Revolution, Creation, and Speculative Fiction

Speculative Fiction and Sub-Creation

What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator’. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.

– JRR Tolkien

In 2001, Bloom’s taxonomy of learning was revised to describe the different phases of learning as Remembering, Understanding, Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating, and Creating. Previously, Evaluation had previously been the top step in the pyramid. The addition of creation as the new pinnacle of the pyramid is significant because of its implication about the act of creating something new and the extensive base of knowledge required to do it well.

In 2007, Mike Duncan started his first podcast, The History of Rome, which concluded in 2012 having covered Roman civilization from the founding of the city to 476 CE. Later that year, he started another podcast, Revolutions, which over the course of 10 seasons from 2012 to 2022 covered various revolutions from the 17th century to the 20th century, including the Haitian Revolution and the Russian Revolution. After a two-year hiatus, the Revolutions podcast suddenly dropped a new season: The Martian Revolution. A futuristic speculative science fiction work. The Martian Revolution continued in the exact same style as the previous seasons of the podcast providing historical overview, but used the common themes and recurring elements of all of the real-world revolutions previously covered to craft an entirely new story.

Historians are largely trained to apply, analyze and evaluate, but are seldom encouraged to create. Modern historiography is filled with examples of students who have written on topics like an analysis of the minutes of town councils in a specific German town in the 1640s. They are overly specific because it is safer. The formal historical training process tends to prize nuanced, but ultimately safe and unambitious, takes on very specific and narrow topics over truly creative work. Historians are constantly defending their work within the academic sphere, to master’s advisors, at a PhD defense, at conferences, in peer reviewed journals. Everyone involved, whether arguing, defending, or critiquing, needs to publish in order to survive their career. It is punishing and brutal, and as a result most people play it safe.

Mike Duncan’s Martian Revolution is a master class in how comprehensive social worldbuilding allows for a truly immersive story with the power to speak into the author’s own society. It succeeds because it was created after an intensive study of revolutions, but also because Duncan introduced it largely outside of the sort of academic historical circles that would have crushed such a creative project before it ever started.

Speculative fiction–especially when it functions as commentary–needs to have an edge of truth. That is what allows the author to truly become the sort of sub-creator that Tolkien describes. It demonstrates a creative understanding of the issue the author examines and spotlights in their own fictional world. Duncan’s Martian Revolution helps to demonstrate the specific ways that revolutions and civil conflict have played out in the real world over the last few hundred years by using building blocks and common themes of real history to frame a fictional history that both sounds realistically detailed and speaks more broadly to the world we all live in right now.

Colonialism and Racism

Pulling from modern social media and Youtube culture, Duncan creates separate castes in Martian Revolution by ranking people into letter groups.

S class: Executives, all from Earth
A class: Senior managers and directors that work directly with the S class, largely made up of the children of S class executives who cannot be S class since they are not first-generation Earth.
B class: Professional elite of Mars (doctors, lawyers, etc.) not tied to resource extraction, almost entirely local upper class
C class: Direct supervisors of Mars mining sites and security personnel, local middle class
D class: Rank and file workers and techs necessary for the colonial resource extraction, local lower class

While this system feels a lot like Youtube ranking lists, it builds upon a much older historical basis of how people have really been divided into groups in a modern context.

‘Us vs. them’ dynamics are a recurring theme of history that filters through every era, but tend to take a particular role in the formation and progress of revolutions. A myriad of discussions tracing the modern concept of race have been done across academic writing, but it is important to understand that race is a fundamentally modern concept that would have been largely unfamiliar to people from before the last couple hundred years. Race, as we understand it now, is fundamentally a modern concept. As a result, from the perspective of writing speculative fiction, understanding that race is socially constructed helps to both underline the fact that invented ways of dividing people need to make some sort of organic sense, but can also be invented and still be believable.

Many of the real-world examples of revolutions covered in earlier phases of Duncan’s podcast, showcase this theme over and over again. From the Haitian revolution to Spanish American independence, complex and thoroughly constructed racial tier systems have been used as a means of control and division by colonial powers in the Americas. Power structures find ways to make people feel better about their positions near the bottom of the power structure by finding ways to make those people only near the bottom and not actually on the bottom. This provides a way for the colonial powers back home to have local allies to help keep the rest of the population controlled, just as we see Duncan constructing with the C class in the Martian revolution.

Colonial Neglect

Colonial ventures, by definition, start at some distance from the colonizing country and the heart of the empire that they are designed to benefit. As a result, it is common that affairs closer to home, combined with the generally smooth operation of the main point of the colony can bring about a situation where the colony is primarily left to its own devices.

In the Martian Revolution, Duncan employs the distance between Mars and Earth to create communication distance, but he also uses larger concerns back at home and a long-tenured government used to letting things ride to create a situation that has been quite common across real history: colonial neglect. Colonized people get used to governing themselves without a large presence of overarching authority; as a result, when something happens that starts to bring attention back to the colony, the colony strongly resents the interference in what has been, up to that point, de facto self rule.

Colonial neglect, as result of the English Civil war, played a large role in forming the context of the American revolution. Similarly, the necessity enforced neglect of the Spanish empire by the Napoleonic wars created a prolonged period where the Spanish empire was forced to contend on its own without useful guiding influence from Spain directly. These types of events create situations in which the de jure situation hasn’t changed at all. Colonists would still largely consider themselves to be loyal subjects, but have also gotten used to only having to pay lip service, without frequent direct interference.

Historically, these sorts of situations have also been exacerbated by the fact that even if a colonial government was paying attention, it was often hard to actually force frequent interference in day-to-day governance due to the practical considerations of slow and cumbersome communication and information sharing.

