Season Two Historical Notes and Acknowledgments: The Tape Recorder Trilogy

An end-of-season extra episode offering some updates on the podcast, background on the history behind the content, and also some much-deserved credit to the people who helped make Season Two and the book it was based upon possible. 

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Credits: 

Voice Acting - Geoff Micks

Editing - Geoff Micks

Music - Dimitri Kovalchuk (MokuseiNoMaguro) through Pixabay

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Hello again, everyone. My name is Jeff Mix, and if you are listening to this, you almost certainly have made it through to the end of the second season of the Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast. Thank you for that. This audio drama is based on my novels beginning, middle, and end, and while asking an author to pick their favorite book is like asking a parent to choose their favorite child, I will go so far as to say the stories in middle were the ones I had clearest in my head when I started writing a very long novel that I eventually broke into three parts. There would be no season two without season one, and season three is going to build upon season two in new and unexpected ways. But the things I put into the episodes you have just heard were with me the longest and came out the closest to my original intentions, and that really satisfies me as a writer. Now I want to give you the historical notes and acknowledgments relevant to what you have just heard. As I did at the end of season one, let me say that while I am using the historical note and acknowledgments from my novel middle as the starting point for this conclusion to season two, I need to expand upon and depart from some of what is on the page for book readers, as the podcast project is its own work and deserves additions to what has come before. So with that said, when I wrote the historical note for beginning and season one, I had to confess that the book largely predated recorded history, and so most of my plot was derived from working backwards from mythology, or forwards from anthropology and archaeology. That is not true of middle and of season two. There are primary documents regarding almost everything in this book, and a wealth of secondary sources as well. With that said, while I maintain the history behind my stories is sound, someone who wants to do some further reading to learn more will probably be surprised at how often it seems I am drifting from the accepted truth. Middle, which I am going to start referring to mostly as season two in this podcast episode, is not going to be an easy thing to fact check. Historical notes like this one give authors a chance to explain the choices they have made as they blend the fact and the fiction. Let me start then by saying that I have always tried to stay as close to the truth as possible in all of my works, and season two is no exception. If you will grant me the MacGuffin of the Framing Device, a man who has lived since the last ice age dictating his memoirs in the present day into a tape recorder while waiting for a mysterious visitor who he believes will be the death of him, I am prepared to say everything else has its origin in the recorded facts, even if it looks like I do diverge wildly in places. So why does my story not more closely align with the accepted versions of events? Broadly speaking, season two covers the rise and fall of Tyre and Phoenicia, the rise and fall of Carthage, and the rise of the Roman Republic, and then the Empire up to the fall of the Western Half and the first recorded outbreak of a bubonic plague pandemic. When we research these eras, we are almost exclusively using Biblical, Greek, and Roman sources, and those sources come with pretty clear self-interested and self-satisfying biases. I have preferred to imagine how the events of my plot would be told from the perspective of Jezebel's friends, or Hannibal's friends, or the subjugated or otherwise relatively powerless peoples of the Roman world, rather than the ruling classes of Rome and later Constantinople. Where I am confident the Jewish, Greek, and Roman writers were being self-serving, I have allowed the narrator to point out the flaws in their versions of events, and offer an alternative I base on a sensible removal of one viewpoint, replaced by the narrator's own also not particularly objective viewpoint. History is written by the winners and repeated for thousands of years by admirers of the winners. By and large, the narrator was not on the winning side, but he views himself now as in a position to set the record straight. With that said, his is an oral history about events from long ago, of which the man calling himself Canmi or Canmius throughout most of the season was an active participant with his own built-in biases. He is a long, long way from an impartial observer. He is an unreliable narrator in the literary sense of that term, and I have done my best to reflect this throughout season two. The best illustration of this is probably that as a Carthaginian patriot, he does not like Romans, and so very little of the greatness of Rome is allowed to shine through when he speaks of them. Even the unavoidable compliments are backhanded. Readers who are frustrated with me for giving short shrift to Egypt or Greece or Rome are encouraged to read more about them elsewhere. Those civilizations are already beautifully covered in other historical fiction, a lot of popular nonfiction, and more scholarly works than you will be able to read in a lifetime. One of the reasons why I was so comfortable skipping and glossing over the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman perspectives in season two is that I wanted to do the lesser known side of the story, and I felt free to do so because it's pretty easy to find the better known side. That's why it's the better known side, after all. So with the caveats of source material and an unreliable narrator giving an oral history from long ago from the standpoint of the losing side out of the way, let me launch into a brief overview of what is and is not true. The kings of Tyre mentioned throughout this book are all drawn