The Martian Revolution (featuring Mike Duncan)

Daniel and Kelly talk to Mike Duncan, creator of The Martian Revolution, about economics, politics and revolution on Mars. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

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• 0:08Speaker 01

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• 1:18Speaker 03

  So Mars just is like, it feels like the planet that has most, most captured our imagination. The imagination of the science fiction community, I think, has been most captured in its whatever couple hundred years run that we're at now, but really like in the last century. Like Mars has been the setting for so many different things. And it's, it's that planet that is like us, but not. And so it's just there. And so I picked it for that reason.

• 2:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Wiener-Smith. I study parasites and space and, you know, I love science, but I gotta be honest, I don't really listen to a lot of science podcasts. History podcasts is my thing and I am such a huge fan of the revolutions podcast.

• 2:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I'm a big fan of science and history and especially the history of science. I really enjoy trying to get into the minds of people in the past before they understood something that we now take for granted, to try to grok what it was like to learn that or to live in a world where you didn't know that, because I feel like there's such a huge intellectual distance between us and people who didn't know that the earth is round or moves around the sun, or the universe is so vast.

• 2:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I've been reading the Journal of Parasitology, starting at 1912, moving to the present. And I feel like every once in a while, you'll catch a paper where they'll be explaining like, oh, this is how something works. And you know, as a scientist in the present, that they're wrong. But you can totally see their reasoning. And I feel like it helps you remember to be humble, because things that can seem right and seem obvious can be wrong with more information. And so, yeah, I also enjoy the history of science in that regard as well.

• 3:10Daniel Whiteson?

  And I think these two fields are more closely related than people realize, because science is also about storytelling. When history, obviously, is storytelling, we're going back in the past and trying to understand what happened and why, and what were the major themes and trends. But science is also storytelling. We're telling a story about how the universe works and how it came to be. And it's, if anything, digging deep into the ancient history of the universe. So I feel like these two fields are more closely connected than a lot of people give them credit for.

• 3:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  I totally agree. And you and I have interviewed some really great storytellers in the past. So we're both pretty big sci fi geeks. And I often enjoy hearing from a sci fi writer who's trying to explore how some particular scientific concept might play out, you know, under slightly different conditions, or on a different planet, or something like that. And so I was really excited when Mike Duncan, who does the revolutions podcast, started writing science fiction. And so instead of trying to test, like, what would it be like living in a low gravity environment, he's bringing all of his knowledge about past revolutions. So he has a history podcast that he did for a decade, going through different historical revolutions. And he's bringing that history and exploring how these history things will play out on the Martian environment.

• 4:18Daniel Whiteson?

  And he's doing something really interesting, which is that he just dropped this into his normal nonfiction podcast feed about history and just started talking about a future revolution as if it was in the past with all sorts of like references and like comments about this source, which you can't really believe and you should read this other source, all of which is obviously made up, but completely deadpan, right? As if it was real history. It's amazing.

• 4:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  I love it so much. And I particularly love it because I listened to the revolutions podcast. It helps get me through the pandemic. I'm a huge fan. And he did this series where he sort of summarized some of the main points he took away from a decade of studying revolutions. And then the Martian revolutions thing dropped. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, I get to hear, you know, all of the takeaways from the Russian revolutions on Mars. And I get to put together these two worlds that I love so much, you know, space settlements and the revolutions podcast. And I am having so much fun.

• 5:12Daniel Whiteson?

  He's really the right person to be writing science fiction, if you ask me. And I'm going to say something a little controversial here, which is that we read a lot of science fiction from scientists, but most science fiction is not about the science. Like, yes, you invent some concept, but really it's about the people and the politics and what life is like. And it's about the sociology and the people who are best informed to write realistic stories about that are people who know the stories from history. So historians and sociologists and political experts are the ones who are going to be able to write effective, realistic stories about new situations. And that's what science fiction really is all about. So anybody who's into science fiction, I really encourage you, check out the revolutions podcast about the Martian revolutions.

• 5:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I've been waiting every week for a new episode to drop, but you don't have to do that because today is June 3, the series wrapped up on June 1. So they're all out there and you can start now and you don't have to wait a week to hear the updates. It's all there and you can just listen to it through.

• 6:09Daniel Whiteson?

  But first, listen to our conversation with Mike Duncan, the author and creator of revolutions.

• 6:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Mike Duncan is a history podcaster and author. He's written the New York Times bestsellers, The Storm Before the Storm, The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic, and Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution. His podcasts include The History of Rome, and the podcast we'll be discussing today, Revolutions. Welcome to the show, Mike.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  Thank you very much for having me.

• 6:41Daniel Whiteson?

  So Mike, since you have dipped your toes into science fiction, which I love, we want to start out by asking you the same question we ask every science fiction author we talk to, which is a philosophy question. And that is, when you step into a teleporter on Star Trek, does it actually teleport you? Or does it disassemble you and rebuild you somewhere else? Is it a murder machine or an actual transportation device?

• 7:06Speaker 03

  It really strikes me as a murder machine, above all. If, I mean, if that's how we have to like categorize these things. It does seem to be deconstructing something and then recreating it from the matter on the other side. So, you know, it's definitely like a ship of Theseus situation, because there is something about the identity that persists, that is clearly like locked inside the physiology of the body. So like, there is, there is a persistence of identity. But yeah, it really seems like whatever got on to the transport pad, that entity doesn't exist anymore. And a new entity has been created down there that is, that is fundamentally different. And you can kind of see this sometimes with like, you know, when there are transporter mishaps,

• 7:49Speaker 03

  right? And there's like, there's, so now there's whatever. So like the Thomas Riker situation, like you've created a whole new thing down there that thinks it was Will Riker. And, and, but, you know, the thing didn't get destroyed up on the ship. So clearly something new is being made.

• 8:02Daniel Whiteson?

  And so if you were given the opportunity to use one of these fantastic devices, would you?

• 8:06Speaker 03

  No.

• 8:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Do you believe that?

• 8:07Speaker 03

  I've never. I would never, I would never get it on a transporter in my life.

• 8:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, no, same.

• 8:14Speaker 03

  If I had a shirt that just said like McCoy was right.

• 8:17Daniel Whiteson?

  About everything.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  Even he's getting off and on it all the time.

