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This year, I've hit on some really excellent fiction. First, I read (and loved) Project: Hail Mary by Andy Weir, which I'm very aware is being made into a film which should be in theaters in something like seven months. But this week, I've stumbled into The Martian Revolution by Mike Duncan, and I'm completely sucked in.

Very rarely, I'll be reading a book, watching a TV show, or in this case listening to a podcast, and it will dominate my imagination to the point that all I want to do is go back to it. This has been the case for me when reading books in the Dresden Files or Wheel of Time series, or when watching Stranger Things or For All Mankind. But I think this is a first for me with a podcast.

Mike Duncan's Revolutions Podcast is a podcast detailing various historical revolutions: The French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Algerian War of Independence. But the 12th season, which premiered in October of 2024, is a fictional account of the Martian Revolution of 2247.

A nonfictional account of The Martian Revolution of 2247. Mike Duncan is taking everything he's learned from 12 seasons of historical revolutions - the repeating arcs, characters, ideas, events, and patterns which all revolutions seem to follow - and created a fictional history of the Martian Revolution of 2247. The series is written from the point of view of a historian working hundreds of years after the Martian Revolution and will be presented in the style and format of previous seasons of Revolutions. It will look, sound, and feel like a Mike Duncan history podcast… but will instead be a fictional narrative of a gripping science-fiction epic.

The story begins with the background on the development of a new clean power source on Earth, powered by a non-renewable resource which Earth soon depletes, but which is available in large quantities on Mars. A new mega-corporation forms to extract this mineral from the red planet, and after a number of generations the inhabitants of Mars begin to grow discontent.

It's excellent worldbuilding, it's well-written, and it's completely captivating. It's all presented as a historical record. I'm currently just about halfway through, and I'm enjoying it so much that I had to share it with you here.

Here is a link to the Revolutions podcast, and here is a link to the first episode.