from Josephus's Tyrian Kings list, and the events of their reigns, as I describe them, line up as closely as possible with that record. The royal women of Tyre are a mix of invention in the place of an unrecorded true person, and recorded historical personages given entirely fictional personalities for the sake of my story. All we know about Jezebel comes from Jewish writers, who had no reason to be kind to her and every reason to paint her as, well, a Jezebel. I went into her story with the premise that she was a Phoenician noblewoman who the narrator saves as part of his pact with generations of the royal ladies in her family, so an awful lot of the Jewish side of the story needed to be changed. I kept the parts of her story that had to stay to make how she is remembered make sense, and I felt free to create something else or explain away whatever did not fit. I comfort myself with the thought that even though I invented much that runs contrary to how the Old Testament tells it, even if it had happened exactly the way I said it, it still would have been both in the best interest of, and based on all the available facts available to Jeremiah, or whoever compiled and edited the Book of Kings, to describe it as it has come down to us. To my mind, that's about as good as historical fiction can do when it chooses to fly in the face of history as we know it. Based on the reactions of my proofreaders, I have no regrets. I also largely invented Elishat's character, although not her existence. There is enough overlap between different accounts of King Pygmalion's reign and the founding of Carthage to make a strong argument that there really was an Elishat, or Elisa, or Dido, who fled her brother after the murder of her husband to establish a new colony that would one day become mighty Carthage. Her death, as it appears in season two, is based on one of the stories of what happened to her. There are others. None of them have happy endings. I picked the version that would horrify the narrator the most and allow the rest of Carthage's history to unfold as I imagine it. The least true version of her life is the best remembered. The Dido of Virgil's Aeneid has never impressed me, and I feel she fits into a larger pattern of the Romans never missing an opportunity to belittle their fallen foe Carthage. I have always sensed Elishat was a woman made of sterner stuff than Dido, and it was my pleasure to write her as I suspect she must have been to found a city like Carthage under some pretty incredible circumstances. Several of my proofreaders were surprised to hear of an Egyptian-sponsored Phoenician circumnavigation of Africa, or that the Greek explorer Pythias got far enough north in the Atlantic to record Pacice. Both stories are true, or at least there are records of the journeys, and the tales seem more believable to us today than to Greek geographers of the time, because the observation of where the sun is in the sky south of the equator, and of a never setting summer sun in the high Arctic are both correct, while both were held up by the Mediterranean-based experts at the time, as examples of why the explorers were just telling tall tales. The rise of Carthage and its conflict with Rome is well documented, even though nothing from the Carthaginian perspective has survived, and I did not stray too far from it in season two. Marco is an invention of mine, but there would absolutely have been Iberian commanders in Hannibal's army. I have plans for Marco's descendants in future projects, so giving him a prominent place in middle was important to me. For anyone interested in rereading his chapters or listening to his episodes again with the benefit of hindsight, in my mind I cast an imagined younger version of Eli Wallach from the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly as Marko. The ambush in that Spanish valley was my attempt at an homage to spaghetti westerns. Probably the single greatest offense I have made to accepted history in this season is Mago's recitation of the Battle of Canny to the Elders of Carthage, and his exchange with Hanno when he was done. Reading this episode in Livy is a beautiful piece of transcribed oratory, but in tone it bears no resemblance to the narrator's way of speaking. It is also much longer and contains details I glossed over for the sake of brevity, so to write the moment as it was recorded would have meant building the whole book and season around it. Meanwhile, it is generally accepted that Livy made up all of his dialogue too, so I soothe my conscience that I am not so much rewriting history as abbreviating an early already fictionalized account of true events. As long as I am confessing about changes I have made to this scene, there is no record of Mago having an Iberian mercenary in the crowd shouting encouragement to him. But when a member of my monthly writers group likened Marco to a hype man during a hip-hop performance, I knew I had to have him in that room during the speech. The whole thing could have fallen into dry textbook territory without some energy. Besides, I wanted Marco to be the common human thread connecting the beginning, middle, and end of the Second Punic War in the narrator's story, so he did need to be present while Canny was discussed. Sailing Caesar from Gades to Ostia in time to stand for election may have happened. Alternatively, and less interestingly, he may have marched a portion of his army home months earlier. I've gone through all the source materials, and there does not seem to be clarity regarding just how he got back so quickly. His speed in doing so and willingness to forego his triumph certainly surprised his political enemies, and allowed him to go on and have the career that made him by turns one of the world's great villains and great heroes. For the idea of him making an unlikely high stakes dash from the Straits of Gibraltar across the western Mediterranean to Rome, I defer to the late great Colleen McCullough, whose knowledge of the life and times of Gaius Julius Caesar I am prepared to call exhaustive and encyclopedic. She had Caesar make the journey by boat in her Masters of Rome series, and that is good enough for me. It would be one