• 8:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right. So you have clearly revealed your like, science fiction creds already.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 8:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  We're convinced. So who are your favorite sci fi authors? And have you always been interested in writing sci fi?

• 8:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, this is, you know, I was, you know, a nerdy teenager once. And so, science fiction is, you know, a part of my sort of cultural identity growing up. You know, I was obviously raised on Star Trek, and raised on Star Wars, and got into, you know, when I was a kid, it was like Golden Age sci fi stuff, you know, Asimov and Clark and Heinlein. And then, you know, you'd progress 10 years down the road, and you're like, you look back on those guys, and you're like, a lot of this is actually like, very problematic. And maybe, maybe I'm not, maybe I'm not so happy that there's so much Heinlein going into my brain. But wait, but we can undo that. But then, as you know, as I got older, it's really like, you know, like Philip K. Dick is like a huge, is huge for me. He's a huge influence. And Vonnegut was a very

• 9:17Speaker 03

  big influence for me. And then also, there's a more obscure kind of out there dude called Robert Anton Wilson, who I really enjoyed. And so if anybody out there knows Robert Anton Wilson, they're like, oh shit, I'm like, Robert Anton Wilson, okay. But yeah, those, those are the guys that sort of like, when I was getting into high school and being a teenager and kind of thinking about what I wanted to do with my life, and I knew I had some like, talent and some, some passion for writing, that if that's the direction I wanted to go, like, those guys were kind of like my guiding north stars, less than Heinlein.

• 9:47Daniel Whiteson?

  It's always my dream that somebody mentions to me, some science fiction author I've never heard of before, and now a whole new vein of text has opened up for me. So I'm gonna go Google Robert Anton Wilson after this is done.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, dude, knock out Illuminatus sometime. Yeah, it's great.

• 10:01Daniel Whiteson?

  So what kind of science fiction do you prefer, though? Are you hardcore about folks following the rules they set up in their universe? Or are you okay with more like a vibes based science fiction universe?

• 10:12Speaker 03

  I think, like, you know, I don't, I don't want to have to pick one over the other. But if I did, you know, it's more the vibes based stuff. Because, you know, I fundamentally come out of the humanities department, you know? When I, when I went to college, And I had this notion that I wanted to be a writer and specifically, you know, do like science fiction stuff. I didn't enjoy the English department at all. I didn't have any good times deconstructing texts or reading these things or like talking about them. It's like, oh, look, another Christ illusion. Great. You know, like, this is kind of, this is boring me. And also, I'm not good at it. So maybe I should do something else. And when I would think about those guys who I admired, they were very literate in like, philosophy and

• 10:56Speaker 03

  they were very literate in, you know, Ray Bradbury is another one that I would put on this list. This more sort of like philosophical, where we are using science fiction as a vehicle for like, thought experiments. And, you know, like Dick is always constantly, you know, grappling with identity. Like, what does identity mean? And, you know, like, if you wake up tomorrow and all your memories have been implanted, is that any different than, you know, who you were before? We actually just, you know, touched on this at the beginning. So like, I wanted to study that stuff. So this is a vehicle for like, politics and history and philosophy, more than being like, I was really into engineering and I want to talk about what it would mean to build a spaceship and what it would mean to live on Mars. That's, that's not really my background. I need you guys, I need you guys doing those

• 11:40Speaker 03

  things for me. Yeah, for, for me, it's much more of a, it's all, it's meta, it's metaphorical space for me more than anything else.

• 11:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I love that there are lots of different flavors of nerds and I welcome them all into the community.

• 11:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Absolutely.

• 11:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, I still read, you know, the Star Trek technical manual.

• 11:58Speaker 03

  I didn't come up with it. And then like, someday, I don't know, maybe get into this, but like, you know, I get dinged by, you know, the people who are like, only hard sci-fi is sci-fi and everything else is like, you know, less than. And, you know, like, and they point to Star Trek as being like, you know, they're doing a good job. And it's like, they realized one day that the warp drive would kill everybody on the ship in like, a nanosecond. They would become splats against the back wall. They're like, what do we do? Oh, we'll invent a thing called inertial dampeners, right? It sounds sciencey, but it's magic, right? And it's like, they're, they're not, they're, it's magical thinking, no less than somebody like me, just being like, yeah, they got grav units. It makes artificial gravity. Like, just go with it. Who cares?

• 12:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Problem solved.

• 12:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, problem solved. They're called grav units. And then people will be like, you can't artificially create gravity. It's like, I don't know, man, I just did. So.

• 12:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Star Trek does science the way that like ChatGPT does science. It's like confidently produced nonsense. It sounds about right. If you don't know anything, you're like, oh, yeah, okay, sure. Tachyon inertial drives or whatever.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, techno babble.

• 12:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly techno babble. That's exactly it.

• 12:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  So the revolutions podcast ran for a decade and during the pandemic, the section on the Russian revolution, like that helped get me through the pandemic. I looked forward to that every week. And then you stopped doing it and you took like a two year break. And then you decided to put a sci fi story in the revolutions feed. So in the feed of your nonfiction history podcast, we now have this fictional story about Mars. What made you decide that that was the right venue for your science fiction? And how has the audience responded?

• 13:25Speaker 03

  So I had this notion to do a fictional revolution, to write a fictional revolution and specifically a science fiction fictional revolution, at least as far back as the French Revolution is how long this idea has been in my head. This is not something I like came up with at the end. Like I sort of knew this was going to be something I was going to do for a really long time. And a lot of paying attention to like the structural beats and archetypes of these various revolutionary cycles, which often mirror each other. I would take notes on these things, knowing that at some point I was going to write what I'm writing, you know, at this moment. And I wanted to put it in the feed because it's a, it's a revolution, right? And it fits as a revolution and it is a revolution.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  It's just a fictional revolution. Now, when I dropped this without telling anybody that I was doing it and just loaded it in there, there is a split inside the revolutions community, you know, between people who, who really do come to me for nonfiction and for history. And now I am sort of not doing that. And so, you know, no hard feelings. They're just like, this isn't for me. This isn't what I'm looking for. I want, you know, I come to you for history. And then lots of other people are like, this is the greatest thing that you could have ever given me. Because if you know, if you're into science fiction and you're into the revolutions podcast, and then I write a fictional account of a revolution on Mars, you know, this is like peanut butter and chocolate. You know, this is the invention of the Reese's peanut butter cup for a lot of people. And then, you know, a chunk of other people are like,

• 14:56Speaker 03

  No, I'm not following you down this road. And, you know, I got, you know, some, some upset emails in, in the early going. They've, they've mostly petered out and some people were upset, literally, that I put it into, I put a fictional thing into something that was tagged nonfiction. And, and they're like, this is a nonfiction podcast. I can't fit it in my brain that fiction is now a part of it. It's like, well, go with it, maybe. Just, just kind of, maybe just roll with it.

