You Should Listen to the Delight That is Revolutions Season 11
But Only After Drinking Deep of the Delights of Revolutions Seasons 3 - 10
There is a splendid new series of serialized science fiction being released—a form for which, as regular readers know, I have a particular fondness— and I want to recommend it to you, since it is not only extremely good, but it is also interesting (possibly unique) in its format and some of the things it is doing. But to explain what makes it so great will take some background, so bear with me as I explain.
Mike Duncan is a podcaster and writer, one who, prior to a few weeks ago, had only published (if we may use the verb to cover posting podcasts as well as birthing books) works of history. He made his name with two history podcasts: the first was The History of Rome (2007-2012), a podcast which is just what it says on the tin, narrating Rome’s history in roughly half-hour chunks from its mythical founding up through the fall of the Western empire; and the second was Revolutions (2013-2022), which (in a similar format of narrative history) narrated over the course of ten seasons the story of ten revolutions, starting with the English Civil War (1640-1660) and ending with the Russian Revolution of 1917. Duncan has also published two history books, one flowing out of each of his two podcasts: The Storm Before the Storm (2017), a book about the period before the climactic end of the Roman Republic—that is, not the stories of Pompey, Caesar, Anthony and Augustus, but the wars and crises that made that more familiar set of stories possible, and Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution (2021), a biography of Lafayette covering his involvement in the American, French and July revolutions.1 But since the end of Revolutions 10 two years ago (or, more precisely, after the twelve-episode series of appendices which followed it), Duncan has been silent.
Until, that is, a few weeks ago, when Duncan (without any advance notice or fanfare) debuted a new season of Revolutions, Season 11, which is currently up to four episodes plus an introduction. It’s about the Martian Revolution of 2247.
And it’s fabulous.
But despite a strong temptation to urge everyone to rush out and dive right into Revolutions 11 right now, I can’t help but note that it will be much more fun if you have listened to at least some of Revolutions 3-10—at least one season, say—and even better if you have listened to a great deal of it. Which is not a bad thing because those seasons are also fabulous! Indeed, I have recommended them to many people long before the marvel that is Revolutions season 11 debuted. So before I talk about how and why and in what way Revolutions 11 is terrific, I want to talk a bit about the earlier seasons of Revolutions, and in particular point to some highlights (which, spoiler alert, encompass almost the entire run of the show). I wish to discuss both because Duncan is doing something—which is to my knowledge unprecedented—in so precisely mirroring a specific body of nonfiction in fictional form, and this lends his narrative a unique power that is worth some serious consideration.
Revolutions 1-10, Plus Appendices
There were ten seasons of Revolutions (plus a set of appendices), running for well over 300 episodes. I myself have listened to all of it save the second half of Season 2, and I have enjoyed all of it,—but I haven’t enjoyed it all equally. So I want to talk about what the show covers, what the various seasons are like, and what parts of Revolutions I would especially recommend.
I should begin by noting that the first two seasons—the first, as I mentioned, is about the English Civil War, while the second is about the American Revolution—are far weaker than any of the subsequent ones. This is a bit surprising, since Duncan was already an experienced podcaster when the show began, with well over 150 episodes of The History of Rome under his belt. And while one might have expected earliest episodes of History of Rome to be weak, as he was new to the medium—it took him some time to finding his footing and his voice—it seems somewhat surprising that the early episodes of Revolutions should also be weak (at least I found it so). But they definitely are: in one of his closing episodes,2 no less an authority than Mike Duncan himself recommended starting with Season 3. So the weakness of the first two seasons is at this point essentially canonical.
I think the reason for the weakness of those first two seasons is that in them Duncan stuck to a rather cramped format: he was planning on only fifteen episodes per revolution, and for two seasons he stuck to it, which also meant that he didn’t do either much lead-up or much follow-through. In later seasons he would extensively set the stage by giving the context of a country’s prerevolutionary history, describing earlier leaders and events and the social scene, but in the first two seasons he didn’t. Similarly he didn’t say much about the aftermath of the early revolutions—save that I should actually limit this claim to season 1, as I bailed about halfway through season 2 and don’t know for sure (although looking at the episodes it sure looks like it.)3 But certainly this weakness is quite notable in season 1: he ends abruptly with the restoration of Charles II in 1660, which doesn’t really complete his story in a satisfying way. If he had been doing the series somewhat later, he would have taken it up through the Glorious Revolution of 1688,4 which is a far more natural ending for the story of the ideological and social clashes that he portrays in the series. Actually, he probably would gone even farther and bridged the time between the first seasons 1 and 2, either with supplemental episodes or simply in the course of the early episodes of season 2; the ideologies of the Glorious Revolution played an important role in setting up the American Revolution, and there are interesting connections to be made, but early on he didn’t see it as within his remit to make them. To be clear, neither season 1 nor (what I heard of) season 2 are actually bad—they’re engaging and enjoyable and educational, and might well be worth a listen—but they aren’t as good as what would follow.
