The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Kim Stanley Robinson is an acclaimed science fiction writer best-known for his multi award-winning Mars trilogy (1992-1996).
Or at least that’s how his profile used to read until a few years ago. I think these days he is even better known for The Ministry for the Future, which came out in 2020 when the world was still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic. The book has since won multiple awards, albeit rather different ones from the usual set of Hugo, Nebula and Locus that Robinson receive for his works. He has also won a whole new readership, including world leaders and climate activists who normally don’t have time for sci-fi as the world careens towards an all too real catastrophe. According to the cover blurb, it was one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2020. I discovered this book through climate-related podcasts. The book doesn’t feel like a sci-fi novel. These days climate fiction, or cli-fi, is considered a genre on its own, and this book is cited as an example. I would describe this novel as a fictionalised but very plausible depiction of what awaits us – and is almost upon us.
The story starts in 2025, when a catastrophic heat wave hits India and kills millions of people. Just before that, the first stock-take at the annual COP climate summit looks so bad that the world agrees to create a new subsidiary body for implementation of the Paris Agreement, which comes to be known as the Ministry for the Future. The story revolves around two protagonists: Frank May, a young American survivor of the Indian heat wave deeply traumatised by the experience; and Mary Murphy, a middle-aged Irish woman who heads the Ministry.
Set primarily in Zurich (where the Ministry is located) but spanning the globe, the sprawling story – comprising over a hundred but mostly short chapters – jumps from one perspective to another through the eyes of different narrators as it charts the struggles of Frank and Mary. Their world looks and feels familiar, with all the seemingly immovable obstacles getting in the way of what needs to be done to avert the impending doom. We read the Ministry’s minutes of meetings recording the team’s frustration as they hit brick walls whichever way they turn. We witness extreme weather events and their consequences (some negative, some positive), Davos and COP meetings, refugees arriving in Europe, geoengineering experiments, attempts to stop Antarctic glaciers breaking off, acts of eco-terrorism and civil disobedience, assassination attempts and bombings. Then things start changing slowly, through means fair and foul, organic and technocratic.
Ultimately, it is a hopeful story – the carbon dioxide level plateaus and then starts ticking down towards the end, decades after the foundation of the Ministry, and we get a glimpse of a possible future where we may be able to live in a different, more sustainable way. It’s a work of fiction, but it feels like a blueprint too, of how we too might be able to save ourselves in this nonfictional world. The starting point of the story was in the near future when it was written, but it’s almost present now, and this present is starting to look just as terrifying as in the novel. Can we get our act together and have our own version of the Ministry for the Future, perhaps?