A rambling yarn of a novel. The Ministry for the Future had neither the interesting narrative nor the too-real characters of his earlier Science in the Capital cli-fi series (starting with Forty Signs of Rain.) I got the impression that Robinson wanted to write an uplifting nonfiction survey book, in the vein of the Whole Earth Catalog or Worldchanging, but didn't for reasons unknown.

The biggest loss here is the squandered opportunity that the character of Frank represented. There was so much potential to turn him into the kind of protagonist that could drive the plot of the book, pulling in the quiet and solid Mary Murphy to enable and activate her leadership skills. Instead, Frank shows up randomly and sometimes semi-anonymously as a personification of the damage that climate change can inflict on people, only to die of a cancer that is stated to be unrelated to his trauma. Frank's ignominious death is not the only wasted opportunity. Two other important secondary characters are killed off with a similar lack of impact on anything resembling a plot.

This is not one of KSR's better books. If you are interested in his cli-fi/hopepunk novels, start with Forty Signs of Rain (more recently published in an omnibus collection, Green Earth) or with New York 2140.