Related 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.
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.
>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.
I always wondered if writers do that stuff. Even with novels, I wonder if they go back and add details in or plan from them way back at the start.
> I wonder if they go back and add details in or plan from them way back at the start.
I heard a rumor that what Agatha Christie (and perhaps other mystery writers) would do is to write the entire story with no perpetrator in mind; then at the end, see which character seemed the least likely suspect, and then go back and "frame" that person.
On a slightly different note, when I've played the game "Once Upon a Time", which involves structured competitive / collaborative storytelling in a group, one of the hints I always give is to never specify anything unless you need to. If you don't specify what color the sword was, or what town he grew up in, or where the horse came from, then it's easy for later storytellers to incorporate that into their story. (Since although the goal of each player is to bend the story to their own ending, the purpose of the game as a whole is to tell a good story and have a good time. It's more fun to have a satisfying story someone else ended than a stilted, unsatisfying story that you ended yourself.)
>wondered if writers do that stuff
planners vs pantsers, it depends of their writing style.
Also, even some "pantsers" can get away with seeming to have had a plan all along if they write the project out of order from how the reader will read it/viewer will watch it. You can write the end first, no one can stop you (except maybe your editor because editing back together into the "right" order can be a chore).
(A bit harder to build a TV show that way, though not impossible; How I Met Your Mother almost pulled it off, depending on who you ask, for one instance.)
During Chris Claremont's 16 years on the X-Men this was his practice. He'd seed little details in his issues and then go back and flesh them out in a later issue if he felt like it, with the effect that it seemed like an organic whole.
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.
>but I just can't stomach the thought of it right now. Maybe in four years
Downfalls of civilization don't seem so appealing when you're living through them. I'm that way with media that overly focuses on mental health too, I have too many relatives dealing with that stuff to enjoy it in my media as well.
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.
For sure I mean he certainly wanted to access the subscriber base he built up. And he has made some commitments to do a few series on 20th century revolutions once he's done with this project so check back in a few months there should be more non-fiction series.
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.
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.
I think there is a pretty significant chance that someone _does_ make a TV series out of it, and it's almost ideally suited for it because it's all background material, so there's a lot of space for a showrunner to actually put their mark on it, and you could probably mine seasons of drama out of it.
Although if they haven't made the Kim Stanley Robinson books into a tv series, it would seem weird to start with this one..
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.
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.
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.
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
It does feel like that, but apparently after this he's going to take the podcast right back into more historical revolutions, like maybe the Cuban Revolution, as if nothing happened. Which will be hilarious if he does it.