• 15:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, you said it in 2247, so it's not like it's ambiguous.

• 15:27Speaker 03

  But I did. I mean, I get it in the, in the first couple of weeks because I deadpanned the whole thing. I did not signal that I was doing this. I did not tell anybody I was doing, even though I knew about this for like a decade. Like, I didn't tell anybody I was doing. And then when I dropped the first stuff, I wasn't like, I'm gonna write a fictional account of something. I just started talking about the Martian Revolution as if it was real.

• 15:48Daniel Whiteson?

  I think that's a really important point, that you've done it in the same style, exactly, as if you really were a historian of the future, talking about it. So it's like this fictional, nonfictional style. It's incredible.

• 15:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, that does also like, clearly, like, there's self-parody that is a part of this. Like, like a lot of the tics that I do in the show, like, I'm, I'm bringing those back. And, you know, the wording and the phrasing and the style and the cadence, it's all meant to ape myself, but in a fictional setting. And I actually still think this, that, that as a work of, as a creative work, it's better if I never break character inside the show. Like, I never want to acknowledge, inside the series on the Martian Revolution, that this is being narrated by anybody, but somebody who lived 250 years after the Martian Revolution and is now writing about it. That's, I think that's actually important to keeping it, I don't know, the fidelity to the thing. Is that the word I'm looking for?

• 16:41Daniel Whiteson?

  That's the same reason that, like, everything Nathan Fielder does works, because he never breaks character. Do you worry that in 250 years, or in 400 years, somebody's gonna unearth this and be confused? Because he never indicate that it's fiction, and the, our only clue is that, obviously, it's set in the future. But what if, deep into the future, somebody unearths this?

• 17:01Speaker 03

  I'm not so worried about that, because I will be dead. And so like, whatever happens after this, I mean, I'm gonna try my best to make the world, you know, better than we leave it for our children. But like, you know, I don't mind that much like I, and partly it'll keep historians employed, you know, because like right now, I'm writing a book. I'm writing a book about the crisis of the third century, which is, uh, which is a period in Roman history, but it's famously very little. It's not well documented because it was so, it was like this 50 year period that was so chaotic that we don't have like good, solid sources. But one of the sources that we do have is called the Historia Augusta, which we still don't know whether this was like a hoax document that was made. It's like, it's like a series of biographies

• 17:43Speaker 03

  of the Caesars, uh, the later Caesars, where a lot of it just seems to be completely made up. It's a lot of his, it's historical fiction that was maybe done by somebody on purpose to trick people or as some creative exercise. And we don't really know whether it was true or not. So yeah, people could come along and be like, you know, there was a revolution on Mars, but I don't remember it going like this.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  He's like a hundred years off on the dating and none of the names seem to line up. But he was very confident. He's referencing all these books like we've like, I don't know.

• 18:15Daniel Whiteson?

  And just like chat GPT, you're referencing things that don't exist. See?

• 18:18Speaker 03

  I'm far more worried about chat GPT leaving a record behind that makes it impossible to know what actually happened than I am, uh, this little thing that I'm doing.

• 18:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I was actually going to ask you about that. If there are analogues of this in history, people writing pseudo fiction of the future, other than the examples you just made.

• 18:37Speaker 03

  Oh, um, you know, not in terms of history, because like the thing, like the thing I just referenced was somebody writing, it's a fake history, but it's of the past. And, you know, you do start to get, you know, proto-science fiction being written of people speculating about the future, like the origins of science fiction. There's, you know, several steps along the way. But in terms of like, using these kinds of non-fiction accounts to write something about the future seems pretty modern. And like for me, you know, it's like, you know, like I said, Asimov, you know, like, like Foundation has like, you know, Galactic Encyclopedia references. And I know that Dune, like the actual text of it has a lot of like encyclopedic entries.

• 19:21Speaker 03

  And though I have not read The Song of Ice and Fire, you know, I've watched the show, but I know that's written as a history and those things like. We're really those that using nonfiction sort of tropes to write fiction is a very fun thing for me. It's it's it's for me. It's exactly at the intersection of my brain. Being inspired by those kinds of things. But it's all it's all pretty modern. I don't remember anything from like, history that did this. There's probably somebody out there who will email us and tell us what it is.

• 19:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Let us know. The internet always lets you know.

• 19:58Speaker 03

  The internet. Yeah, yeah. The internet always lets you know. This is why you should never say always. You should never say never. You should never say first. You should never say last. Never say those words and you will be fine.

• 20:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  My husband gets so frustrated with me when we're writing because he'll always try to put in always or never. And I'm like, we haven't read everything, Zach. We don't know that for sure.

• 20:15Speaker 03

  And the thing is, is like, one time I said that this was the only cavalry encounter to ever capture ships, right? Like a cavalry captured boats. Okay, that's pretty unique. And there was an incident in a in a Dutch in a frozen Dutch harbor during the wars of the French Revolution. And I was like, this is the only time that this ever happened because it's so implausible. And then later I was doing Spanish American independence, and some Jose Antonio Paz's cavalry guys like took some gunboats. It was just it was a shallow river. And so there's another cavalry, a cavalry attack that that captured boats, which you would think would be impossible.

• 20:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, at least you were the one who figured out the mistake.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  I did.

• 20:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Instead of having someone email you with it.

• 20:56Speaker 03

  I did find that one out. Yeah.

• 20:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  They're not always so nice when they email you about the mistakes.

• 20:59Speaker 03

  No, they're not. Somebody actually emailed me about the Martian Revolution. And the subject line was errors and mistakes in the Martian Revolution. And it was not cheeky. I've got I've gotten some emails that are very cheeky. And like, people are like responding with deadpan. They're like, you know, you referenced this book, and I have found him to be like, very like, sketchy on the sources. And like, there's this other book that I think is way better. And and those emails, like, these people get it. And I'm having a really good time with them. But then this guy emails me, and he's like, errors and mistakes in like, your work of fiction. And I'm like, I don't think you can do that. You can say like, I wish you hadn't have said that, or I wish you had done something different. But I don't think you can tell me that there was an error in it.

