The Ministry for the Future
Ratings155
Average rating3.8
Loved the first half, second half really dragged. KSR sometimes loses the thread in this and some of his other books, when there's no real A plot.
Man, Kim Stanley Robinson can really write. This was both somber and hopeful, optimistic but realistic.
The world of the near future, fighting climate change over the next couple decades, as told through the eyes of several protagonists. Among them Mary, who leads the Swiss-based Ministry for the Future, and Frank, one of the few survivors of a devastating heat wave that killed 20 million. The solutions and problems they encounter while attempting to save the planet are very grounded in our socioeconomic reality, and sometimes feel like a nonfiction blueprint of ideas. There's a cryptocurrency tied to carbon sequestering - carbonCoin. There's climate-motivated bombing of planes, causing a widespread and convenient fear of flying. There are initiatives to return half the planet to wildlife - Half Earth.
I think I appreciated the idea behind the book more than I enjoyed the flow of it. But, I did have a big smile on my face when I realized that this is a hopeful book, presenting us with a happy ending, telling us that it'll be hard and difficult, but that ultimately we'll get there.
This book gets filed under “books that changed how I see the world.” And I honestly think that the more people who read this, the better our odds of having a future worth fighting for.
It's not an easy read. It gets into the weeds about topics from sociology and glaciology to economics and monetary theory. In fact, at times it felt more like non-fiction than fiction. And the style this book is written in takes a little getting used to, but the effect it had was pretty undeniable for me.
To sum up the book in a sentence: Regarding climate change and global inequities, things are obviously going to get worse, but then they CAN get better - must get better - and it is possible using tools that already exist combined with a sufficient amount of collective will power and gulp bureaucracy!
And I believe it. The future of Earth doesn't have to be a drowning burning dystopia with capitalist rulers pitting poor people against each other in death games. My hypothetical grandkids MIGHT just live in a better world than I do. We just have to buckle down and make things like government and scientific advice mean something again.
Also, I want to visit Switzerland now...
The is novel about the the rest of our lives.
It is a history of the next few decades, that focuses around a “the Ministry of the Future” an organization set up to implement the Paris climate agreement. The novel is based in Zurich, but shifts around the world from catastrophic heat wave, to revolutions, terrorism, strikes, to ‘carbon quantiative easing' and a transformation of central banking.
In reality, the global economy is eroding nature and destablizing the climate, pushing the world towards catastrophe. Humanity needs to change our civilization, substantially, to help us start building a liveable planet, for all.
KSR's novel sketches a possible transition towards such a society is therefore, pretty unique, well written, and essential. I didn't like some of the banking sections, which I didn't find convincing or engaging, but the overall goal of the book compensates for these flaws for me.
While I found the book too negative in parts, and widely optimistic in others, this type of near future novel is incredibly engaging, and provoking explores a possible pathways out of our current crisis.
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.