Paperback, 563 pages
English language
Published June 21, 2021 by Orbit.
Established in 2025, the purpose of the new organization was simple: To advocate for the world's future generations and to protect all living creatures, present and future. It soon became known as the Ministry for the Future, and this is its story.
From legendary science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson comes a vision of climate change unlike any ever imagined.
Told entirely through fictional eye-witness accounts, The Ministry For The Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, the story of how climate change will affect us all over the decades to come.
Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us - and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face.
It is a novel both immediate and impactful, desperate and hopeful in equal measure, and it is one of the most powerful and original books on climate change ever …
Established in 2025, the purpose of the new organization was simple: To advocate for the world's future generations and to protect all living creatures, present and future. It soon became known as the Ministry for the Future, and this is its story.
From legendary science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson comes a vision of climate change unlike any ever imagined.
Told entirely through fictional eye-witness accounts, The Ministry For The Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, the story of how climate change will affect us all over the decades to come.
Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us - and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face.
It is a novel both immediate and impactful, desperate and hopeful in equal measure, and it is one of the most powerful and original books on climate change ever written.
After a strong start in the first few chapters I was struggling to get through the rest. The writing was plain and disjointed, the plot and characters thin, and it often read more like journalism, some climate change manifesto or a physics lecture, rather than fiction.
Actually, the book has no real plot. On the basis of two persons, the book presents psychological trauma caused by climate change and how a high bureaucrat tries to convince other executives to act. Interspersed are short essays. Admittedly, I skipped about a third of the book due to repetition. I would have liked more plot. In the end, there is hope that somehow it will work out, but many sacrifices must be made along the way. What is problematic about the book is that while societies or masses are subjects, they are somehow very manipulated, reactive, history is written by the elite, which takes away a lot agency.
This isn’t a dystopian story, nor is it a utopian story. It is a reality-based guess of what could happen. In this possible reality, the world struggles to put a cost on the effect that climate damage will have on new generations. The world’s governments are forced to deal with citizen uprisings to address those costs. With a combination of capitalism (including…ugh…a blockchain currency) and climate activism, the levels of carbon in the atmosphere crest and decrease. But that is just the start of untangling the human population’s Gordian knot; it is not (yet?) the utopian future.
This was a 10%-per-day book for me: each day I’d read 10% plus the remainder of the chapter. The book is written in a dense style with a constantly shifting viewpoint, and it takes a while to digest the author’s meaning.
4.5. I have a lot more to say about this book but I need to digest. Needless to say, this just sucked me in. I loved the polyvocality.
In principle I should have really enjoyed this, but it was just a good book, not a great one.
KSR has done exactly what he set out to do, and does not deviate from his usual 'apply the technology & investigate deep character driven reactions'. Here he asks the question that ultimately is _the_important one of our times: how exactly do we get ourselves out of this climate mess?
I really can't fault any of this. The characters are interesting, the fact that we get to hear from many of the usually sidelined voices is great, there's a bunch of technology, humanity prevails albeit with a lot of sacrifice. What's not to like in a well written KSR story that follows this standard template?
After a lot of thinking on that I seriously cannot say. 'Nothing is wrong with that' is really the correct answer, but I just don't find …
In principle I should have really enjoyed this, but it was just a good book, not a great one.
KSR has done exactly what he set out to do, and does not deviate from his usual 'apply the technology & investigate deep character driven reactions'. Here he asks the question that ultimately is _the_important one of our times: how exactly do we get ourselves out of this climate mess?
I really can't fault any of this. The characters are interesting, the fact that we get to hear from many of the usually sidelined voices is great, there's a bunch of technology, humanity prevails albeit with a lot of sacrifice. What's not to like in a well written KSR story that follows this standard template?
After a lot of thinking on that I seriously cannot say. 'Nothing is wrong with that' is really the correct answer, but I just don't find myself enjoying this one as much as something like the Mars trilogy or Aurora. Maybe this one is just too close to home for comfort?
So his answers for both, basically: maximalism. The point he's sort of making is that making the planet safely inhabitable is going to take every tactic and every ideology not necessarily working together but working on some piece of the thing. No one actor gets to be the hero (though I do enjoy that KSR's favorite kind of protagonist remains the middle-aged competent lady technocrat–guy's got a type) and while he's sort of indicating that capitalism as we know it has to die, he's not saying that happens through inevitable worker uprising. Some of it's coercion of central banks and some of it's straight-up guerrilla terrorism. Geoengineering happens at varying scales for better and for worse. Massive economic collapses occur. Millions die. And the point I think from KSR is that's the outcome in his most optimistic take. In general with KSR I don't know if I ever fully agree, …
So his answers for both, basically: maximalism. The point he's sort of making is that making the planet safely inhabitable is going to take every tactic and every ideology not necessarily working together but working on some piece of the thing. No one actor gets to be the hero (though I do enjoy that KSR's favorite kind of protagonist remains the middle-aged competent lady technocrat–guy's got a type) and while he's sort of indicating that capitalism as we know it has to die, he's not saying that happens through inevitable worker uprising. Some of it's coercion of central banks and some of it's straight-up guerrilla terrorism. Geoengineering happens at varying scales for better and for worse. Massive economic collapses occur. Millions die. And the point I think from KSR is that's the outcome in his most optimistic take. In general with KSR I don't know if I ever fully agree, but I always feel fully engaged.
This is also probably the most not-novel-y of his novels in that there's a couple of recurring characters running through the book but a ton of it's just first-person unnamed narration of events happening around the world. Someone describing a drought, a refugee describing a camp, a miner describing the nationalization of his mine. One very weird and fun chapter from the point of view of actual carbon.