The New Protocols

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

– GK Chesterton

In the Martian Revolution, the Mars colony is controlled by the Omnicorp on Earth, and in the lead-up to the main events of the story, that corporation is controlled for decades by Vernon Byrd. His eventual death finally allowed the rise of new leadership under Timothy Werner, leading to widespread new reforms Werner believes to be necessary called The New Protocols that lead to disastrous results.

Over the last few decades, it has become very common for tech companies from Silicon valley to loudly proclaim that they can revolutionize any number of industries only to reinvent them in ways that lose large quantities of money, with a number of sterling examples, like the Las Vegas hyperloop, which have largely come to nothing.

People who reach top leadership almost invariably have high levels of self-confidence and a strong tendency to believe that they know the best course of action in a situation. This is especially common when people have had a long time to ruminate on the shortcomings of a long-standing system of the sort that comes out of a period defined by inertia and colonial neglect.

The Edge of Existence

In the Martian Revolution, the remoteness of Mars and the way in which the corporation fully controls everything on the planet puts dissidents into a stranglehold position. Anyone who has their contract annulled by the corporation no longer has the legal, or practical, ability to do anything, even opening doors and hatches. When the New Protocols result in the mass annulling of contracts, many of the people are left without any way to support themselves just waiting to be deported to the outer solar system. This creates a deep sense of desperation.

Despite the sense often given by discussions of historical events, most people are apolitical most of the time. Even the largest mass movements in world history have often been driven by far fewer people than people tend to remember. But even among the people who actively take part in revolutions, many of them are often motivated less by political fervor and more by an understanding of necessity.

When people are backed into a corner and their only options are fighting back and death, it creates a scenario of survival rather than political idealism. It was famine that helped to drive the French and Russian revolutions drawing in a great many people that otherwise would have been content to live their lives and leave politics to others. The Martian revolution gives a vision of people pushed to the edge of existence in a way that is fundamentally different from famine or economic deprivation, but nevertheless understandable and relatable.

Indistinguishable Change

The end of the Roman order in the west was not like the crash of a single mighty building. It is more like the shifting contours of a mudbank in an ever-flowing stream: certain prominent ridges are washed away, other hitherto mute landscapes gain in eminence. But the shifting mud of day-to-day social, economic, and cultural activity remains, to be piled up, once again, in yet another pattern.

– Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, p. 21

In the Martian Revolution, Timothy Werner overestimates his own knowledge when he comes up with the New Protocols. To begin with, the changes are dangerous and counterproductive because they are based on an incompetent and incomplete understanding of the system he is trying to change. In addition, however, the idea that he could pull them off at all was based on the fundamental assumption that he could make the changes without consequence. That turns out not to be true.

The gradual changes of the world are intensely difficult to spot as change is happening, but maddeningly obvious when viewed with some distance. As a result, people tend to view leaders who make wrong decisions during a crisis as if they didn’t see obvious changes. If only they had just had the sense to understand what was happening, all of history could have turned out differently. What this perspective ignores is that leaders tend to operate within specific power structures that have been solid through their entire lives, and that systems seemingly sudden inability to continue is almost always a surprise to them. The failure of the New Protocols is not something that Timothy Werner can conceive of, both because he cannot believe that he had a bad idea, but also because he had every reason to believe that the power structure of Omnicorp could simply enforce the changes.

Too Little Too Late

Having pushed many of the people of Mars to the brink by annulling their contracts and taking away their ability to be a functioning member of society, and having endured the humiliation of the violent reaction to his changes, Timothy Werner restructures some of the New Protocols. These are concessions that would have been highly welcome earlier, but with the uprise already in motion, are now too little too late.

When people have been pushed to the edge of existence by their leaders unwillingness, or inability, to provide solutions, they start to take action. Once the revolution starts, the need for something to be done becomes obvious to almost any leader. But it is often the case that concessions cannot calm the situation once the crisis has arrived. Even when those concessions would have appeased the revolutionary leaders pushing for them before the tipping point. Tipping points are never seen or well understood before they happen. But all of a sudden leaders on both sides have the realization that the world has changed, and the terms under which a deal can be struck have changed completely.

Leaders facing revolutions do not recognize the need for change because they think that the power structures support them. It is only the realization that their power is less secure than they originally believed that causes them to make concessions. Unfortunately for those leaders, revolutionaries have the same realization about their power at the same time, and the offered concessions are now too little too late. A reality that is obvious across the experiences of Louis XVI and Charles X of France, and Nicholas II of Russia.

People who are worried that there might never be a revolution are happy to take the concessions they can get, but people who see a revolution already in progress realize how much more they can accomplish than they ever realized.

Conclusion

The Martian Revolution uses these recurring themes of real revolution to create a secondary world that its listener’s minds can enter, and it relates something that rings with truth, both within its own world and within the real world. The degree to which it has been shown to echo the works of the current administration is a sign not of clairvoyance about the future, but about a clear sighted understanding of the past.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does have a way of rhyming, with recurring themes weaving throughout hundreds of years of human history. Largely these themes are representative of something within humanity itself and the ways in which we interact with power and one another. It is speculative fiction’s ability to speak to those fundamental truths of human nature in new and imaginative ways that has made it such an enduring force in literature for so long now.

Tim Johnson LaBarbera is a once-historian seduced to the commercial dark side by the allure of vague tech slang, branded polo shirts, and the discovery that he is inordinately gifted at using Excel. When he is not managing business operations, he enjoys dipping into armchair academic analysis and constructing databases of mythic proportions.