With season 3, however, Revolutions came into its own; it is absolutely first-rate. It’s a 50-episode narrative of the French Revolution, starting more than a decade before the main events, carefully laying the ground for the story to come, and then taking you through the events of the revolution beat-by-beat in an enthralling narrative (and going all the way up through the 1815 restoration of the Bourbons). I think I learned a lot more from that podcast than I did from Patrice Higonnet’s class on the topic which I took at Harvard in the fall of 1989—and that’s only partly because I was paying more and better attention to Duncan; it was also a better introduction to the topic.5 And if my saying that Duncan was laying the ground for later events makes it sound dull, let me assure that it is absolutely riveting. Duncan really makes you care about the Compte rendu au Roi (1781), which was essentially an accounting document. Every step is enthralling; it’s masterful storytelling.
Let me pause here for a personal anecdote. When covid shut everything down in March, 2020, our local public schools were fully closed for a full month before reopening with remote instruction. Not knowing how long this shutdown would last, I began home-schooling my fifth-grade son as soon as the schools shut down, doing math and reading and a few other things with him, including history. For the history portion we listened together to Revolutions seasons 1 and 3, stopping frequently to explain vocabulary like “parliament”, “textiles” and “bourgeois”, which he naturally didn’t know, and to provide other needed background. It worked splendidly: he loved the episodes, and often begged for more the way he would with television shows (“Let’s watch another!” he’d say, and then correct himself, “I mean listen.”) Unlike most of the homeschooling, we even continued it for some time after his school restarted, because they were just fun. (For that matter, I too found the episodes incredibly engaging, even though I had already heard all of both seasons, not to mention knowing more about both events from other reading and classes.) All of which is just to say that Duncan really nails it: this is not only highly educational, it is gripping storytelling as well.
And Duncan kept it up more or less undiminished for another seven seasons! The topics of each season were as follows (the parenthetical number following each is the number of episodes in the given season):
4. The Haitian Revolution of 1791 (20)
5. The Spanish American wars of independence, 1808 & following (28)
6. The July Revolution of 1830 (12)
7. The Revolutions of 1848 (33)
8. The Paris Commune of 1871 (8)
9. The Mexican Revolution of 1910 (27)
10. The Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 (114)
--. Appendices (12)These are all basically splendid, and I recommend listening to the entire show. You’ll learn a lot; I myself, despite having a Ph.D. in history, knew embarrassingly little about either the Haitian or Mexican revolutions, and Duncan provides a superb introduction. The series of later French revolutions—1830, 1848 and 1871, which in one case spread across the continent of Europe—are gripping, and come close to providing a broad history of 19th-century Europe. The Russian revolution is done in extraordinary depth. In short, it’s all great stuff.
Having said that, I do think the later seasons suffer a little bit from the opposite problem which hampered the first two seasons: where those gave too little context covered too little of the aftermath, in the final seasons I think Duncan errs in the other direction and does too much, especially in his laying of groundwork. This is most notable in the case of Russia, where he gives a quite long history of Russia plus a detailed, multi-episode examination of multiple socialist theories before getting even close to the first revolution of 1905. It’s all fascinating and gripping stuff, mind you, and I enjoyed all of it, but it’s a lot. (Note that the Russian season, 10, is longer than the previous five seasons combined.) Even season 9, which covered the Mexican revolution, started pretty far back (with the conquest of Mexico by Cortés), but there it was done more succinctly (season 9 is a reasonable 27 episodes, unlike Russia’s 114), you get a bonus revolution (the independence revolution of 1810), and in any event all the background seems more directly relevant than some of the deep dive into early Russian history that Duncan does in season 10 whose necessity for understanding the revolution is unclear to me, although Duncan does make the story fascinating in its own right. At any rate, the line between “the history of revolutions” and “Mike Duncan’s history of Europe and the Americas” got pretty blurred as Revolutions went on, and I think it weakens the appeal of the final seasons (mostly season 10) a bit, simply due to a lack of the focus that propelled the best seasons of the show.6 Suffice to say I know other fans of Revolutions who listened to all the other seasons but stalled out at some point in the midst of season 10, and while I didn’t (and am glad I didn’t) I understand why they did.
