The Ministry for the Future
Ratings155
Average rating3.8
There were parts that were quite thought-provoking, but both as a book and a process for how we get to that future it was underwhelming.
Smart and important but also long and boring. The “novel with bits of educational content throughout“ format doesn't really work. Mostly because the novel part isn't very interesting. On the other hand, it does pack ten times more interesting ideas than the average novel.
I didn't enjoy "Ministry For the Future" nearly as much as some of KSR's other works like Red, Green, and Blue Mars. The book felt underdeveloped with ideas that I felt ridiculous. Using cryptocurrency as some sort of cure-all monetary solution - the idea that anonymity in currency would be such a useful asset or make money a better investment seems foolish.
The engineering projects, the sci-fi part of the book, also didn't convince me. Red Mars had the decency of being overtly fantastical; "Ministry For the Future" fell into a sort of uncanny valley where hearing about the projects, they just don't seem feasible.
I was also disappointed with the characters. I thought that this, like Red Mars, would be more of a story of many different perspectives, and I felt the focus on Frank and Mary, and in particular their relationship, dominated a lot more of the story than I would have liked. While it did make sense to focus on Mary as she was the minister for the Ministry For the Future, I just didn't find it that interesting.
I thought dialogue was boring at times. In particular, there was a section of the book that was just listing countries and their different climate solution projects which was extremely boring, and I wish I could have skipped it, but I was listening to an audiobook. The sections about the children of Kali and news articles about things like the drones were quite interesting. But most of the divergent non-narrative sections that added to the world were just kind of unengaging.
In short, it’s not something I’d reread.
Some of the best near future sci-fi I've read. A blueprint in a lot of ways on how we could save our planet. Poses a lot of great questions about the ethics and politics of what actions are currently condoned and asks us to reevaluate.
Set in the not-very-distant future, this is a novel about pulling Earth back from the brink of catastrophic climate change. The bureaucratic sounding Ministry for the Future is an agency of the UN, headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, and tasked with figuring out how to accomplish that impossible seeming goal. It's headed by Mary Murphy, an Irishwoman with a strong memory of the Troubles, with staff from all around the world. Chapters are from the perspectives of many different people (and other entities!) experiencing changes. A few characters return repeatedly (Mary Murphy and her staff among them), while others pop up only once.
The opening chapter is a heart rending description of people in a town in India experiencing a catastrophic heat wave. I had to put the book down for a couple of days after reading it, but given the subject matter I was surprised that that was the hardest chapter to read. The story wrestles with whether drastic enough change can be brought about quickly enough without violence. Some of the chapters go quite in depth on banking and world economic systems and don't read like a novel at all. This is a wide ranging, kind of shaggy novel with an optimistic heart.
This is really good. It’s made up of different plot threads, but also images from places and events, and even meeting minutes and strange interludes from things like history and computer code.
It’s a very important book, in that it shows that we could save the Earth, but not by making an important invention and then keeping going the was we do now. We would need to address more than carbon, things like economic gaps, refugees, war, gender roles among other things.
Oh, and a “warning”: make sure you are comfortable when you start reading the book, specifically that the space you are in is at a comfortable temperature. I read the first chapter while being too warm on the first day of a heat wave after a week of rain. Don’t do that!!!
Eek. Rarely in my life has a book fired me up so completely. I spent the last few weeks OBSESSED with this book, and have already made changes to my lifestyle. My family is pretty sick of it, HA.
I need a book club about this, but - even more desperately - I need an undergrad semester-long course with full syllabus and citations PLEASE about everything in this book. This + Charles C. Mann and I just want to shout from the rooftops. I will shout from Goodreads instead!!