• 21:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  My favorite email is when someone says they're telling you an error you made, but actually you didn't talk about their favorite pet topics. And that was the error that you made, was that you didn't talk about that other thing. And you're like, I could have, this book could have been 5,000 pages long. It had to end somewhere, man.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, when I, when I did the American Revolution, I basically got an email about every single local skirmish that ever happened in the entire course of the American War of Independence that I did not cover and therefore have left my audience bereft of the, the de-information that they need to like, okay, man, there was like 17 guys there. I'm trying to talk about the Declaration of Independence, you know, I gotta pick and choose what I talk about here.

• 22:15Daniel Whiteson?

  So when you're doing history, obviously you want to be rooted in the facts and so you're constrained by what actually happened. In this case, you could have chosen any location, any time. Why did you choose Mars in the 2200s?

• 22:28Speaker 03

  The other thing I'm doing with the show is, you know, I'm, I'm taking all of these like historical moments, historical events, historical beats, historical archetypes, and, and creating a mosaic story out of them. But I'm also taking science fiction tropes and using them. I'm, I'm like sort of combining both of those at the same time. So there's aspects of the show that's like, oh, this comes from the Mexican Revolution. And then there's a thing from the show like, like that thing, that came from Ender's Game. So Mars just is like, it feels like the planet that has most, most captured our imagination. The, the, the imagination of the science fiction community, I think, has been most captured in its whatever, a couple of hundred years run that we're at now, but really like

• 23:12Speaker 03

  in the last century, like Mars has been the setting for so many different things. And it's, it's that planet that is like us, but not. And so it's just there. And so I picked it for that reason, right? Like I wanted to live in the same place that, you know, they were writing about 100 years ago.

• 23:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, let's take a break and when we get back, we'll talk about building a world on Mars.

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• 26:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, we're back. So when Zach and I were researching a city on Mars, we were often asked and often thought about what could economically justify settling Mars? And we came up with like, nothing. And, and the proposals that we saw included like, you could start a reality TV show on Mars, and that would fund it, even though people like started shutting off the Apollo missions after 12. They tuned back in when the oxygen canister blew up on 13. But after that, they started tuning out again. So I'm not convinced reality TV would fund your space settlement.

• 27:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Unless you're intentionally killing people.

• 27:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, which hopefully not. Yeah, but so I suspect, yeah, you came to the same conclusion that Mars doesn't have a lot of resources valuable enough to send to Earth. So tell us about the resource you came up with that justifies settling Mars and how you picked that resource.

• 27:39Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I mean, it's just that, like, I had to have a reason for us to go to Mars. And at the moment, there is literally no reason for us to go to Mars. Like, going to Mars would be a stupid waste of time and money. And I say that even as somebody who is like enchanted by the wonders of space, you know, like, I grew up on science fiction, just like everybody else. It's not like I want to say, you know, we shouldn't explore and create and like advance our technologies and all that stuff. Like, I love, I love NASA. Like, I love, I love this stuff. I really do. But there, there's nothing on Mars. It's not like people think about Mars sometimes, like, it's just like New Mexico or something, and you can just go there, and it's like red and desert-y. But, but that's the, that's the only difference. And, you know, as like, I came up with this, and I'll answer your question, but like, yeah,

• 28:24Speaker 03

  you know, reading City on Mars is just like, really drills home that like, the future of the species is not building a dome in the, in the Mariana Trench, you know, because that's an impossible stupid place to try to like, live, just like Mars. So I had to invent essentially a new periodic table of elements, is what it is. Basically, like, inside the periodic table of elements, we discovered that there's like some substratum matrices within that that we had, we've never discovered before and didn't know about before. And it's in there. And there's different versions of things. And there's a thing called Phos 5, which I gave it a very, very long scientific name in the first episode, and which I could not recreate ever again. Like, I actually had to phonetically spell it

• 29:09Speaker 03

  out for myself. And I just, I, it was Techno Babble, right? I just like, jammed together as many prefixes and suffixes into a single word as I possibly could, and then slapped a five on it. Which was a bit of an homage. There's, there's a Red Rising series about a revolution on Mars, and their thing is like, they're mining helium 3. So my thing is Phos 5, which again, like, these are meant to be sort of like homages and tips of the cap to all the people who came before me. So Phos 5 is a thing that then powers what is essentially unlimited clean energy. And that that is what allows our species on Earth here to get out from under the 21st century, which I am positing to be like insane chaos, anarchy, you know, climate disasters

• 29:53Speaker 03

  that that is going to define the 21st century and pulling out of the 21st century is about the discovery of phosphide, the discovery of these things called flex cells, which allows us to have unlimited clean energy. And then there's only a limited amount of this on Earth, but there's a just a ton of it on Mars, right? The volcanoes of Mars are loaded with phosphide. And so that's what takes us there and gets us there and justifies it. And this is all just complete invention, you know, because there's, like I said, there's nothing in reality, right, that we, as we understand it right now, that would justify the colonization of Mars.

• 30:28Daniel Whiteson?

  And if I could just dig into that a tiny bit, I don't know how hardcore you went on the science here. Were you mentioning something where the atomic number is above the numbers on the current periodic table or somehow like stuck in between?

• 30:39Speaker 03

  Oh, no, no, I didn't get into that at all. I just gave it. I just gave it a cool sounding name.

• 30:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Because there actually is a really fun concept in science about these super heavy elements, which could maybe have been created in supernova events or neutron star collisions and potentially could be in other places in the universe and could have really weird properties.

• 30:58Speaker 03

  So one of the things that I do in the show is, you know, I'm constantly referencing like these fake history books that talk about because the show is set like the narrator's 250 years after events. So he's always referencing, you know, books that have been written about the Martian revolution. And in the very, and in the very first episode, I was like, okay, if you want to learn more about flex cells and phosphide and how all this stuff works, you know, the definitive account is by this doctor, I forget what his name is, and his book is called suspending disbelief, how to stop caring about it even though you really want to care about it. And just kind of like, this is my right. And this is my signal to like, the audience, just, just sit, just sit back and enjoy the story without getting too caught up in like, the mechanics of it, because I'm not doing that. I'm, I want to be Ray

• 31:43Speaker 03

  Bradbury and Philip K. Dick. I don't want to be Arthur C. Clarke. I don't want to be, and I don't even want to be Kim Stanley Robinson, even though I love Kim Stanley Robinson. I can't do what he does. I can't do what, I can't do what those guys do.

