576 pages
English language
Published Dec. 13, 2020 by Orbit.
The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year, this extraordinary novel from visionary science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson will change the way you think about the climate crisis.
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR
“The best science-fiction nonfiction novel I’ve ever read.” —Jonathan Lethem
"If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future." —Ezra Klein (Vox)
"One hopes that this book is read widely—that Robinson’s audience, already large, grows by an order of magnitude. Because the point of his books is …
The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year, this extraordinary novel from visionary science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson will change the way you think about the climate crisis.
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR
“The best science-fiction nonfiction novel I’ve ever read.” —Jonathan Lethem
"If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future." —Ezra Klein (Vox)
"One hopes that this book is read widely—that Robinson’s audience, already large, grows by an order of magnitude. Because the point of his books is to fire the imagination."―New York Review of Books
"If there’s any book that hit me hard this year, it was Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, a sweeping epic about climate change and humanity’s efforts to try and turn the tide before it’s too late." ―Polygon (Best of the Year)
"Masterly." —New Yorker
"[The Ministry for the Future] struck like a mallet hitting a gong, reverberating through the year ... it’s terrifying, unrelenting, but ultimately hopeful. Robinson is the SF writer of my lifetime, and this stands as some of his best work. It’s my book of the year." —Locus
"Science-fiction visionary Kim Stanley Robinson makes the case for quantitative easing our way out of planetary doom." ―Bloomberg Green
Source: Publisher
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.
This is the story of how to intentionally expand the fissures in capitalism's skin so it bleeds out and eventually dies. It's not utopian. It's about as violent as I imagine it will need to be. Its concerns are a whole planet affair and not centered on the west. It definitely doesn't skimp on the economics. The solutions are thrilling to entertain and on the whole it's a pretty hopeful story. It doesn't lean in only one direction either-containing everything from collective living, science, banking, industry, activism, violence, murder, and blimps (errr, sorry, I mean airships).
To me this felt a bit like a left-wing Ayn Rand book: it purports to take place in the real world, but people and the world in the book work just differently enough that it's practically impossible to gain insights about it about the real world - supposedly one of the book's goals.
Oh, and the author verbed "blockchain". Ugh.
Loved it. It is desperate and bleak at first, but it offers some hope. Sometimes it is vague, yes, and perhaps a bit overly optimistic, but I enjoyed a reasonable vision of a livable (maybe even desirable) future adapting and minimising the worst effects of climate change. A world where humanity finds a balance and respect for our biosphere.
I do wish it featured indigenous voices and characters more than it does, but otherwise, it does raise some interesting ideas and possible paths for our immediate future.
The first 1/3 landed really well, but it started falling apart quickly after that. First KSR I've read, and I had "hard scifi" expectations for characterization, but there was still some corny stuff.
But despite the awkward anonymous first person chapters and uncomfortable Switzerland fetishization I think it succeeds at its primary goal: envisioning a collaborative utopian approach to realistic climate change impacts.
Fascinating idea, and plot. 10/10 in the first half. Loved the way the author unfolds the first decades. Also loved some of the very technical but also very well explained solutions proposed. Disappointed but not disagreeing that we will need increasingly negative incentives alongside leadership and economic invectives to tackle climate change. My interest in the book dropped significantly towards the end, but if you think about it it's an extremely hard book, plot and story to wrap up.
In principle I should have really enjoyed this, but it was just a good book, not a great one.
KSR has done exactly what he set out to do, and does not deviate from his usual 'apply the technology & investigate deep character driven reactions'. Here he asks the question that ultimately is _the_important one of our times: how exactly do we get ourselves out of this climate mess?
I really can't fault any of this. The characters are interesting, the fact that we get to hear from many of the usually sidelined voices is great, there's a bunch of technology, humanity prevails albeit with a lot of sacrifice. What's not to like in a well written KSR story that follows this standard template?
After a lot of thinking on that I seriously cannot say. 'Nothing is wrong with that' is really the correct answer, but I just don't find …
In principle I should have really enjoyed this, but it was just a good book, not a great one.
KSR has done exactly what he set out to do, and does not deviate from his usual 'apply the technology & investigate deep character driven reactions'. Here he asks the question that ultimately is _the_important one of our times: how exactly do we get ourselves out of this climate mess?
I really can't fault any of this. The characters are interesting, the fact that we get to hear from many of the usually sidelined voices is great, there's a bunch of technology, humanity prevails albeit with a lot of sacrifice. What's not to like in a well written KSR story that follows this standard template?
After a lot of thinking on that I seriously cannot say. 'Nothing is wrong with that' is really the correct answer, but I just don't find myself enjoying this one as much as something like the Mars trilogy or Aurora. Maybe this one is just too close to home for comfort?
ok even as somebody who would be predisposed to liking this book (as a student of bureacracies, etc) this was a trash fire
also, goddamn blockchain is used as a solution for money laundering, lmao.
What a magnificent, epic, hopeful, joyful book. It starts with a catastrophe - an extrapolation of climate change and the very dark places it might lead us - but then takes us on an exploration of how we might deal with it. It’s an informed celebration of invention, resolve, and the human spirit. If I have a criticism, it’s that it sometimes is too utopian, but what a change that makes. This is hard economic science fiction, and yet, one of the most human books I’ve ever read.
It's hard to believe that KSR has been making me think and entertaining me for 35 years now, but it is definitely true. From his California trilogy in the 1980s to the Mars trilogy in the 1990s, to his alternate history "The Years of Salt and Rice," Mr. Robinson has been able to transport readers to so many other worlds and times it's impressive that he can continue to surprise. The Ministry for the Future starts just a few years in the future, is rooted in centuries of human disregard for the environment, and shows a plausible - if difficult - path to a better future. And it's a great story besides. I want to live in his world.
Suitably KSR, this is dry, procedural, deep, a montage of near future heroic and tragic efforts between a few human threads of lived-experience-if-not-plot. I was anticipating optimism, technological and human spirit, and that's all here but not as much as struggling with the absolute and relative violences and deaths of current delay on climate response, of terrorism and surveillance and refugee camps and wealth. And plenty of meetings. A lot of thinking about the scale of actions necessary, and great essays on where exactly we are stuck.
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, …
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, but I always feel fully engaged.
This is also probably the most not-novel-y of his novels in that there's a couple of recurring characters running through the book but a ton of it's just first-person unnamed narration of events happening around the world. Someone describing a drought, a refugee describing a camp, a miner describing the nationalization of his mine. One very weird and fun chapter from the point of view of actual carbon.
Best novel I've read this year. How to solve the climate crisis .