The other minor quibble I would have with the show is that the appendices—which was a series of twelve episodes comparing the ten revolutions, released after Revolutions 10—were the weakest episodes since the first two seasons. The general idea of doing historical comparisons on the material he’d covered was a good one, but to go through all ten in as much detail as he did made those segments feel like a narration of a Generic Revolution, which is just less interesting than the narration of any specific revolution; I also found my specific memory for names was faltering at times (which granted is a common problem for me). I think a shorter and more thematic comparison would have worked better. I also found Duncan’s historical claims in the appendices more questionable than I did any of those in the main part of the show,7 in particular because in making them he was drawing from a very specific set that purposefully omitted all other similar events (coups, revolts, grumblings that never went anywhere, etc), so there was a fair amount of implicit cherry-picking which distorted his conclusions: he did not have a representative or random sample. But mostly the problem with the appendices was that they were simply not as gripping as the rest of the series, not really having a narrative of their own (or, at best, having a fuzzy one made of all of them overlapping). So while I do understand the desire to do a summing up, and I see why Duncan did them, but I feel that this set somewhat missed the mark.
But overall, Revolutions is utterly fabulous, and I urge you to listen to it. My advice would be to start with season 3 and keep going; by the time you’ve done seasons 3-9 you’ll be in a position to judge for yourself whether you really want to tackle all of season 10 and the appendices, or go back and listen to seasons 1-2, or simply skip ahead.
Because now, two years later, Duncan is back, with a show that can be understood as an alternative summing up to replace the appendices, one which has none of the (to my mind) historical flaws and which has all the narrative drive of the very best seasons of his show. I refer, of course, to Revolutions season 11: The Martian Revolution.
Revolutions 11: The Martian Revolution of 2247
Duncan is now narrating the history of the Martian revolution of 2247—which is to say, that he is writing science fiction. This is slightly less of a leap than it sounds: a lot of SF is, essentially, future history (necessarily fictional of course), and both history and SF are set in times, places, and societies which are foreign to their audience (an even closer analogy is between SF and historical fiction.8) But, of course, it is a real jump: this is the first foray into fiction that Duncan has made, and that alone makes it a radical departure, despite the very real continuities (about which more in a bit). But so far, I would recommend it extremely highly—highly enough to write a lengthy essay bringing it to your attention, for instance.
The show is, to be clear, just starting; it has been running for about a month so far. As of this writing, Duncan has released a brief introductory episode (called episode 0 of season 11), which is integral to the project and should not be skipped,9 and four full-length (i.e. half-hour) episodes, to wit:
11.0. Welcome to the Martian Revolution
11.1. The Colonization of Mars
11.2. In with the Old
11.3. The Martian Way
11.4. The Election of 2244Duncan has said that it will run something like 25-30 episodes, and my main complaint is that I can’t simply binge the entire thing right now, because it’s just awesome. So now I want to talk about what makes it so fabulous, why you should rush out and listen to it (after listening to earlier seasons, if you haven’t yet), and in particular what makes it unique, namely its relation to the earlier seasons of Revolutions.
The first thing to say is that season 11 is just as gripping and just as fun as Revolutions 3-10 were; this is simply great storytelling. Which is, I think, sufficient recommendation for any tale, and not one I want to give short shrift to. So I recommend it very highly on that basis alone; indeed, were it not for that, none of its other virtues would matter. But it is, and so they do, so onward.
The show has been quite meticulously prepared. Duncan is, quite clearly, in dialogue with the history of SF. He drops an early mention of “KSR industries”, a reference to the best prior work portraying a Martian Revolution, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy (consisting of Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), Blue Mars (1996), and a spin-off volume called The Martians (1999), and which I also recommend very highly). The title of episode three is borrowed from the title of a story by Isaac Asimov, which can be found in his collection The Martian Way and Other Stories (1955). And so on. Further, Duncan’s worldbuilding is quite clearly very carefully done and well thought out (more on this aspect in a bit). Which is to say that Duncan has done his homework here just as much as he did in his history podcast, and it enriches the work significantly (although I hasten to add that you needn’t have read any of the SF he is in dialogue with in order to enjoy Duncan’s narrative).
