The Ministry for the Future

Paperback, 563 pages

English language

Published June 21, 2021 by Orbit.

ISBN:
978-0-316-30014-8
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4 stars (25 reviews)

Established in 2025, the purpose of the new organization was simple: To advocate for the world's future generations and to protect all living creatures, present and future. It soon became known as the Ministry for the Future, and this is its story.

From legendary science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson comes a vision of climate change unlike any ever imagined.

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 …

8 editions

just because bill gates and obama like it that doesn't mean its bad, i fucking promise

4 stars

This book is brave (derogatory) in that it is relentlessly unashamed to date itself. Then again, how else do you write about the ongoing end of the world as we know it? look up some CWs about the opening, it's not for the faint of heart, maybe the most harrowing section of literature I have ever read?

Gets a lot right, but with some painful blind spots

3 stars

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

Strong ideas, weak execution

3 stars

There are a lot of ideas in this novel that do bear thinking about but the narrative, heavily reliant on a series of vignettes from the future, feels disjointed to the point that it keeps stumbling over itself. I do like the eventual optimism of the novel, but did find it a bit too reliant on hand-waving and buzzwords for me to really buy into it.

As a novel, The Ministry for the Future felt a lot like an exercise in wasted potential.

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 …

Important but not fully successful artistically

4 stars

Terrifyingly, largely nonfiction. After a very strong, almost shocking opening, it lacks a strong story arc that pulls you through the book, the kaleidoscopic storytelling feeling a bit artificial. But full of interesting, sometimes essential ideas and insights about climate breakdown, the wider socio-economic system and possible solutions. After only two years already somewhat dated, which makes it even more terrifying.

Un livre plutôt optimiste mais assez réaliste

4 stars

J’ai bien aimé.

Le changement climatique devient une évidence… alors qu’est-ce que le monde peut faire ?

Cela m’a semblé plutôt réaliste, avec la prise en compte qu’il ne faut pas que de la technologie mais des changements sociaux profonds pour s’en sortir.

Un livre peut-être trop optimiste, mais parfois cela fait du bien.

C’est une sorte de guide sur ce que nous pourrions faire pour nous en sortir.

Cet épisode longnow.org/seminars/02022/mar/02/climate-futures-beyond-02022/ du podcast "Long Now: Seminars About Long-term Thinking" avec Kim Stanley Robinson parle du livre.

Ehe es besser wird, wird es schlimmer

3 stars

Kim Stanley Robinson beschreibt in The Ministry for the Future, wie die Menschheit mit dem Klimawandel umgeht. Das Buch ist eine Art fiktionale Dokumentation, die zwischen den sporadischen romanhaften Erzählungen der beiden Protagonisten aus Sitzungsprotokollen, Augenzeugenberichten namensloser Ich-Erzähler und Infodumps zu ökonomischen Konzepten und Glaziologie besteht.

Ehe es besser wird, wird es schlimmer. Und besser nur, wenn dafür harte politische Entscheidungen auf globaler Ebene getroffen werden. Schilderungen, wie die zustande kommen, nehmen großen Raum in dem Buch ein. Das trägt zu seinem immensen Realismus bei, was mir gefallen hat.

Dann allerdings gab es einen wirklich großartigen Schlusspunkt in der Erzählung, bei dem ich überzeugt war, dass nach dem Umblättern ein langer Anhang oder ähnliches beginnen würde. Allerdings geht die Geschichte danach noch sehr sehr lange weiter und wurde eher ermüdend und zäh.

Some thoughtfully imagined hope

5 stars

Well-researched vignettes and story lines portray some of the likelyhoods and possibilities the changing climate could dish out. The thorough research doesn't always equal plausibility for me, but I found it educating and probably a much healthier rumination than I can manage on my own. Don't mistake hopeful for utopian, there is no denial that if there going to be hope humanity is going to get it's ass kicked on the way.

Review of 'Ministry for the Future' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

Ambitious and well-informed, but politically and emotionally implausible in key respects. That, of course would hardly be a criticism in much speculative sci-fi (hell, it defines the genre!) but good world-building invites us to embrace certain implausible (or outright ridiculous) foundations, by drawing us into a compelling story or novel vision, hopefully both. Here, alas, the vision far exceeds the power of the underlying stories to draw the reader in, and so the limits of character development and political-institutional simplicities become increasingly grating. Still, things could be (marginally) worse: he could have written Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock instead! :/

Too much blockchain and geoengineering

3 stars

I thought I would enjoy this book a lot more, and it ended up being a bit of a slog towards the end. A lot of the writing is very "stream of consciousness", and there's not much of a plot to speak of.

In terms of finding ideas for addressing climate change, there's too much focus on blockchain and geoengineering. Not really solarpunk.

KSR trying to answer "how to write about/actually respond to climate change"

4 stars

So his answers for both, basically: maximalism. The point he's sort of making is that making the planet safely inhabitable is going to take every tactic and every ideology not necessarily working together but working on some piece of the thing. No one actor gets to be the hero (though I do enjoy that KSR's favorite kind of protagonist remains the middle-aged competent lady technocrat–guy's got a type) and while he's sort of indicating that capitalism as we know it has to die, he's not saying that happens through inevitable worker uprising. Some of it's coercion of central banks and some of it's straight-up guerrilla terrorism. Geoengineering happens at varying scales for better and for worse. Massive economic collapses occur. Millions die. And the point I think from KSR is that's the outcome in his most optimistic take. In general with KSR I don't know if I ever fully agree, …

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Subjects

  • Speculative Fiction
  • Climate Change
  • Politics
  • Environment

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