alt Hacker NewsRelated comment - Mike Duncan who made a name for himself doing long form multi episode history podcasts recently produced a fiction project of the false history of a class revolution on mars ~200 years in the future that is told through the lens of long form multi episode history podcast from a narrator in the distant future.
It's pretty good considering it is his first not-non-fiction project and the narrative is a refreshing departure from typical sci-fi stories since it's written to sound like a true history with too many important figures to remember and historically disputed causes and effects of pivotal events.
The story doesn't not follow the conflict-rising-climax-resolution structure but it often refutes a listener's anticipation of satisfying narrative elements like true history many loose ends remain loose and plenty of important characters "disappear from the records" which leaves one wondering.
It's certainly unlike any fiction I had consumed prior and it's pretty good imo so I'm shining a light on it here.
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I've listened to all of his Revolutions and Rome podcasts. I look forward to getting to his Mars Revolution podcast, but I just can't stomach the thought of it right now. Maybe in four years.
I did manage to get through the first few episodes, and I was very pleased with how effectively he recreated the level of detail he used for his real Revolutions episodes. It's not like a novel, but it captures just how many different players there are in any real-world event -- very different from conventional storytelling.
At that, I think it might be most interesting to people who see it in terms of his other Revolutions work. As a pure work of fiction, it could be quite dull -- too many players with too little characterization, too many events with both too much and too little detail.
I enjoyed the The Revolutions podcast from him, but was very confused when I returned to it and new episodes were clearly fiction. I would have preferred a separate podcast instead of using the same feed for history/non-fiction and then changing to fiction midway.
The lore in the game Morrowind has a similar feel, though in a mythology-history instead of modern history sense, with a lot of Rashomon-style ambiguity.
Fascinating! Will check this out.
Likewise, I thought it would be very cool to create a show written in a hypothetical future, that is set in our time period. The nature of the future society would only be revealed by how they choose to portray our time period, and which stories are told, just like we always put our own ideological framing on shows about the past.
I love love LOVE the Martian revolution series In many ways it feels like the narrative climax of every revolution he’s covered so far lol
Sounds alot like Alastair Reynolds Yellowstone series, although he has a more classic, alive characters bumping into and becoming part of the future history. I agree though, its a fantastic medium.
A kind of sci-fi version of Jack London's Iron Heel?
I had similar thoughts about it, and the thing it's actually closest to is world building chapters in RPG books. It's almost pure world building without any actual story. Super interesting experiment.
It'd be interesting to see if something like that could be adapted to the screen formats the author is complaining about here. House of the Dragon faced a similar problem. The source material is a lot like what you describe, a fictional history written as if it was real historical research, with multiple conflicting sources, disputed accounts, and no way to resolve the truth of what really happened. The HBO television adaptation kind of just threw that out the window and presented what is supposed to be seen as the "real" history through a normal God's eye third-person narrator. It also showed what happens in situations that the fictional history had no account of, resolving mysteries of what happened to people who disappeared without anyone involved witnessing how and writing it down.
In the audio-track commentary for Angel, which is a TV series that has some very long story arcs, one of the writers mentions that they would insert superfluous details into the script (i.e names of people and places) so that they could tie future story developments back to earlier episodes and seasons, making it seem to the viewer like the entirety of the show had been worked out from the start, and that the writers had been dropping hints along the way.