• 31:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I'll put more tachyons into the disbelief

• 31:58Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 31:58Daniel Whiteson?

  But I want to ask you a history question about that. You're making this argument about the future and resources. And I was wondering if you're making a broader argument about the cycle of civilization, about how we discover a new resource which transforms our society, opens up a new territory, and that we then go through this sort of cyclical expansion and collapse or revolution. Is there a broader argument that you're making there about the sort of structure of human civilization?

• 32:23Speaker 03

  It's mostly a plot device to get us to Mars. But, but your point is well taken. I mean, like, the Dutch were powered by wind. And then when coal supplants wind, then the British are suddenly like, doing great, because they've got all this coal. And then we move from coal to oil. And, you know, now the United States, now, you know, the Saudis and, and, you know, the Middle East suddenly becomes like the main center of things. And it's been a minute since we've had a true revolution in terms of our, our energy usage, like what and how we use energy. And if something comes along, yeah, I think it'll radically change the nature of our civilization and who's on top and who's, who's not.

• 33:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  What are some of the other historical points you're trying to get across in this, in this podcast? Is it just for fun? Or are you trying to help people understand revolutions better?

• 33:12Speaker 03

  The project is, yes, to have fun, but also, we're going through the process of a revolution. And I am trying to create. The structures that I have seen previous revolutions go through. There is an ancien regime of some kind that is broken and dysfunctional. There will be resistance to that. It's not, however, just about, you know, oppressed masses rising up and overthrowing something. There is always disaffected elites inside the ancien regime who either want more power or they're frustrated with the incompetence of the leaders of the ancien regime who start to turn against it because they would prefer themselves to be in power.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  There are structures inside of the movements where any revolutionary movement that comes together to overthrow the power that had ruled them previously. There's a thing that I posit that's called the entropy of victory, that as soon as that group wins, they break into two or even three factions and then begin fighting amongst themselves. One of those factions wins and then that group splits into two. And there's this constant sort of like, like coming together and then breaking apart that I've seen so often, to the point where then, you know, you get to the end of the Russian Revolution and Stalin is literally purging the old Bolsheviks, right? He's purging the Bolsheviks are the one who they beat the Mensheviks, they beat the SRS, they beat the anarchists, they beat the royalists, they beat the liberals. And then you see this tiny, tiny group of Bolsheviks.

• 34:37Speaker 03

  And then even inside that Bolshevik clique, then Stalin breaks off from them and purges all the old Bolsheviks. So like, this is a thing that goes on and that is something that is happening inside the Martian Revolution for sure.

• 34:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  I heard a great history joke the other day, which is when the IRA gets together, the very first thing they do is discuss the split.

• 34:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Anyway, I've been...

• 34:56Speaker 03

  And that's the thing, that's not, that's not just the IRA. That is every single group. I mean, you know, like Monty Python's Life of Brian, like had that great bit where they're like sitting around in the stands of the Colosseum and it's like, you know, the people's party for, I don't, I don't remember what it is and I'm not even going to try because then we're going to get Monty Python people yelling at me, but you know the joke, right?

• 35:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't remember that part of the Life of Brian. I remember the amazing song at the end, which I played for my daughter the other day. What were you gonna ask, Dan?

• 35:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Did I hear you say correctly that we're going through a revolution right now? You mean like us literally at this moment in time?

• 35:31Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, in the Martian revolution.

• 35:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, okay.

• 35:35Speaker 03

  I mean, there's, there's, there are revolutionary things that are happening right now in current events, but they're not like fun revolutionary things. This is bad revolutionary things, but they're doing revolutionary things that are very similar to sort of year zero Jacobin stuff and like abolish everything Bolshevik stuff. They're just doing it for reactionary reasons, not for progressive reasons.

• 35:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  So we talked about how you created Fosse Five to give an excuse to go to Mars. What were some of the other features of life on Mars that you felt like you had to deal with? So I know you didn't constrain yourself to the hard science, but were there things where you were like, oh, I really have to deal with X and Y?

• 36:12Speaker 03

  Well, it was like, it was sort of in designing what the cities would look like. It sure felt like they were going to be living underground as opposed to like, you know, buildings on the surface. It just seemed like that was going to be a thing. And so there's this thing inside the show called the Martian way, which is like sort of how the people who lived on Mars wound up living like their cultural attitudes and like how they wind up behaving with each other. And there, there is something to the fact that they're living in close quarters with each other all the time, that there's, you know, it's corridors and rooms rather than like, nobody really has any open or empty space. And so if you're somebody who can't handle being around people all the time, then that you're not going to survive on Mars.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  And then there's also a whole thing about how, you know, when you're out there and you have to do this stuff, like the sort of the individualist settler archetype that we think of, like the rugged individual who goes out and, you know, makes their own farm and they're totally self-sufficient. Number one, that wasn't even true in the Old West, but it's especially impossible in a situation like Mars. So like those kinds of like, but that's mostly about the social stuff. And so to deal with, with other things, like what are the gravity differences? I invented grav units and grav units handle that. And there are air scrubbers that make sure that there's, that the air is, is clean and works properly. They've got ways of generating food and they've got ways of generating water that

• 37:39Speaker 03

  are just, it's not about trying to figure out how we would actually live on Mars. And then when it comes to like the ships, like the ships that are going back and forth. I mean, I literally say, I say in the show that like, it would usually take six to eight weeks at this point to get from Earth to Mars, depending on, you know, where we are in the, in the orbits, uh, which just by coincidence, happens to be the amount of time it took sailing ships to get from Europe to the Americas during the era of classical revolutions, because that's what I'm here to talk about more than anything else.

• 38:13Daniel Whiteson?

  If you've created these little science fiction doodads, get around some of these science issues, why not set the revolution in the Mariana's Trench or Antarctica or somewhere else more realistic?