of the great accomplishments of my writing life if fans of her work would consider my chapter a worthy stand-in for the scene she chose not to include in detail in her novel, Caesar's Women, I expect for reasons of pacing. I made sure my trilogy made time for Caesar, although the trick was how to surprise and delight the reader and listener with how and when my narrator came to know arguably one of the most famous men who ever lived. Moving on, the improbable stories of the Colossus of Nero and the Golden House are all true and happened as I recorded them. I gave the architects and engineers and artists personalities, but I did not invent their accomplishments. What little I did speak of the emperors is all true as near as we can tell from the surviving biographies. And where some of those biographies are questionable, I have the narrator question them. The only other note I want to add to this part of the season is to say in the book, this is one chapter. I have a self-imposed rule against episodes running more than an hour, so I broke this chapter into two episodes. I expect that's going to happen again in season three, and I'll own up to it if and when it happens there too. Alright. Next we come to the fall of the western half of the Roman Empire, and then the outbreak of bubonic plague that ended the last attempts by the Eastern half to reunify and restore what was lost. I did it all very quickly, and I focused as much as possible on dealing with the death of a loved one during what must have felt like the end of the world to make the story more human and immediate, but everything I have said in the historical context is true. I have a plan to write a book about the building of the Heia Sophia one day, and if and when I do get around to writing that project, I will of course revisit this episode in much greater detail. A final fun thing? Melissa White's explanation about the Beatles' time in India is also true. Ringo Starr really did have a suitcase full of tins of baked beans because he did not trust the local cuisine. He also stayed the least amount of time out of any of the fab before. I suspect he went home once he ran out of British food. I have read somewhere he is the only one who did not suffer a digestive complaint because of the trip, so he was probably right to be cautious. And there you have it. Season two is not the exhaustively plausible historical opus I tried hard to achieve with my novel Inca. It is a collection of things about history I find interesting, most often told from the perspective of someone on the losing side of the recorded facts. That, plus the narrator's obvious biases and the inaccuracies inherent in an oral history given long after the events, gives me all the wiggle room I felt I needed to diverge from the accepted truth where necessary for the sake of injecting something fresh and new and exciting into some of the old familiar stories. So, with the historical note out of the way, I'd also like to do some acknowledgments, first with reference to what I wrote for the novel Middle, and then with some specific thank yous for help with season two of the Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast. I dedicated Middle, the book season two is based upon, to my friend Piero Marinatos. Piero and I first met something like fifteen years ago as of this recording, at a wedding in Quebec's cottage country. I sat across from him at a dinner, and after forty minutes or so my date dug her elbow into my ribs and asked, Are you alright? I have not said a word while listening to a natural storyteller spin me his yarns. Within a few months of that first happy meeting, Piero introduced me to a monthly writer's group that I still belong to today, and I wrote this trilogy in just four years with their help and encouragement. Piero and I have also made a game of visiting all the used bookstores in Toronto, as well as other venues and events relevant to reading and writing. Let this book be for Piero then, with gratitude and appreciation for his friendship and all he has done for me and my craft. As I mentioned in beginning, this trilogy was first conceived as a single book, so everyone I thanked in beginning also played a role in middle. With that said, thank you to Rhea Angelo, Lee Beden, Melissa Batrill, George Panayatu, Don Rumble, Nate Simpson, Sarah Snowden Mars, and Jillian Warringbird for all your thoughts and input on the second portion of the trilogy that emerged after I broke up that unfinished first draft manual into three roughly equal pieces. Of course, I also must thank Paulette and Terry Mix and Robin Lawrence. My family made me, and I made this book. A piece of it must be theirs. I am sure there were mistakes, and I take full responsibility for them. Some are choices, and the rest escaped my best efforts. If you enjoy them, let us agree to think of them as choices. As I mentioned, I would like to now add a few extra thank yous for season two of the Tape Recorder trilogy podcast, separate from the novel used as its sorts material. Just like I did at the end of last season, I want to start off by giving a big thank you to my vocal artists. The third person omniscent voice for when the tape recorder is turned off is played by my mother, Paulette Anderson Mix. The part of Melissa White is wonderfully done by Melissa Batrill. I also want to thank my friend Rohan MacDanny for playing the hostel manager. It means the world to me that people I know have volunteered to help me do what I could not do for myself with this project. Speaking of things I cannot do for myself, I'm going to take a moment again to apologize for the inadequacies of my own voice work. I have been told for most of my adult life that I have a voice for radio, but I think what people are actually complimenting me on is a good vocabulary and my ability to enunciate. I have no gift for accents or languages. I knew an older British gentleman and author, Don Rumble, who is sadly no longer with us. When I read my narrator's words, I hear a lot of his voice in my head. I am not going to try to do an impression of my late friend, and even if he were still alive, I never would have asked him to volunteer the kind of time I have