The Ministry for the Future

Señor Rolando reviewed The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

Super Idee. Super schlecht zu lesen.

1 star

Hier geht um die großen Themen unserer Zeit geht: Klimawandel, Korruption, politisches Versagen, Demokratieuntergang, Hang zur Gewalt als Ausdrucks- und Gestaltungsmittel. Alles drin, alles dran.

Aber wie. Einen nachvollziehbaren Erzählstrang gibt es nicht. Einen Plot? Gibt es nicht. Statt dessen gibt es viel meinungsschwangeren Info-Dump. Dieser wird so unstrukturiert dargeboten wie ein Manuskriptentwurf. Es fühlt sich beim Umblättern an wie eine Sammlung von Schulaufsätzen.

Dieses Buch wollte mal eine gut erzählte Geschichte in Romanform werden, hat aber leider die entscheidenden Überarbeitungsschritte nicht bekommen.

Das ist kurz vor unlesbar. Leider. Es ist sehr schade um die Themen.

moving to outside.ofa.dog reviewed The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

Gets a lot right, but with some painful blind spots

3 stars

Content warning Spoilers for the whole book; references to disturbing content

I read this over a few months with an in-person book club, and it was a great choice for that because it has a lot to discuss. It opens with an incredibly harrowing description of the sort of heat wave disaster that the world hasn't seen yet but I think is plausible not far in the future. And from there it basically follows three interwoven threads: * The UN establishes a climate change super-org that gets dubbed the "Ministry for the Future" because its official name is far too unwieldy government-speak * India decides after the heatwave that it can't afford to wait for the world to get its shit together, and starts going it alone on geoengineering, to global consternation but also spurring some more serious action from other parties * The character from whose point of view we saw the disaster is very deeply scarred by the experience and devotes the rest of his life to climate action by any means necessary

In true KSR style, the book is very long on research and loving descriptions of places (mostly Switzerland this time; he's made me want to visit Zurich), and relatively short on three-dimensional characters. I think this one does a better job with the characters than Red Mars, because he picked a couple (Frank and Mary) to focus on and managed to bring those to life somewhat, while letting others just be functions in the story. But it's definitely still his weak point as a writer.

The book goes through a grim ride, in which there's a lot more loss, and it takes a huge amount of work and delay to get to meaningful global action. All of which seems sadly realistic to me. I think KSR's also right that in the end the levers will be social and financial system changes, not some amazing new technology. But his proposal for those changes feels weirdly credulous about Bitcoin, and thin on details about how it would actually achieve its social objectives - which would be fine for a straight work of fiction, but is jarring compared to how much deep research there clearly is in the climate system and technology parts of the story.

It eventually leads to a sort of optimistic conclusion, a somewhat believable scenario of humanity living within its means at last, and some aspects of that vision being genuinely appealing. But that end state has two glaring omissions which ultimately detracted a lot from the book for me.

One is that there's been a triumph of this "half Earth" movement about physically limiting human habitation to half of the land surface, to rewild the rest. But... everywhere habitable is someone's ancestral land. What happened to those people? Were they consulted, compensated, persuaded, or moved along yet again? And most of those ecosystems' stable pre-industrial states were ones of dynamic equilibrium actively maintained by humans - simply withdrawing wouldn't do what this book seems to assume it will.

The other is that there's this lovely vision of long haul travel being done by boat and airship, which in turn is practical because people get to work on their laptops. Which would be great for me! But what's a plumber supposed to do? I can only be so happy about a future in which migrants' ability to see our families is contingent on us having remote work compatible jobs. And the way that's not discussed left me feeling like KSR had only really thought about this future for himself.

Robert Fromont reviewed The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

Somehow both harrowingly realistic and implausibly optimistic

4 stars

The Ministry for the Future follows the history of the eponymous ministry created by the UN in 2025 to represent the interests of future people when addressing #ClimateChange; given that the solutions to climate change will take effect over hundreds of years, so don't immediately benefit the current generations, the ministry would speak for future generations in order to ensure long-term thinking is applied.

The novel has three main characters: Frank, who we meet in the first traumatising chapter, is an American relief worker, and the only survivor of an Indian town struck by a devastating heatwave that wipes out millions. Frank suffers the rest of his ruined life with acute PTSD, which drives him ever more desperately find ways to avoid such a catastrophe from repeating. Early in the novel, it spurs him to actions that introducing us to the second main character:

Mary, an Irish lifetime diplomat, is …

The Ministry for the Future follows the history of the eponymous ministry created by the UN in 2025 to represent the interests of future people when addressing #ClimateChange; given that the solutions to climate change will take effect over hundreds of years, so don't immediately benefit the current generations, the ministry would speak for future generations in order to ensure long-term thinking is applied.

The novel has three main characters: Frank, who we meet in the first traumatising chapter, is an American relief worker, and the only survivor of an Indian town struck by a devastating heatwave that wipes out millions. Frank suffers the rest of his ruined life with acute PTSD, which drives him ever more desperately find ways to avoid such a catastrophe from repeating. Early in the novel, it spurs him to actions that introducing us to the second main character:

Mary, an Irish lifetime diplomat, is the Minister for the Future, a role that make her a target for activists from both sides of the climate struggle, and requires her to assemble and coordinate a team to establish legal standing for future generations, and promote solutions that protect them.

The novel interleaves short chapters between Frank and Mary and the third main character: The Situation Itself. This unusual character's chapters are either extremely short whom-am-I riddles that impart a set of disparate but germane concepts, or they are vignettes told from the perspective of unnamed witnesses to some aspect of climate change's effects or solutions.

Appreciating that the story is global, vast, and epic helps to understand that this apparently scattershot narration style is a cleverly devised mechanism (and maybe the only way) to ensure that the novel includes everything needed to grasp the problem and its solutions. Indeed, in parts it's so saturated that it reads like a draft of a #CliFi novel, with long lists and shorthand notes, that was rushed to print before some of the chapters were fleshed out, and maybe before some of the events played out in reality!

The novel is somehow both harrowingly realistic and implausibly optimistic, in that some of the manifold solutions involve changes that just seem impossible to achieve. But Robinson already understands my pessimism and dread:

"... the order of your time feels unjust and unsustainable and yet massively entrenched, but also falling apart before your eyes. The obvious contradictions in this list might yet still describe the feeling of your time quite accurately…"

On reflection, although it may be naive, it's also possible the exact formula we need in order to confront inexorable, nonfictional climate change that is definitely already arriving.