The book
OK, so this is a beefy, near future sci-fi book about climate change. It basically outlines the rest of the 21st century, ultimately landing on an “optopian” (optimal realistic outcome - as distinct from “utopian”/idealized outcome) 2100. The book is a novel in the most old-man-KSR way (more on KSR below): namely, chapters vary a LOT in style. Exposition is very light. There is a LOT of talk of geological things - as well as technocratic things like economics and government and political action. Characters are fairly thinly-drawn; we spend the most time with Mary Murphy, a diplomat and head of the new UN agency nicknamed “Ministry for the Future”, and Frank May, an American aid worker who almost died in a heat wave. There is occasional eco-terrorism, lots of meetings with central bankers, and ultimately, airships and solar-sailed sailboats.
On the book's effects on me
And OH MY GOD, THOSE SOLAR-SAILED BOATS!!!!
OK, so this book got me - as I said - SUPER fired up. I was about ready to throw my plane tickets in the incinerator, and put solar panels on my entire house and family, and start composting the cat. I was (and am) OBSESSED. [My family did not appreciate.] It helps that my area is undergoing an enormous heat wave at the moment, with heat indexes at 110+ and the local government texting me every day to warn me not to die. It also helps that my gas guzzling, Earth-killing, non-EV vehicle is at the repair shop, so I have been e-biking like a utopian everywhere.
But, srsly, here is my list of behavioral changes (thanks, KSR):
- Downloaded various apps to calculate my carbon footprint (I like Earth Hero right now). Eye-popping numbers.
- Shrieked at the plastic in my home. Bought laundry powder in a cardboard box, for the love of God.
- Threw out my cursed compost bin from 2022 (plz don't ask), picked up a new one. RE-STARTED COMPOSTING.
- Signed up to my local climate action group. ✊
- Re-started my CSA.
- Went to the farmer's market.
- DID NOT buy a bunch of crap I was planning to buy. Oh my LORD, the consumption addiction!
- Made long lists of plans about divesting my personal retirement funds from fossil fuels, investing in green funds, and how to avoid online shopping ALWAYS.
- Researched and had lots of emotional drama about community solar and green bonds and buying carbon offsets. Hand-wringing here. Plz let me know your thoughts.
- Discovered some really great readings at Yale Climate Connections, Grist, and MIT Climate.
On KSR
I do so love KSR. Ever since Ursula Le Guin died (RIP, bless), he is my top living sf author. I have now read 6 of his books, and 2 as did-not-finished, and I enjoyed seeing many of his usual habits and tactics and intelligence in this one. He also has, thankfully, minimized two of his bad habits - the cranky/unlikable/”if you're not angry you're not paying attention” strong female protagonist, and his cranky infodumps. I mean, they're still THERE. Some of those short “I am an electron!” chapters were cringey (not the electron one, actually, I liked that one, but some of the others). But Mary Murphy is blessedly pleasant.
I enjoyed seeing the similarities to The Years of Rice and Salt (ugh, one of my top faves
An incredible journey through the complex web of climate change challenges, told from so many unique perspectives. It's both a cautionary tale and a glimmer of hope for our future. Highly recommend this thought-provoking and inspiring read!
I'm going to start with saying I've enjoyed the Mars Trilogy greatly. I've re-read it recently - it does show it age a bit, both by the underlying world moving on and by the narrative structure of a grand epic that feels a bit quaint in 2024.
The Ministry for the Future, though... it's not a book? I mean it's one in the physical sense, but it's not a proper novel. It's a bunch of happy magical thinking stories where everything works out. There's a lot of unconnected snapshot viewpoints, and then Central Banks deploy bitcoin and AI and everything is redeemed, and Russian aircraft carriers save the Antarctic. That's a rather disappointing investor spiel, not a proper sci-fi novel.
I should have known better, seeing as it carries “favourite book of Obama” on the cover. I'm struggling to believe he's read it, as near the middle it calls out the assassinations by drone that his presidency made such wide use of - and blames them on him by name.
Then again, it's nice to fantasize about oil execs getting tagged like that.
Didn't really appreciated this read, I don't know if it was the French translation or the author's writing, but I didn't like the way the story was told. To be honest a lot of it would have felt more logical inside an essay than into this fiction form. I found that everything surrounding the ideas was both useless and badly written and at the end didn't served the ideas that well.
