The Life & Times of a Time Weary Wombat

Mike Duncan has finished telling his Martian Revolution volume. sabotabby I don't know if you listened to his interview on It Could Happen Here, but if you were worried about events in your writing happening in real life before publishing your story, imagine publishing a weekly speculative historical fiction podcast where events in real life catch up with your narrative week by week... :P

Duncan has switched to Patreon as his publishing platform, and now there is a discussion thread where he mingles with listeners/fans. He revealed that he was thinking about writing this Martian Revolution fiction throughout the 10 years he spent doing the Revolutions podcast. So that kind of explains why he was able to write the damn thing week by week as he did, (I mean he did plan the big lines of it ahead of time) but holy cow. That was a magnificent story, especially if you have been a listener of the podcast, or if you have good revolutionary history knowledge in general, because you can pick up many references to other revolutions, and I probably didn't even catch two thirds of them. But there was a LOT of the Russian Revolution infused in this story.

For all of you holdouts who haven't ever listened to the podcast, just listen to one episode per week... Start at 3.1 as even Duncan himself recommends, and even though the French Revolution is too many damn episodes, it's worth stretching the pleasure over time. I think I was consuming about 2-3 episodes a week for a long time, so I only caught up to its weekly release a year or two ago, in the middle of his 10th volume (the Russian Revolution) and I was also catching up on his seven years of History of Rome as well, though I did not pay as much attention to that one.

Maybe I should start a Révolution Weeklé, like Whale Weekly, to get more people to tackle it... *cough*

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A friend is planning on starting a Capital vol. 1 reading group, and he asked me if I would read it in French so I could provide a different perspective... Weee! (I first turned him down because I think in English these days, but Marx personally supervised the French translation, rewrote some bits of it, and eventually told Russian translators that they should use the French translation rather than the original German to base their own translation on! So I will read it in French after all.

David Harvey has a course (a recording of which I have as a podcast) teaching Capital... In an interview, he was discussing how he has taught Capital for like 30 years, but not always at the same school, and even in the same school, the cohort of students he would get would change in terms of personal interests and areas of study, so every time he has taught the course, students have been picking up on different parts of the book and/or had different perspectives to bring to it. Imagine how interesting that must be.

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After listening to 10 years of podcasting on 10 different Revolutions, I do wonder though why revolutionaries (and many of their arm-chair wannabes) still focus so much on Marx. I mean I understand that he's a phenomenal writer and the finest analyst of capitalism and all that, but in the end, revolutions, even the Russian one, didn't quite happen because of a good grasp of Marxist theory. Marx /followed/ the French revolution, the mother of all the other modern ones. The Cuban Revolution didn't have much of a Marxist character until the U.S. started opposing Castro and forced them in the hands of the Soviets, along with Ché's own inclinations. I mean the end of the Cold War means that there's a lot fewer people focusing on Marx today, but he's still a big deal in many university revolutionary/activist circles, one of which I am somewhat adjacent to thanks to F.