On the worldbuilding: Duncan’s future, at least what we have seen of it so far (remember I am writing this only a bit of a way into the series) is not only well thought through, it also feels incredibly lived in and plausible. A lot of science fictional futures feel more like fantasy settings—that is to say, interesting, well-thought out worlds which it’s hard to imagine actually happening. Obviously there are many SF works for which this is not at all true. For instance, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars is very well done, although far more utopian (from this vantage point, naively so) than Duncan’s, and perhaps it stretches credulity just a tiny bit for that reason alone. To take another example, Ada Palmer’s supremely brilliant Terra Ignota tetralogy manages to portray a world employing what are (to my mind) some fundamentally extremely implausible assumptions and still make it feel like the most plausible reasonably-near future I can think of. I could multiply examples quite a bit; I don’t mean to imply that there aren’t lots of persuasive SF future. But far more common are works like the equally-brilliant tetralogy The Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe, which is far enough in the future that it doesn’t feel like a world we can really imagine coming to pass (the historical connections between our world and it are simply too tenuous), so while it is vividly realized it doesn’t make you feel ah yes that’s probably how things will go. Or, to take a near-future example, consider Robert Charles Wilson’s superb novel Spin, which does splendid worldbuilding, but which is centered on a miracle which you can’t really imagine actually happening, so its realism is of a different nature than that of Robinson’s or Palmer’s or Duncan’s. Now Duncan does help himself to one miracle—a new physics, leading to a discovery of a new element and a new energy source—but as far as SF miracles go it’s several orders of magnitude less improbable than that which grounds Spin, to say nothing of the all-too-common fantasies of faster than light travel or (gods help us) time travel. And of course nearly all SF, save for very near future SF, imagines future discoveries and technologies; not to do so would be unrealistic! While we definitionally can’t know what they will be, a plausible future has to have knowledge and capacities that we lack. Within that framework, Duncan’s is about as reasonable as any I can think of.
And the world-building works splendidly in many other ways, too. Duncan portrays the most well-motivated and therefore most plausible colonization of Mars that I can recall in any SF. His image of non-territorial governments is just as vivid as Ada Palmer’s, while being much, much grimmer (and, therefore, much more plausible, realistic and easy to believe in10). His portrayal of the rise of a class society is depressingly persuasive. And so on. This is a future which, if you took a time machine and jumped ahead, the most implausible thing in it would be the time machine you used to get there.
But while Revolutions 11 is brilliant SF, and could probably be enjoyed without any preliminaries, it works much better if you have previously listened to at least some of Revolutions 3-10—the more the better, really. And therein lies its uniqueness.
The first and (to my mind) lesser reason for this is the one that Duncan himself identifies, in the episode he did on his other ongoing podcast (more on that below), namely that his Martian Revolution is, among other things, a collage of pastiches of elements from the various historical revolutions he covered in seasons 1-10, cleverly knitting together elements from real historical events, quite often elements which themselves have many different examples in different, real revolutions, which helps makes the entire series feel like real history. For example, he’s narrative concerns a colony, established by a home country, which then seeks independence, just as did all of the colonies whose revolutions Duncan covered in seasons 2, 4 & 5. His character Vernon Bird is a marvelous and persuasive leader on the model of Porfirio Díaz (president of Mexico from 1876-1911, save for two brief gaps); his character Mabel Dorr is a liberal noble of a sort we find playing an important role in several of the revolutions Duncan has narrated. And so on. This is why I said that season 11 (more than the ho-hum appendices) is superb a summing up of the earlier seasons: it draws from many revolutions, thereby highlighting patterns and continuities and echoes, but rather than a generic revolution, it portrays a specific one, with all the narrative drive that that affords. Further, the fact that this summation lets us imagine our descendants going through a similar set of events—one which, in Twain’s apocryphal words, does not repeat the history previously narrated, but which definitely rhymes—makes them all feel more real and vivid than any imagining of our ancestors living through them. The past can always be dismissed as unenlightened, different, done with (it’s history, man means it’s over, done with, forgettable), but the future is always with us. So to hear how, step by step, we might get to a place of revolution again really drives the complexities and problems home, forcing us to confront the reality that we are in fact no better than were those long gone. If you’ve listened to Revolutions 1-10, you both get the added pleasures of spotting the parallels, and the further pleasure of letting this experience revivivy the history of the earlier revolutions which Duncan has taught you. It adds, in other words, a whole extra type of enjoyment and insight, one that is well worth gaining (especially given that the gaining is itself a pleasure).
But the other reason to listen to (at least some of) Revolutions 3-10 first—aside, of course, from the fact that those seasons are simply terrific entertainment, not to mention highly educational—is that one of the things that makes Revolutions 11 work so well is precisely its borrowing of its form from that earlier work. After all, in his earlier Revolutions seasons, Duncan created a very specific narrative form, one that is obviously very closely related to other history, other podcasts, and especially to other history podcasts, but one that, in its details, is quite individual to his work. From small stylistic tics to larger patterns of emphasis and interest, Duncan has a historical voice, which he then takes and applies to history that has not yet happened, with powerful effects.
