User Profile

I enjoyed reading The Ministry for the Future, but if this is the best current utopian fiction we have, we're in trouble. This does not help us imagine realistic positive outcomes to the climate crisis. Robinson correctly diagnoses the threats we face and immerses the reader in a very plausible near future. Unfortunately, any happy ending feels unearned as the world is essentially saved through magic, as humans/society respond in vanishingly unlikely ways.

What makes the happy ending unsatisfying is that there is no villain who is defeated. There isn't even organized opposition to the good guys. Ridiculous! How unopposed were the heroes? Well, at one point The Ministry for the Future's offices are bombed, and this adds some suspense; the bad guys aren't going without a fight! Towards the end it is revealed that this was a false flag attack; the black ops wing of the Ministry bombed itself. There is so little organized opposition that the good guys have to manufacture it.

Relatedly, the good guys more or less have a monopoly on violence. The "war for the Earth" is remarkably one-sided. When ecoterrorists/ecopartisans destroy fossil fuel airplanes and cargo ships, the perpetrators are never found, and they continue to destroy property and lives unhindered. When the ecopartisans can't be found, conventional world powers do not respond by declaring war on a random country as a scapegoat. In fact, no conventional wars are fought at all (good thing, since any serious war would prevent international cooperation to curb emissions at this crucial moment). Rather than doubling down on fossil fuels in response, the powers that be do what the ecoterrorists want, and stop operating fossil fuel airplanes / ships.

One excuse offered for why conventional wars are not fought is that cheap drones make conventional war machines like aircraft carriers and tanks obsolete. I cannot believe that this would prevent war, because this assumes (a) militaries would recognize their machines are obsolete, and (b) they would not do anything to adapt. What I think is far more likely is that militaries would prepare for the previous war, and go into battle with undeserved confidence. Other militaries, prescient or observing military defeats, would hold back while they harden their war machines against drones, and then go to war again. I can imagine cheap drones continuing to be effective against soft targets, such as infrastructure like railroads & power lines (can't harden zillions of miles of tracks) or assassinations (especially killing ordinary civilians who do not have security teams). I cannot imagine militaries unable to harden military targets, given time and resources to prepare.

Finally, The Ministry for the Future leans heavily on "carbon coins", a combination of cryptocurrency and carbon offsets. Sadly, in the real world I do not think either cryptocurrency or carbon offsets can be made to work. A project that relies on both of them working, together, is doomed. I'm willing to cut Robinson a little slack for this one, since a few years ago it was less clear that cryptocurrency was entirely scams. Many today still believe it is the future despite everything. The IRL failures of blockchain and carbon offsets are complex and in some ways counterintuitive, even intelligent and well-educated people are fooled.

The failure of bad guys to use violence, however, goes against all of our history, as well as basic human nature. Robinson, and everyone who read his book drafts before publishing, should have seen that this was pure fantasy, not hard SF.

There are a few other disappointments about Robinson's future that he couldn't have helped. Our timeline is already painfully worse than Robinson's timeline. He posits a Russia that is willing and able to cooperate with the world, when Russia's invasion of Ukraine instead suggests Russia's near future is either Putin undermining international cooperation at every turn, or collapsing into a failed state under internal power struggles. I doubt Russia has enough civic resilience left after centuries of oppression to produce a functional state in the immediate future, especially after remaining opposition has fled the country. One chapter also displays a Hong Kong that held on and emerged victorious against Chinese oppression, when in our universe all dissent in Hong Kong has been thoroughly crushed. These optimistic outcomes were plausible when Robinson wrote them, and aren't his fault.

Ultimately, I'm glad I read this book, but I did not come out of it with any new ideas for saving the planet, only lessons on what cannot and will not work. We need some plausible near-future utopian fiction that doesn't handwave away the rise of global fascism, disinformation and disturbingly successful fossil fuel interests. A better future society that successfully addresses the climate crisis will have to do so while grappling with well-funded, ruthless and coordinated opposition, fighting to preserve their capacity to destroy the biosphere.