Ministry for the Future - Carton of 10 Signed Copies

The first chapter of this book is one of the most brutal and visceral things I have ever read. It describes, from the perspective of the sole survivor in a particular town, a devastating climate change induced heatwave in India that kills 20 million, and in the process, I think, captures the prevailing mood amongst those who understand the urgency of the situation we face.

After that it calms down a bit, and has a quite unusual narrative structure. Some chapters are like snippets of a political manifesto, others are vignettes about unidentified characters and groups and how they are responding to the climate crisis. The main through-line concerns the head of a UN agency, the titular Ministry for the Future, their efforts, and her interactions with the sole survivor I mentioned above, who was radicalised by his experience.

It is more a book about concepts than it is about action or plot. The main concept it explores is what we could probably call Longtermism, if that name hadn't been hijacked by transhumanist tech-bros to justify their disregard of people living today, supposedly in favour of the interests of billions of hypothetical future people, but really in their own selfish interests. In the book, the concept (though unnamed) concerns future generations whose existence is threatened by our actions today. Their interests are defended by the Ministry.

Does the threat represented by climate change to people living today, and the existence of future generations, justify violence? Does it justify geoengineering? This book says yes, and yes. The mass deaths of the heatwave spur action on multiple fronts, including grassroots campaigns of assassinations, bombings of polluting modes of transportation like airplanes and container ships so intense that it makes them economically unviable, black ops campaigns of violence and intimidation by the Ministry, and several massive geoengineering projects to slow sea level rise, reductions in the Earth's albedo, and other things. While we see a lot of the geoengineering stuff up close, it is one of the books weak points that the violence mostly happens in the background, and is all a little too neat and efficient. Even as it threatens the main character's life the players on both sides remain unidentified, and is mostly used as a pretext to justify radical, but technocratic, reforms to the financial system. I think it would have been better if we were down in the trenches a bit more, with a little less abstract villain than the agents of unidentified reactionary fossil capitalists and elites.

Another problem I have with this book is that it is way too enthusiastic about the liberatory potential of blockchain technology. At least it is clear that that potential lies in it being a tool of surveillance to prevent the wealthy from hiding their money and doing whatever they want with it, rather then the sort of digital goldbuggery, private money nonsense that most proponents embrace. But, given what we have seen so far of how it is used in the real world, I have my doubts that it will ever be a tool for anything other than enabling scams, corruption, and wealth concentration.

Overall a very interesting read that is both an intimate exploration of the trauma and anxiety caused by climate change, and a detached and ultimately optimistic analysis of some of the political and technological possibilities for addressing it.

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.