• 38:23Speaker 03

  Oh, because it's fun to be on Mars. I mean, I mean, straight up, man. It's just, it's more, it's more fun. What was cooler, Star Trek or Seaquest DSV? You know, Star Trek.

• 38:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Jonathan Brandis was pretty awesome, though.

• 38:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:41Speaker 03

  Roy Scheider.

• 38:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  He was in Seaquest, right?

• 38:43Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah. No, yeah, he was, yeah, he was the, he was the, he was the Tiger Beat heartthrob from, from Seaquest.

• 38:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  I did have the Tiger Beat things pinned to my wall when I was the right age.

• 38:52Speaker 03

  Who was your, who was your?

• 38:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  It was Jonathan Brandis. Yeah.

• 38:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Great hair. Learning a lot of history on the pod today.

• 38:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Really great hair. A real loss for everyone. Yeah, he did have great hair. Yeah. All right. Anyway, sorry to get us off track there. When we were writing about a city on Mars, a lot of the arguments that we found for why you should settle space is that it would cause cultural diversity. And a lot of people were arguing that, hey, you know, we're losing a bunch of languages here on Earth. But if you go to Mars, they're going to be so cut off from everything that's happening on Earth, that you're going to get all of this diversity in culture and we're going to be able to undo this horrible homogenization that's happening here on Earth. How good do you think that argument is?

• 39:34Speaker 03

  It's certainly nothing that I thought would happen.

• 39:39Speaker 03

  And this is a lot, you know, I do in the early episodes, you know, the Martians do develop their own culture because politics is often downstream of culture. And so I wanted to make sure that there was like a, because this is actually one of the things about about revolutions is you go 20, 30 years before a revolution and you start getting writers and artists and musicians who are exploring new ideas and putting, putting ideas that are out there that then sort of the generation that grows up with those sort of cultural outputs in their head, then they go on and they do sort of like the political and economic changes. And so the Martians absolutely have their own culture, but they're plugged into the company. They're plugged into Omnicore and the signals that are coming out of Omnicore

• 40:19Speaker 03

  are, you know, they're watching the same shows. They're seeing the same commentary. They're, they're receiving the same information as, as earthlings on earth who are living under Omnicore's auspices are in the same way that like when I went to, I lived in, I lived in France for three years. And when I was in France, you know, 30 years ago, if I was living in France, I would have just been bathed in French TV, French, you know, magazines, French newspapers, because that was the only thing that would be available. But I could sit in Paris today and just, you know, beyond English language Twitter and watch English shows. And I'm not, I never felt like I was cut off from like American

• 40:59Speaker 03

  culture when I was living in France. And that's essentially what I'm positing for the Martians is that a lot of what they're getting passively is, is cultural products from Earth. Also in the way that like, you know, that was true of the Americans in, you know, in both Spanish America and Anglo-America and Franco-America, they were engaging with the cultural products of the mother countries, not from themselves. And it was a big deal when Hawthorne comes out and is relevant back in Europe. And so there is a person whose name now escapes me unfortunately, because I wrote it so long ago, but it was a big deal when there was a musician who made a song that was actually a hit back

• 41:39Speaker 03

  on Earth. And it was the first like Martian who ever like cracked the civilizational zeitgeist back on Earth because they're all living under that same thing. So they're They wouldn't be cut off and at least not in my, at least not in my story because like, I mean, how long does it take to get a signal there? Just a couple of minutes. It's not like, it's not like they're living in Lima, Peru in, you know, like the 1500s when it would take literally six to nine months to get a letter back to Spain and then another six to nine months to get the letter, you know, the response back. Like, how are you? That nine months later, somebody's like, I am fine. Nine months later, it winds up back in Lima. Like, that's not how it would, I think, be on Mars.

• 42:20Daniel Whiteson?

  So as a reader of science fiction, I'm always using my physics brain to analyze, like, does this make sense? Would that actually work? But there's often social stuff and historical stuff and big themes in these books that I don't feel qualified to like, you know, understand whether they're realistic. When you read science fiction, like when you read The Expanse, which is very political, right? It's got these communities and they separate in these ways. Does your history brain kick in and you're like, that's not how it would work? Or actually, this should go a different way? Or what are your thoughts about those things?

• 42:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I think that part of this project for me is to, you know, I'm not infallible. I'm not creating like a perfect product here or anything, but like, I'm so steeped in the political history of human civilization that I do feel like I'm uniquely able to write plausible politics for in a science fiction setting in a way that lots of science fiction books. I have to suspend my disbelief about how this society has been organized. You know, we all have to suspend our disbelief that every planet anyone seems to go to is like, the planet is like a country or it's a node. Like, there's never, there's never internal, you know, conflict on any of these planets. It's always just like one planet equals like

• 43:34Speaker 03

  one thing. And that's, that's for storytelling reasons and for dramatic reasons because it would get so complex. But yeah, for sure. I think like, I do have to suspend disbelief all the time. And when I read, you know, the Kim Stanley Robinson books, which are fantastic, right? I love those books. And I even wrote, I even wrote into the show that the people who were designing all the stuff that allowed us to live on Mars, you know, the company that was doing it was KSR. Designs. They're they're the leaders of of Martian technology and spaceship technology because that's it's Kim Stanley Robinson, right? That's that is what that is meant to be. Some of the politics in those books. I'm like, ah, okay, that's fine. I'll suspend disbelief. It's fine. I don't mind. My thing is better on the politics, but you know, obviously terrible on the science.

• 44:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  So you and KSR both leaned into age extension as a way to move forward the plots. I feel like as a biologist, that's the thing that gets me. I'm like, oh, I'm just I'm not convinced we're ever going to be able to do that. And so the age extension thing seems to have been dropped now. Does it come back? I guess you don't want to tell me what happens next.

• 44:36Speaker 03

  I'm not gonna I'm not gonna give any spoilers.

• 44:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, all right.