Writing SF by writing it explicitly as imaginary history is, of course, an old practice, dating at least as far back as Asimov’s excerpts from the Encyclopedia Galactica in his Foundation trilogy (1951-1953) and then up through various books over the years, from Robert Sobel’s alternate history For Want of a Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won at Saratoga (1973) to more recent examples like The Fall of Western Civilization by Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway (2014) and Adrian Horne’s A History of the Future in 100 Objects (2020).11 But I can’t think offhand of a case where someone had developed an individual historical voice by writing works of actual history and then went on to write science fiction in precisely that voice. Hearing the way that that voice changes, and the ways in which it doesn’t, is a huge part of the fun (after, of course, the sheer narrative pleasure of the series). Duncan’s employing a precise historical format which he has narrated many other, true stories in not only adds a layer to the narrative but it also really allows you to believe in a way that not all future SF is believable (and in a way different from even other believable SF). In this way Duncan is creating a narrative that is truly unique.
This works on every level. Let us start with the small: Duncan’s voice and style is, as with any good writer, very much his own, and it manifests in part in all sorts of small recurring choices. Thus Duncan’s habit of summarizing people’s lives (“Charles I died in 1649; he was 48 years old, and had reigned for 24 years”) is a recurring feature of his work, one which actually dates back to his summation of Emperors’ reigns from his History of Rome. Should that not sound distinctive, I should add that in this case part of what makes it distinctive is the cadence of his voice when he says such sentences; for a podcaster, “voice” is not simply the choice of words and the wielding of grammar, but is a more literal voice as well. And in Revolutions 11, we find these sentences’ equivalents (“On February the 17th, 2244, word went out on screens across the solar system: Vernon Bird was dead; he was 151 years old and he had been CEO of Omnicorps for 87 years”), which recalls many past sentences, making this latest one feel just as real as the parallel sentences about Constantine or Napoleon III. Similarly, on the other end of character’s lives, another recurring feature of Duncan’s narrative voice is the way he introduces his major characters, which usually follows a particular format: birth year and place, social class born into, education, and so forth—again, what makes this unique is not only the sort of things he mentions and the phrases he uses to describe them, but the vocal patterns with which he reads them. These too reoccur in Revolutions 11, save that the birth place or education may now be on Mars (or they may be in familiar places and universities, which helps us imagine the future really is ours; both have valuable effects). Or to take a third example, many episodes of Revolutions end with Duncan’s emphatically mentioning characters who are about to enter the story, usually people whom he expects the audience to have heard of (“One of those was a young general named… Napoleon Bonaparte”: cue theme music); this, too, is found in the Martian story.
But doing these things in a fictional setting makes them mean something entirely different (or work in an entirely different way) than they do in a history. Duncan can end an episode with something like “and the new chairman was a man named… Vernon Bird”, and it will feel familiar; but unlike saying something similar about Robespierre or Toussaint Louverture or Lenin, the name Vernon Bird naturally doesn’t mean anything to us. But the fact that it feels like it should, i.e. the fact that to listeners in the imaginary future 200 years after the Martian Revolution it would, itself tells us a lot. For that matter, unless you are a very well-read listener indeed, you will have already had that experience while listening to Revolutions 1-10: Duncan will introduce someone with great fanfare, and you will know you ought to have heard of them, even though you haven’t. That experience now reoccurs, except that none of his listeners will actually know who the person is: but the feeling of oh I should know them shouldn’t I?, familiar from before, helps the setting seem real—the feeling, after all, is the same in both cases. The same thing occurs as with Duncan’s narration of his characters’ early lives or the social structures of the early Martian colony: the familiarity of the format sells the reality of the imaginary setting. Furthermore, lots of great worldbuilding is built into all these incidental details which Duncan mentions in passing: this is, of course, a direct analogy both to the way history (Duncan’s specifically and also in general) works, and to the way a lot of SF works, but here the parallel’s obviousness enriches it and enhances its effect.