put into this story. No, one of the things about doing a project like this by myself is that I must do the heavy lifting myself. That means I need to ask you to suspend your disbelief that a man who has lived more than ten thousand years somehow has my Toronto accent. In fact, even now I am being careful not to go too far into my comfort zone as I mention my hometown, as here in Toronto, we pronounce it either Tirana or Churana. One T is optional, neither is casual. I clarify this both to avoid gentle ribbing from my Toronto friends later, and also to illustrate that I am doing my best to keep the worst of my accent out of my diction when recording this podcast, and that doesn't leave a lot of other wiggle room to put on voices and accents that are not my own. When my best isn't good enough, I apologize. It was doing it this way, or you likely would never have heard this podcast. I would rather have it this way, and I hope you do too. Who else should I thank for season two of the Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast? Well, there are some names you have already heard before who you should hear again, because a decade and more separate middle of the novel from season two of the audio drama, and if the same people helped me with both, they should be thanked for both. Thank you again to Lee Beadon, Melissa Batrill, Piero Marinatos, George Panayutu, Nate Simpson, and Sarah Snowden Mars, as well as Paulette and Terry Mix, and my sister Robin Lawrence. And who else should I thank for their support and encouragement as I was putting season two together who did not get a mention when I was writing the book? I will put my wife Kelly Foley at the top of that list. A lot of time and effort has gone into getting this thing up on its feet, and she has given me the freedom to do that. I also would like to thank Chris Bork, Paul Bradley, Michael Bulco, Jason Entyne, Francesco Gangemi, Grace McMillan, Tyler Mason, Sophie O'Dwyer, Allison Payne, Life Tominson, and a lot of helpful and supportive people on Reddit for all the ways big and small they encourage me and give me the tools and know-how I need as I put this show together. I also want to give a special thank you to Amy Green, who I understand has been doing more than almost anyone to introduce this audio drama to new listeners. Finally, I would like to thank all of you. If you are hearing this, you've listened all the way through this episode, and you have almost certainly listened all the way through all the episodes that have come before as well. When you think of all the other things you could have done with your valuable time, all the other options to entertain you or distract you, you have stuck with me this far, which is far enough for me to guess you will probably see this thing all the way through to the end when it's done. I cannot properly articulate how much that means to me. Whether it is a trilogy of books or a multi-season podcast, I made this in the hopes that it would find you, and nothing makes me happier than the idea that my work matters to you in some way. When I wrapped up season one, I was actively working on season two, and I could give you a very clear start date for when you could look forward to season three. I am recording this episode's raw audio on February twentieth, twenty twenty six, and as of right now I really don't know how much of a gap I will need between seasons two and three yet. I would like to say I'm going to take a month off, the same way I did between seasons one and two, but all I can really promise is the break will not be longer than I need it to be in order to publish on the weekly schedule I have maintained this far. I also want to start putting the thought out there that while this project may have a firm conclusion planned for the end of the third season, I have learned a lot doing this, not the least of which is how much I have enjoyed doing it. I am going to start working on another audio drama series, so please look forward to updates about that in the third season, and when the last episode of the Tape Recorder trilogy is published, please don't unsubscribe from this podcast. If you want more from me in the future, let this subscription remain dormant in your podcast feed. I will let you know when new projects for me go live with short bonus episodes. That's really all I have to say, other than thank you again. You're now two seasons through a three-season project, but the third season is going to be longer than the two that came before, and it is going to have more of everything. More action, more adventure, more romance, more people you've heard of and history you already sort of know, and more people you've never heard of living through things you had no idea about. It will also have a lot more of Melissa White. It will take you from where we left off all the way up to 2015, and it will also have something I hope you're looking forward to. It will have a conclusion. Stay tuned, season three is coming soon. You've been listening to the Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast, and there is a lot more to come. Here are a few ways you can help support this program. First, if you are enjoying it, tell someone about it. Audio dramas live and die on word of mouth, so please help spread the word. Second, please like it, review it, and subscribe to it wherever you find your podcasts. We want to teach the algorithm that this show is worth people's time. Third, this podcast is based on the novels Beginning, Middle, and End by Jeff Mix, available on Amazon. If you want to read ahead or just have a copy of this story on your shelves, that would be so appreciated. Fourth, I have a link to a type form survey in the show's notes for each episode. Tell me a little about yourself and feel free to ask me some questions. I will be doing a QA mailbag bonus episode at some point. Finally, while I don't want to break up the episode with ads, I do have a Patreon account with extra content for those of you willing to. Support this channel with a donation. A link to that is also in the show notes. With that said, thank you so much for your time and attention, and I look forward to you enjoying the next episode soon.