• 44:39Speaker 03

  So the life extension thing opens up like the like a third thing here, which is like, obviously, if you know, science fiction, you know, that science fiction is writing about the future. But what's it really writing about the present, right? Every work of science fiction is ultimately commenting on its own contemporary society. And so there is stuff that is in here, the politics of this thing, even more now than ever, like frequently so. And we don't have to get into it. But like, because a lot of these plot points that I came up with years ago are now like happening in real life. And it's really disturbing to me. But the age, like the life extension thing, that's like, we live in a gerontocracy. Like, we live in a world where there's a generation of people

• 45:22Speaker 03

  who were the first people to hit sort of real advances in medicine. It's the boomers, right? They hit these real advances in medicine that are keeping us alive longer, that are allowing 80 year olds to continue to like, not just be dead, but continue to be alive. And when you look at who the leadership is of the country, we're living in a gerontocracy, which is the rule of old people. And I think that this is really bad, right? I don't know how else to say it. Like, like, I will editorialize and say that it is bad to have leaders who are like, I don't use email because I don't understand email. Like, it's 2025. We've got real problems, right? And I do not need people whose brains were formed in the 1950s

• 46:03Speaker 03

  to deal with the issues that are facing us here in the 2020s. I think they're fundamentally unequipped to Do the job at a certain point. I don't want to be ageist, but like, I just think that's true. So the age, the life extension stuff is meant to be a comment on that. And my life extension juice is not like fountain of youth stuff. It's not you get to continue to be alive and vital and your brain still functions. These people are staying alive, but their bodies are just kind of inert vegetables. Their brains are just kind of inert vegetables. Like they're not, they're not at the same level. They're cognitively and physically, all they are is merely alive.

• 46:44Speaker 03

  And that's the thing that I, I think is different from previous life extension things, which is definitely a part of the Kim Stanley Robinson books. And, you know, if you read, or not read, but like you watch some of the Alien prequels, like Prometheus, like there's, there's a life extension, you know, little subplot in there with that guy. But yeah, this is, that part is almost entirely social commentary.

• 47:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, we're gonna take a break. And when we get back, we'll talk about whether or not a revolution on Mars is inevitable.

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• 50:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  So I've been wondering whether or not a revolution on Mars is inevitable, or how we could avoid it at one point. So the way international law is currently set up is that if you go to space, you remain the responsibility of some nation. But you're not allowed to own your land. It looks like the international community is going to let you extract and sell resources. But it does seem like there could be some fundamental conflicts if you are like, living very far away, but you're still governed by people on Earth who don't get what your life is like. Do you feel like with our current setup, a revolution on Mars would be inevitable? Or what could we do to avoid a future Martian revolution?

• 51:09Daniel Whiteson?

  Should we be shorting Martian stones?

• 51:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, big time.

• 51:18Speaker 03

  You know, nothing is inevitable, right? I have to like, I have to officially declare this as a representative of the history department. Nothing is inevitable. Just because a bunch of stuff happened before, that doesn't mean it's going to happen now. There are lots of times where it seems inevitable that something happens and it doesn't. There are other times where something seems unfathomably impossible, and then it just happens. And that's really what history is all about. It sure does seem like, in the history of civilizations and colonizing civilizations, that eventually, those people who are in the colonized place are gonna want

• 51:59Speaker 03

  home rule. And that's seems to be pretty consistent across time. You know, not, not in every time, not in every place. But you know, there's a reason the Americas are a bunch of independent countries and do not continue to be uniformly colonies. There are still a few colonies left. And we've got our own colonies. But yeah, that kind of thing happens all the time. So if you actually, if we do go to Mars and we do have the colonization of Mars, there's definitely going to be people who were like, yeah, and we want Mars to be independent. And in the show, there's a guy, Jose de Petroff, who this is early going, like before, this is like precursor revolutionary stuff, you

• 52:42Speaker 03

  know, where he literally produced this like really influential documentary that is, that is saying exactly that, like it is inevitable that Mars will be free. And so what we need to do as Martians is be the agents of that inevitability. Like, we need, we need to be the soldiers for this force of history that is inevitably going to give Mars its independence, whether it's today, tomorrow, or 500 years from now, it's going to happen. And then I say in the show, of course, he conveniently ignored all the times in history where that didn't happen. But it was a very influential documentary and, you know, it impacted a lot of people. And also, just like, in terms of like where people's mentalities are at, because this has happened so often in history, that, you know, our future Martians will know

• 53:24Speaker 03

  that. And they will have it in their heads that, you know, in certain times and places, you know, people that have gone off and, and done something far away, wind up running it themselves. But how do we avoid that? If we don't want the Martians to have their freedom, if we want to continue to have them live under the thumb of the earthlings and the earthworms, how do we do that?

• 53:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's not necessarily what I want.

• 53:46Speaker 03

  No, I know, I know, I picked up on the subtext.

• 53:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  I want there to not be conflict.

• 53:49Speaker 03

  You hate the Martians and you want them to serve you.

• 53:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  They're the worst, they're the worst.

• 53:52Speaker 03

  They're the absolute worst, yeah. But when you look at sort of the example of the United States without like unpacking the sort of the genocidal way that this unfolded, the Northwest Ordinance in, was it was a pretty early document in American history that is what lays the foundations for the path from colony to statehood, from debate, not from colony, but from, from territory to statehood. And then saying, once you become a state, you're an equal part of this project that we are doing. And there is something to that, because there was an argument at the Take it for granted that like this path to statehood is a thing. But there were arguments at the time that like the 13 original colonies, they should be the states.

• 54:35Speaker 03

  And then as, as the white settlers move into the interior, those should be territories that are primarily serving us here on the coast, like the real thing, like these United States, and then those are going to be the territories. And it was a big argument about whether, you know, Ohio and Kentucky and, and Wisconsin would, would eventually be able to become states if enough Anglo settlers move there. And I think that doing that has helped keep the country together. California, which is a really far away from the East Coast, especially, you know, at the time that, that the settlements of California are getting going. Like California just became a state, even though it was a whole continent away. And California did not ever, there was no plausible independence movement.

• 55:17Speaker 03

  I mean, I'm from the Northwest, I know about all the little subgroups that want independence for Cascadia and independence for California. But there's never been any need for it. And so I think that having that kind of incorporation, legitimate incorporation into the larger project is, is how it would work.

• 55:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I keep trying to think about the best way to get Mars settlements started, which I don't think is going to happen in the near term. But right now I worry that we're going to have a scramble for territory, which is going to lead to conflict down here. So trying to figure out a way where you don't get a scramble, but at the right time, without violence, you give the people on Mars, you know, the ability to govern themselves is a, what sounds to me like a complicated question, but I don't deal with the human stuff. I mostly deal with the science stuff.