The best example of this, perhaps, is Duncan’s engagement with the historiography of the Martian Revolution. This mirrors quite precisely his engagement with historiography in The History of Rome and Revolutions 1-10, talking about both primary and secondary sources—except, of course, that the historiography is all imaginary. This is, of course, enormous fun in its own right (I have half a mind to go listen through again just to start making a bibliography, but “that way madness lies—let me shun that”, as the Bard said). But it is equally a magnificent vehicle for storytelling. This, like all his innovations, is hardly unprecedented; all of the imaginary histories listed above cite imaginary history books,12 and more generally a great many modernists have demonstrated over the last century and a quarter that nonfictional architecture, fictionally applied, can make a great storytelling device. But Duncan’s use is his own, and its echoes of his own nonfiction are far more precise and specific than any earlier examples, which of course echo a genre not a particular body of work, and this makes them all the more potent. Additionally Duncan does a lot with his fictional historiography—not only commenting on various aspects of real history and real historiography but conveying real narrative too—for example, we learn something about Vernon Bird simply from learning that he has had a hagiographical biography written about him, and then learn something further when it is dismissed as such. Duncan can also use historiographical disputes as a way to deploy useful ambiguity when that serves his narrative purposes, or as a way to pass over some detail that he does not wish to dwell on ("we have no sources on that” is a great excuse, all the better for its usually being, in other contexts, the simple, boring truth).
Larger stylistic elements of his histories which are now recurring in his fiction serve Duncan equally well. His disclaimers that he won’t go into this or that particular event as it’s a detour from his main story may be lifted word-for-word from similar disclaimers from his historical seasons, but here they allow little glimpses and bits of worldbuilding rather than being simple disclaimers. Similarly, his refusal to go into the details of his new physics sounds like something he might well say in a history (although I can’t recall any precise parallel), and is an elegant solution to that old SF problem of employing new science and technology without either going into enough detail to sound ridiculous or boring the reader with technobabble. Sentences which mention events his narrative has not yet reached, which in the historical seasons would simply help to orient listeners with familiar landmarks, here become foreshadowing, a familiar narrative technique made new through the parallel. Then there is the background: the fact that Duncan had established the habit of doing episodes about social context allows him to do so again in his SF series so without any irritating sense that he is just infodumping, even though he is. In short, feature after feature of Duncan’s histories recur in Revolutions 11, always giving it additional plausibility, additional power, and a unique voice for telling an SF story.
Most remarkably, listening to the Revolutions 11 series feels a lot like listening to an earlier Revolutions series, especially if there is an area you aren’t very familiar with (e.g. for me, seasons 4, 5 and 9). In earlier seasons, you learned new history, filled with twists and turns you couldn’t possibly anticipate or imagine; here you are doing the same thing, and if this history is new to everyone, rather than only to some, the feeling is no less similar for that. And Revolutions 11 is exciting in much the same way that 1-10 are: it turns out that a lot of what made 1-10 so gripping can be divorced entirely from it being actual history—which is a pretty interesting fact, with lots to say about the writing of both history and SF. It seems that history is interesting not simply because it is true, but also just because it is history, and if you feel, as I do, that Revolutions 11 is just as exciting as 4 or 9, you will really feel that to be the case, and learn something the ways in which it is. I imagine that a close reading (listening?) of this series could change the way one writes either history or SF.
Of course Revolutions 11 is different from most SF in that it is not told in a fictional way: it is presented as history. We do not get characters’ interiority the way we would in a novel or a film; it’s more about a society than individuals, however big a role some individuals play in that story. But of course, as I noted above, using nonfictional formats for fictional ends is hardly a new device, even if the precision of the parallel is (to my knowledge) unique in this case. And a great many stories are in fact stories of societies—and it is to Duncan’s benefit that he does not need to pretend that his story is anything else. Some histories try to mimic novels by focusing on one character to tell a broader story, and this technique sometimes works well, but here Duncan does the reverse, telling a fictional story without a single central character, and it works equally well.
In sum, Revolutions 11 is terrific SF, and I recommend it highly: but it is all the better with a familiarity with the form which it quite precisely and really interestingly mirrors, and to experience the full power of Duncan’s innovations here you should really go into Revolutions 11 with that familiarity. Lots of SF has mirrored or mimicked history, but this SF mirrors and mimics certain very specific histories, which lends it extra power and is the most unusual thing about this terrific show. Don’t deny yourself the full richness of this unique piece of art by listening to it without having heard at least one earlier season of Duncan’s fabulous show—particularly since those seasons are fun to listen to and are splendid in their own right.
I will end with a few, quite possibly futile, hopes. Because despite the fact that we have many hours of Revolutions 11 left to enjoy—it’s only just begun!—I already want more.
