The Ministry for the Future

This is KSR's roadmap to how we might avoid total climate disaster in the coming decades. I say avoid, yet many hundreds of thousands of people die during the course of the book. Grimly, this is the optimistic view. The pessimistic one is much worse. The book engages with politics, global finance, geo engineering, technology, sociology and constructive terrorism to offer a path to a twenty second century Earth that is in much better shape than she is at the moment. There is a framing narrative around the formation and work of the titular Ministry, led by Mary Murphy, the closest thing to a main character there, but really it's a collage novel. There are short discursive interludes from all kinds of viewpoints, and the plentiful chapters hop between viewpoints and locations to give a global picture. It's a good read, with some fine writing - the opening chapter is particularly effective. I do worry that some of the obstacles to Robinson's ideas are overcome too easily. It's a long way from Trump and Johnson to even the 2025 actions depicted in this book, and that's before we get to the destruction of capital a decade or two further down the line. It's going to be a long hard road, but this gives us the hope that it might be worth walking.