Ministry for the Future

What would a worldwide, lasting revolution look like? What would be the obstacles and what tactics would be needed to overcome them? How are we going to survive climate change? These are the themes Kim Stanley Robinson tackles in his 570-page cli-fi novel THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE.

The narrative is disjointed, with epistolary chapters placed throughout. If you roll with it, it works well. You get a well-researched, fairly well-rounded picture across class, power, and geography. The format makes for a clever way to introduce details that otherwise might not fit into a traditional narrative. I also appreciate the global perspective of this book. The U.S. is not at the center at all, and is critiqued heavily and fairly.

THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE envisions a world that includes the Half-Earth concept as one of its solutions to combat climate change. Half of the planet would be reserved exclusively for nature; the other half for humans, centered in sustainable cities. It sounds plausible in the novel, but I had this nagging, bad feeling about it. I kept thinking, you're never going to get 100% compliance on that, no matter how many incentives you offer. And we have a terrible history of forcing Indigenous peoples off their land. Nowhere in the book is that addressed and, so far, what I'm reading about Half-Earth doesn't assuage my concerns.

So, I'm feeling meh about this novel. When I was able to believe it, its hopefulness felt inspiring and relieved some of my fears. When cynicism (reality?) got the best of me, I had to set it aside for a bit, which is why it took me so long to finish it. Plus, I have major problems with a top-down approach that is just repackaged state power claiming to be a solution. (Obama loving this book should have been a red flag for me.) But this is science fiction. It doesn't have to actually solve anything. There were plenty of moments where the book imagines creative ways to forge ahead, and for that, I'm glad I read it, even if I'm probably not going to pick up another Kim Stanley Robinson book in the future.

Choppy, clumsy, preachy. Narrated in multiple voices and styles, all of which felt discordant: sometimes third-person, sometimes first (including a few weird short chapters told from the POV of a photon or carbon atom, often in the form of riddles). Platonic dialogs; lectures on economics; utopian manifestos; historical-ish chronicles; all of them totally failing at exposition and context. Today—the day I finished the book—happens to be 11 September 2022, so an analogy seems apt: his chronicling feels as if someone in 2022 were to write “The world of 2001 was different. Everyone was going about their business, then one day three or four airplanes got hijacked and deliberately flown into civilian targets. That really shook people up.” Nobody writes that way: you don’t interject universally-known background. I know it’s hard to bring a reader up to speed, but this isn’t how you do it: as a reader, I want to be treated as a participant in a journey, not speeched at like a visitor on a McFactory tour. Most of the book was like that, and it always jarred me out of the story.

I think the world of Robinson. In interviews he comes off as a remarkable human. I love what he tried to do here, love many of his ideas (technological, geoengineering, geopolitical, cultural, economic). I would love to imagine the world of 2040 as he describes it, with only tens of millions of climate deaths, with societies coming together and working toward minimizing the damage. Maybe this book will reach a few young people who will then make that happen? I can hope. But I also hedge my bets, and remain infinitely thankful that my children will never have to suffer through the coming years.

The Ministry for the Future is a decent book exploring a relatively optimistic future where we as a species are able to adapt to climate change without significantly disrupting modern civilisation. It explores a scenario where the UN, in symbiosis with increasingly militant eco-terrorist, is able to enact policy that significantly curtails both state and capital in such a way that it can ensure a relatively smooth transition to a sustainable post-capitalist future.
As for the story, parts are well written and most of the characters are at least somewhat engaging. At the same time, it is clear that the characters are mere devices for the utopian speculations and subordinated to the “idea” of the book. The book thus remains trapped within its genre as a “novel of ideas” where more general literary qualities are secondary to the “point”: that an ecological non-capitalist modernity is possible.
While the lacklustre literary qualities lower my overall impressions with the book they could be forgiven if the point was more convincing. My main critique of the book is that it is both too utopian and to trapped within what I, with Mark Fishers overused term, would call “capitalist realism”. It’s limits as a utopia is that institutes such as the state and the value-form remain post capitalism, it is unable to portray a future where such heteronomous institutions can be completely overcome. Furthermore, it is utopian in the sense that anthropogenic climate change can be overcome smoothy through largely technocratic means, while at the same time catering to some form of increased democratisation.
While this review has been largely negative, I would still argue that the book is well worth the read. In my case not as inspiration, rather the opposite, as an exploration of the limits of modern civilisation and how it despite the authors intent still appears as a world that still limits human autonomy and a complete sublation, the magical word aufhebung comes to my mind, of the nature-culture divide.