First, I hope that Duncan does an appendix to this series. For all my grumbles about the earlier appendices, I would love to hear his explicit, out-of-character thoughts on the relation of this revolution to the historical ones, making parallels explicit, and talking a bit about his creative process in the creation of this series. I think the additional element of comparing a fictional revolution to earlier historical ones would both add a great deal of interest to the appendix, but also would illuminate the history in ways that would be very valuable. Mike, if by some chance you happen to read this, please do it!
Second, in the same way that The History of Rome spun off The Storm Before the Storm and Revolutions 2, 3 and 6 spun off Hero of Two Worlds, I hope that Revolutions 11 spins off its own book, presumably an SF novel. Of all three hopes, this is the one that I am most optimistic about: I have a hunch that Duncan is an aspiring novelist as well as an accomplished historian, and that Revolutions 11 is, among other things, a way to expand his career in that direction. Such a book might or might not be related to the future history he invented for Revolutions 11—it could be an entirely unrelated story, or it could be a different story set in the same fictional world, or it could tell a story which relates some portion of the events of Revolutions in a different way: whatever it is, I will be there for it, and I hope that it happens.
And third, and probably most futilely, I hope that Duncan’s future world has future revolutions in it, and that we can look forward to a future Revolutions 12 about yet another future revolution, building on the future history he is establishing in this series.13 There is no reason his narration has to stop in the twenty-third century: it could keep going! And unlikely as it may be, I will continue to hope it does—because, as I have said repeatedly, this is great stuff.
Appendix: Other Mike Duncan Projects
This is not really related to the main thrust of the essay—if unless you’ve already listened to Revolutions 3-11, I think that that is the next Duncan you should seek out—but I thought I should say a bit more about his other projects.
The History of Rome (2007-2012): This was Duncan’s first podcast, and he audibly learned in the course of doing it. The earliest episodes are pretty clunky, but it gets better and better as it goes along. The entire period from the fall of the Republic through the end of the (western) Roman Empire is really well done and I highly recommend those episodes.14 You might even enjoy the opening episodes—if you’ve already heard Revolutions, presumably it would give you enough optimism to forgive any early. faults. But if you are uncertain, just jump in a bit further on. And while it might seem awkward to start in the middle, another project of Duncan’s provides the prefect lead-in, to wit:
The Storm Before the Storm (2017): Duncan’s first book, on Roman history 146-78 BCE, is absolutely terrific—all the narrative drive of The History of Rome and Revolutions, but in much greater depth. Usefully, it also provides a good alternate entrance into The History of Rome: listen to Duncan’s audiobook and then pick up with The History of Rome episode 34 or thereabouts. Going from the book to the podcast will be an adjustment—Duncan’s book goes into far more detail than The History of Rome ever did, and is somewhat more polished—but it kicks off the story well, and then you can ride to the end. But whether you want to listen to The History of Rome or not, the book stands alone and I definitely recommend it very highly.
Hero of Two Worlds (2021): This was Duncan’s second book, a biography of Lafayette. It looks great, but the truth is that I haven’t read it yet so I can’t say one way or the other. I bought it on the strength of Duncan’s other work, and have high hopes for it, but that’s all I can say so far.
The Duncan and Coe History Show (2024-) Concurrently with Revolutions 11, Duncan has teamed up with fellow podcaster Alexis Coe to do an unscripted podcast about history. So far they’ve only released four episodes: a brief introduction, two shows in which each interviews the other in turn, and a brief, humorous announcement that Duncan is sick and they won’t have an episode this week. (Naturally, we here at Attempts wish him a speedy recovery.) I believe their plan is to review history books on a wide variety of topics, but they haven’t done so yet. Clearly even once they get into the swing of things, it will necessarily lack the narrative drive of Duncan’s other work, being unscripted and changing topics from week to week; based on their early episodes, they intend to offer humor and banter instead, which is really not as much my cup of tea.15 So I will admit that based on the four shows so far released, I am not yet sold—but, of course, in a very real sense all they’ve put out so far are introductory episodes, so honestly it’s simply too early to evaluate the show, and I will certainly keep listening, as Duncan has earned my trust by this point. I will note, however, that if you are listening to Revolutions 11, you will probably be interested in the episode where Coe interviews Duncan since it’s almost all about that project, so I recommend that to people who have already binged all the available episodes of Revolutions 11 and find themselves desperate for more, and of course listening to that will enable you to form your own judgments as to whether you want to hear more of the podcast more generally.