I can understand the appeal, but to me this book was lacking on several parts besides the writings. There was a part about French yellow jackets presenting them as ecological warrior that felt totally wrong (as the movement emerged to fight oil price increase), and also a solution based on blockchain without too much thinking about the energy cost of the technology that looked a bit like a tech venture fever dream.
Some parts and ideas were good and I discovered a lot of initiatives and possibilities for our future, which gave me a bit of hope, but this book didn't feel as ground-breaking as the hype make it seems.
That book just does not work.
Solving all of world's major problems in 600 pages or less, I don't think so.
How to solve climate change? Obviously with help of a blockchain.....
A love story hidden inside a tale of rebellion and resiliency, where the object of desire is, essentially, persistence.
Not my favorite KSR. I appreciate the big ideas and the hopefulness, but it felt like the dark realism at the beginning gave way to fantasy idealism really quickly towards the end. Too long!
Kim Stanley Robinson is a polymath, a renaissance man with an encyclopedic knowledge of not just climate change, but economics, history, and many other topics. Who else could have written this book? It is a tour de force of science, culture and speculation that feels grounded in reality. For the most part it is a narrative of humanity's attempts to control climate change in the next few decades. We are taken to various places in the world where we see the devastating effects of climate change, the most moving being the death of over 20 million citizens of India during a climate change caused heat wave. We are told stories of refugees and of the scientists trying to understand and mitigate climate change. We follow Mary, the head of the Ministry of the Future, the UN agency charged with the world's response. and along the way we are shown how, potentially, we can survive this disaster.
This book is like Robinson's Mars Trilogy, but the subject is the terraforming of Earth to overcome climate change. It is a masterpiece of organization and complexity management and is perhaps the crowning achievement of Robinson's career. And that is saying something.
This is an important book, read it.
Interestingly described solutions for hard environmental and economic problems. Down to earth and yet sophisticated and extremely knowledgeable. Great prose structure.
Buried deep in this polemic (and don't get me wrong, I totally agree with the point being made) is a sweet story about a woman (a very successful woman who runs the Ministry for the Future, which isn't really a Ministry) looking for love. If my book club hadn't chosen it to read this month I might very well have given up on this one, something I almost never do.
Probably worth a listen, but I definitely struggled through it and just finished it for the sake of finishing. I wish it had continued the way it had started with the immersion in the real experience of going through climate crises. There were some interesting concepts here and there, but mostly not much i felt i could grab on to through what started to feel like overly optimistic day dreaming.
Choppy, clumsy, preachy. Narrated in multiple voices and styles, all of which felt discordant: sometimes third-person, sometimes first (including a few weird short chapters told from the POV of a photon or carbon atom, often in the form of riddles). Platonic dialogs; lectures on economics; utopian manifestos; historical-ish chronicles; all of them totally failing at exposition and context. Today—the day I finished the book—happens to be 11 September 2022, so an analogy seems apt: his chronicling feels as if someone in 2022 were to write “The world of 2001 was different. Everyone was going about their business, then one day three or four airplanes got hijacked and deliberately flown into civilian targets. That really shook people up.” Nobody writes that way: you don't interject universally-known background. I know it's hard to bring a reader up to speed, but this isn't how you do it: as a reader, I want to be treated as a participant in a journey, not speeched at like a visitor on a McFactory tour. Most of the book was like that, and it always jarred me out of the story.
I think the world of Robinson. In interviews he comes off as a remarkable human. I love what he tried to do here, love many of his ideas (technological, geoengineering, geopolitical, cultural, economic). I would love to imagine the world of 2040 as he describes it, with only tens of millions of climate deaths, with societies coming together and working toward minimizing the damage. Maybe this book will reach a few young people who will then make that happen? I can hope. But I also hedge my bets, and remain infinitely thankful that my children will never have to suffer through the coming years.
Thought provoking and interesting, but heavy handed in pushing author's ideology with plenty of strawmen.
What an incoherent hodgepodge of ideas and concepts. I tried to finish and failed more than 5 times. This book is a waste of time and money.