The Ministry For The Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
I would like to thank Nazia and Orbit for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher - Orbit
Published - Out Now
Price - £8.99 paperback £5.49 Kindle eBook
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.
To paraphrase Douglas Adams regards climate change just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think the last year or so have been tough, but that's just peanuts to what happens when our planet gets warmer. We’ve all seen the news, the reports of what happens and yet we seem closer to the deadlines repeated kits a few decades ago. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s powerful and thoughtful The Ministry For The Future we get a story examining why change is so hard but also making the case this is the only way to win.
The story starts with a severe heatwave in India and places us initially with a young aid worker named Frank in the wrong place at the wrong time. The heat destroys power to the city and he and thousands of others congregate in a lake trying to keep cool a lake that ends up warmer than the human body. Frank is the only survivor. Across the giant country millions of others also die. The latest global climate summit while expressing sympathy ultimately does very little to change current plans and help other countries move off oil or prepare for the droughts and increases in water they know are coming but one unusual idea has been created possibly as a PR stunt a small unit formed to represent the generations of the world to come to give them a voice to say the plans we have are not enough and the press nickname this group The Ministry For The Future headed by Mary Murphy. She knows deep down change is needed and a strange encounter with Frank spurs her and her team to actually say it’s time to act. Will the rest of the world do the same?
This is not a great person of history novel this is more akin to a journalism long read. Robinson opts for a truly global story as if we are reading a new paper’s long read of what happened over a twenty year period in the future. Each short chapter explains the science or economics being discussed; gives us the boots on the ground view of farmers, miners, scientists refugees and even disaster survivors as the years go through. Across this then are the policies and actions the Ministry tries to get people on board for.
Robinson succeeds first in making the read undertand the scale of climate change - why 35 degree heat at the tropics is going to be deadly, destroy food chains and lead to more refugees. We get to realise exactly how much water one glacier contains and then realise what the Antarctic shelf melting actually would result in. It’s sobering and the approach used is powerful and as we rotate across the globe makes us realise this isn’t a small problem a few countries need to fix alone.
What makes this stand out though in climate science fiction is the way that Robinson then explores why no one is acting not just a few useless politicians but ultimately it’s the economy and specifically it’s focus on short term profit. The story examines the faulty human logic that the future will always be better even if we don’t do anything to make it that way and it challenges the idea the costs to stop it are too high when you realise the benefit is the trillion and trillions of dollars a livable planet for the future gives us in benefits.
Although this isn’t a short read I continually came back to find out how the world Robinson created changed. The tension is less action scenes and more discussions or people dealing with natural disasters. Robinson notes some will want more drastic action and in some scenes it could be seen the Ministry created it’s own black ops division to attack those willing to get in the way or send some pointed messages to industry and it’s users but for a lot of the book it’s the art of persuasion that ultimately there are no other viable actions.
Robinson gives us change on epic scales - the way global financial systems can be changed to encourage good behaviour. Moving to safer methods of power for vehicles; changing agricultural landscapes and attacking the dark lords of the internet barons and wealthy horsing far too much. We slowly see the changes tart to take hold and Robinson argues such change actually may help the whole world with a e continue model that was already on its last legs. A more co-operative based world is this novel’s war-cry. It’s a fascinating novel that always makes you think and look at our world itself differently.
The story is not a blueprint for change but it is very much saying the future isn’t yet sealed. We watch the Ministry change minds and this is very much you need hundred of ideas and thousands possibly millions working together to try and stop it - the ideas on technology, power, money and local democracy though are good at explaining what’s in the way of change and we don’t really have any other options anymore.
The story has a few weaknesses we see The Minstry characters more as people in offices and Robinson didn’t really make many of the characters come alive but the journalistic approach here works we get impressions of people but the focus is on wider world changes. In one chapter Robinson thinks we may finally see Hong Kong change for the better but it has clearly been written before the recent changes in 2020 making those paragraphs bittersweet to read. Despite those minor issues though it’s a compulsive read for me.
The Ministry for the Future will not give you flowing action and a found family saving the world. What it will do is give you the science fiction that talks of ideas. It is talking about the near future but it’s 2021 in its sights. These issues are all around and will happen without change. It does though strongly believe we can change our ways because humans are clever and can work together. It’s quietly angry, focused and hopeful all in one long read and something once you do read it will be thinking about it for a long time afterwards. Highly recommended!