But as good as much of Duncan’s other work is, mostly I think you should go listen to Revolutions 3-10 if you haven’t already (or at least one of them, which I would recommend being Revolutions 3: despite its being the second longest of them, it’s one of the best, and is in many ways foundational for all the others16), and then (or right now, if you’ve already heard an earlier season of Revolutions), go listen to Revolutions 11. It’s simply some great serialized SF in a place you might not think to look for it. So check it out, wherever find podcasts are sold.
These are traditional books, not podcasts, but since Duncan himself narrated the audiobooks, so you can experience them as extensions of his podcasting work if you like.
I don’t recall precisely where—I think it was in his final farewell episode, but it might have been somewhere in the appendices.
The reason I didn’t finish season 2 is that my Ph.D. is in American history, so the story was sufficiently familiar to me that I decided to skip part of it. I should also perhaps note that I might have found it less compelling for this seem reason; I was not perhaps a good audience for the show however well it was done—although, at the same time, I certainly read books on familiar history topics (and learn by doing so), and of course, as I noted, Duncan himself recommended skipping ahead to season 3.
The Glorious Revolution also has the advantage, unlike the English Civil War, of actually having “Revolution” in its now-accepted name. The English Civil War is rarely called the English Revolution, which is how Duncan is presenting it. Not that it’s an inappropriate name or framing for the events of 1640-1660—it fits well—but it’s not the name or framing most commonly used, which adds to the confusion.
To be fair to Higonnet, he wasn’t trying to teach an introductory course, but rather one which grappled with the historiography and complex questions of interpretation the Revolution involves, which would have been a completely reasonable thing to do were the course not specifically and explicitly offered as an introduction for non-majors meant to satisfy distribution requirements (it was a core course, for anyone who knows what that meant at the time). It probably would have been a fabulous class to take after listening to Duncan’s podcast, but alas, time travel was not yet widely available.
And then he stopped, which was (and is) to my mind a pity: I’d have loved to hear him on the Chinese Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, the Iranian Revolution, and the various Velvet Revolutions of 1989, just to name four.
It’s all very well, for instance, to deny that the American Revolution (to pick the one I know the most about) wasn’t a real social revolution, but there is a lot of good argument on the other side, and I’d have liked him to at least grappled with the sort of arguments you get in Gordon Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution before dismissing it.
The most interesting writing I know of on this point is Kim Stanley Robinson (op. cit.)’s classic essay “Notes for an Essay on Cecelia Holland“, which is well worth tracking down if it’s the sort of thing you are interested in.
In contrast to the few other mini-episodes released around the same time (“Stage Three Launch” and “The Duncan and Coe History Show”), were are just announcements about forthcoming plans and aren’t related to the Martian Revolution at all.
If you don’t think that plausible = grimmer, then you obviously haven’t been following the news.
More ordinarily formatted SF novels also play with this: Gene Wolfe presents himself as the translator of a future manuscript in his masterpiece Book of the New Sun, and Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota is presented as a pair of future histories written by a contemporary to the events. But those feel much more like novels (down to their unreliable narrators), not fictional history books.
As do other books for that matter, such as Susanna Clarke’s masterful fantasy masterpiece Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (2004), not to mention the stories of Borges.
Or about a different future with a different revolution, much as Kim Stanley Robinson created three different possible futures in his Three Californias trilogy. That would be cool, too.
If you listen to this through to the end, I recommend supplementing Duncan’s narrative of the fall of Rome with The Fall of Rome by Patrick Wyman: Duncan focuses on political history, and Wyman focuses on social and economic history, so they complement each other well—Wyman, in fact, tells you to go listen to Duncan in places and tends to assume you have.
They employ a form of humorous banter which is common both in podcasts and in other venues such as DVD commentaries; given how common it is, I suspect that most people like this form of humor more than I do: as I said, I simply don’t have a taste for this sort of thing, so I can’t really judge how good it is compared to other humorous banter.
The Haitian Revolution was, so to speak, a direct spin-off from the French (Haiti having been a French colony), the various later European revolutions all occur in the wake of the French, either in direct historical succession (the various other French ones) or in inspiration (the Russian). I suppose the other Latin American revolutions are slightly more independent from a narrative point of view, but even they have some connections to the French Revolution, both directly and in inspiration. In the end, all subsequent revolutions really flow from the (first) French Revolution, the mother of all revolutions. Go ahead and start there.
When Mike Duncan ended an episode with one of those portentious introductions of a famous historical figure I'd never heard of, I always used to go straight to the Wikipedia page of that person.
I found myself trying to look up Vernon Byrd on Wikipedia a few weeks ago until I realised that he's a fictional character and I can't read the books that Mike mentioned. Sadly.