of his peers, grounded in the belief that colonies having revolutions through which they gain independence is a historical inevitability. They try to gain control of key strategic sites in the main city of the Mars colony, their attempt is brutally crushed and all are killed, and it is mostly hushed up, but some people do find out about it, and it’s foreshadowed that information about it will come out later and serve as an impetus to the successful Martian Revolution. (Let others rise to take our place until the earth Mars is free.)
This is a callback to several things historically – the ‘historical inevitability’ bit is definitely one to Marxism – but the one that comes to my mind is the Decembrist revolt in early-1800s Russia: it’s led by idealistic young people with strong convictions, and it ends quickly and violently. You could also see him as a less successful and less skilled Lenin. Another parallel is the unsuccessful attempt at Colombian independence by Francisco de Miranda.
2) Mabel Dore. She’s the daughter of two S-class personnel, one of the richest people on Mars and probably the richest Martian-born person. She’s radicalized by learning about Petrov’s rebellion and the way it was crushed, and also influenced in her Martian patriotism by going to university of Earth and being treated disdainfully – or at best, as a curiosity – while there. I’m embarassed at how long it took me to figure out who she was paralelling, because she is, of course, Mars’s Simón Bólivar.
She is lookimg potentially very successful thus far in the series, because thanks to widespread philanthropy she is already extremely well-regarded by the Class D personnel, which is exactly the kind of cross-class alliance you tend to need for a successful revolution.
(To be clear: none of this is ‘laws of history’. The idea of ‘laws of history’ is bunk. There’s no particular circumstance that guantees a successful revolution – everything is affected by chance and contingency. But there are patterns, and one of them is that a successful revolution against an existing order generally requires both people who are embedded i. existing power structures – upper classes – and people with numbers – lower classes. And that one, the other, or both frequently go for each others’ throats as soon as the initial revolution is achieved. So pre-existing good feeling is a very good sign for Mabel Dore.)
3) Timothy Werner. This is, to use Mike Duncan’s term, our “great idiot of history”. (Basic thesis: you don’t get a successful revolution without the main person in power muffing up very, very badly.) Due to being a person with energy and some intelligence in an old, malfunctioning, and moribund company, and due to being near the top of the upper class, he developed the firm opinion that he was a genius who could fix everything, and that anyone who opposed his ideas or raised problems with them was simply obstructionist. As the new CEO of Omnicorp, he’s going to set off the Martian Revolution.
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Another fun option joins the party: history podcaster Mike Duncan is now writing his own science fiction podcast series about the "Martian Revolution"
"tone of nonfiction podcast but it's fiction" is also a legitimate way to express worldbuilding project :)
No offense but I think some of you would be a lot happier writing a fictional atlas or encyclopedia instead of a narrative story
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