• 56:05Speaker 03

  Oh, it's very complicated.

• 56:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Just trust Elon, I'm sure he'll do it, right?

• 56:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh yeah, let's trust Elon.

• 56:08Speaker 03

  Some of the things that he has thrown out there about like, this is what Mars should be like. It should be democratic, but you should be able to rescind any law with one third vote. With like, if one third of the population opposes a law, they should be able to just like rescind it. It's like, you're just sending people to die. Like, that is the only thing that this organization of society that you are positing will actually accomplish is that everybody dying. And you're creating a new Roanoke. So the way I get around that in the show, like the scramble for territory on Mars is, uh, it's a monopoly. And there's just one company and they have secured a monopoly at a certain point in human history, they've secured a monopoly to all resources and territory beyond the line of lunar orbit, which, you know, gets me to want, you know, for one thing, being

• 56:51Speaker 03

  able to make social commentary about life under a monopoly corporation, but is also sort of like tipping a cap to, you know, the line that the Pope drew that gave the Spanish everything on one side and the Portuguese everything on the other. Like the Spanish just, for a while, the Spanish were literally claiming all of the Americas as their own territory because the Pope said that it was theirs. And that was a real thing that happened. And so that's, that's how I kind of wrote it into the show. And, you know, I even said that like a couple of the corporations, the rival corporations, the Omnicore that, that initially agreed to giving Omnicore this monopoly, they were just like, this is great. Let them claim that monopoly because they're going to go try to colonize it and they're going to bankrupt themselves and they're not going to get anything out of it. It's just going to be a huge debacle. And so like, letting them go off and try

• 57:34Speaker 03

  to do this, we're actually securing their collapse here on earth and that's going to allow us to become more powerful, you know, in relation to them. And of course, they were unfortunately dead wrong and Omnicore became very, very powerful because they did it.

• 57:47Daniel Whiteson?

  And that sure didn't pay off.

• 57:48Speaker 03

  It did not. No, they tried.

• 57:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  I keep hearing people say, let Musk do it. He'll just go out there and die. And while I think that's high probability, I also worry about what would happen if he was successful, but.

• 57:57Speaker 03

  There's, there's no chance he gets on one of those ships. None whatsoever.

• 58:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 58:02Speaker 03

  Elon Musk is not getting on a ship to go to Mars. Never. He would never do that. He would send people to do it. He would have other people die for sure. But he would be like, that's too risky for me.

• 58:12Daniel Whiteson?

  And would you get on a ship to Mars?

• 58:13Speaker 03

  Absolutely not.

• 58:15Daniel Whiteson?

  How about New Mexico? Would you visit New Mexico?

• 58:17Speaker 03

  Mexico's great. Yeah. I love New Mexico. Lovely place.

• 58:22Daniel Whiteson?

  I grew up in New Mexico and couldn't get out of there fast enough, but it is a beautiful place.

• 58:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's like, I think it's the outdoorsy stuff. Um, you know, it's, it's a good, good place for hiking and stuff.

• 58:32Daniel Whiteson?

  So tell us about what's next for you. You planning to write more fiction? Is there going to be a Jovian revolution inspired by Byova Space Tyrant? What are you planning on next?

• 58:42Speaker 03

  At the moment, I am finishing my third book, which is, you know, nonfiction about a certain period in Roman history where it seemed like their civilization was collapsing and that would be irreversible and irretrievable. And then instead, they pulled themselves out of it and put themselves back together and went on for another couple of centuries, which I feel like is a pretty pertinent story that deserves, uh, that deserves to be shoved into people's brains as we all doom scroll our lives away.

• 59:11Daniel Whiteson?

  A hopeful message.

• 59:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Honest to God, like a hopeful message. And then, you know, the, there's eight episodes left on the Martian Revolution. And then when, when that's done, I'm going to restart sort of like the traditional series of, of revolutions and I'll sort of pick it up where I left off with, with Russia at the end of war, war one-ish. And so like the Irish, I'll do the Irish Revolution, um, you know, Cuba will be done, maybe the Spanish Civil War. I haven't quite, I'm going to be calling it as I see it and as I go. But there's basically the 20th century revolutions are left to be covered. And then, you know, is there, is there future fiction? Yeah, I would sure love to do more stuff like this. Basically, the way I put it is the people who like it, love it. And I've gotten a lot of positive feedback

• 59:54Speaker 03

  about it and people saying that they really, really enjoy it. And so if I can do this kind of thing again, that would be fantastic. Is there going to be a sequel to the Martian Revolution? If there is, it's already been coded into the show and you would just have to know what you were looking for to be like, oh, that's what he's doing. Because yeah, the, the, the sequel is, is known if it happens. And it should already be something that if you were really paying attention, or if you just happened to accidentally have a realization in your head one day, oh, that's why he keeps saying that. Um, then you know what the sequel will be.

• 1:00:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Listen carefully, folks.

• 1:00:34Speaker 03

  Listen carefully, and it's there. It's there.

• 1:00:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  This is something we should have asked earlier, but have you written science fiction that is publicly available yet? Or was this your first science fiction?

• 1:00:44Speaker 03

  No, this is my first work of science fiction. This is my first work of like, published fiction. I have stuff that I did like, like independently, like little short story things. And I did the three day novel contest a couple of times, and I did record an audiobook of one of those. But that's like a, that's like a detective story that's using all the tropes from like Raymond Chandler and stuff. But no, this is, this is the first science fiction.

• 1:01:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Got it. So in the next eight weeks, when the Martian Revolution is over, there's nothing for us to fall back on.

• 1:01:13Speaker 03

  Not fictionally. No, no, no, you know, you can, no, you can't be like, oh, I love this new stuff. And he's got this old stuff. I mean, you knows, maybe I'll, maybe I'll resurrect some of those stories. They're all science fiction-y.

• 1:01:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. Well, I love the Martian Revolution. I'm looking forward to what comes next. And I'm looking forward to the history revolutions coming back to. It's all wonderful. Thank you so much for being on the show. I had a really great time.

• 1:01:34Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:01:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you.

• 1:01:48Daniel Whiteson?

  We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.

• 1:01:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.

• 1:02:00Daniel Whiteson?

  We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at questions at danielandkelly.org.

• 1:02:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D and K Universe.

• 1:02:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

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