Ominous strings of Austrian composer Joseph Haydn’s “Oxford” Symphony (No. 92) announce the beginning and end of each episode of Revolutions. The podcast, hosted by author Mike Duncan, walks listeners through history’s most significant turning points, from the French Revolution to the Bolshevik insurrection. Its new season shakes up the formula. This time, Duncan isn’t talking about a terrestrial dustup. He’s chronicling the Martian Revolution.
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Talking with Big Think over Zoom, Duncan says he hadn’t tackled fiction since his college days of typing out reams of half-finished manuscripts. Returning to fantasy and science fiction after years of nonfiction writing, he finds that his detour into podcasting hasn’t hurt so much as it has helped him. In addition to making him a better writer overall, his knowledge of civilizations — how they change, make war, maintain peace, and divide resources — allowed him to construct an alternative reality that’s as complex and believable as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, George R.R. Martin’s Westeros, and Frank Herbert’s Arrakis.
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And not a single fuck is given for Kim Stanley Robinsons Red Mars trilogy, where Terran overpopulation, longevity treatments for the rich, environmental crisis, and corpo power abuse lead to a massive revolution on - you guessed it - Mars. It’s a classic, people, and it at the very least deserves a mention.