The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Review by Dave Gamrath
Book Review:
Many nonfiction books describe current and coming dangers of climate change. In The Ministry for the Future, author Kim Stanley Robinson uses the genre of science fiction to thoroughly educate his readers on climate change. Stanley Robinson uses multiple styles of writing, in over one hundred short chapters, to cover many topics directly and indirectly related to climate change. Stanley Robinson successfully ties science together with key elements of our society, allowing him to predict how things may play out over the next few decades.
The story begins with a severe heat wave in India, occurring within the next few years. Protagonist Frank May, an American volunteer at a local clinic, tries but fails to save people from essentially being baked to death. The heat wave is massive, and kills twenty million Indians. Frank manages to survive, and dedicates himself to fighting climate change. India is shocked into becoming a global leader towards climate action, beginning with using geoengineering to release aerosols in the atmosphere to scatter sunlight back to space. Indians demand a new government to focus on addressing climate action.
The book’s title comes from an international agency created in 2025 to “defend all living creatures present and future”, called the Ministry for the Future. The books’ second protagonist, Mary Murphy, heads the agency. Without real power, the agency initially struggles to force change, but as climate disasters worsen, the agency begins to have some success. Stanley Robinson uses the role of the agency to introduce many ideas that may help civilization survive climate change. Examples include pumping water out from underneath glaciers and spraying that water back onto the top of the glaciers so it refreezes. This stops glacial melt, and thus stops the flooding of coastlines. Another big idea introduced is the creation of a carbon coin; a digital currency, disbursed on proof of carbon sequestration, which effectively bases money on a carbon standard. Stanley Robinson goes into extensive detail on how these ideas would work, as well as the struggles it would take to implement them. The agency must do battle with the world’s most powerful institutions, including major governments, fossil fuel companies, and financial institutions. Stanley Robinson seems to make an extra effort to show just how powerful and destructive global banking institutions have become. He also makes some fairly credible leaps as to how fossil fuel companies can be redirected away from emitting CO2 towards sequestering it, as well as getting them to play other key roles with climate action. The agency introduces other big ideas, such as crafting a refugee plan to create global citizenship, and creating a “Half Earth” movement to essentially establish half of the planet as protected for animals.
As Stanley Robinson introduces multiple climate-driven disasters, the outrageous-sounding solutions seem more and more doable, and urgent. As the book progresses, and the planet gets hotter, we face our insurance system collapsing, cities being wiped out in massive floods, killer heat waves, and hundreds of millions of climate refugees. As Stanley Robinson puts it, civilization “is on the brink”, and “until climate was actually killing them, people had a tendency to deny it could happen.” But when disaster repeatedly hits home, people finally support action.
The book includes some pretty dark possibilities, such as a highly organized, violent pushback against the world’s biggest polluters. Led by survivors of India’s deadly heat wave, the proponents of violence use technology – mainly drones – to bring down airplanes, sink ships, spread Mad Cow disease to force people to stop eating beef, destroy dirty powerplants, and to continually attack the superrich who are burning the most fossil fuels. Stanley Robinson invents high-tech weapons that could make these attacks feasible. These attacks, combined with climate disasters, push climate action forward.
Stanley Robinson provides the reader with a wealth of potential climate solutions. Some are expected, such as the use of many forms of clean energy and carbon-negative agriculture. Others inspire imagination, such as fleets of sailing ships with sails that capture energy from the sun to help power them, as well as electric aircraft and fleets of airships (electric blimps). The ideas just keep coming throughout the book and provide the reader with inspiration that we possibly can really think our way out of the climate change problem. Honestly, some ideas seem downright crazy, such as staining the Artic Ocean yellow to keep sunlight from penetrating deep into the water, or creating the “Internet of Animals” to avoid species extinction, but Stanley Robinson provides reasonable detail to give the reader a view into how they could happen.
In his many short (one- or two-page) chapters, Stanley Robinson introduces topics that initially may seem unrelated to climate change, such as happiness indexes, narcissism, tax laws, providing legal standing for animals, the impact of discount rates, Modern Monetary Theory, etc. Others deal with topics more directly climate related, such as the brutal experience of living in a refugee camp. These topics show the connection between differing aspects of society, and how they are leading us down a very dangerous pathway.
The Ministry for the Future is actually quite a good novel. The characters are well developed and I found myself strongly rooting for them as their lives evolve throughout the book. The story includes many unexpected twists, keeping the reader engaged. Stanley Robinson tries to balance telling a good story with educating the reader, and leaves us with some important ideas. One is “history goes like this: lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, win”, meaning it may seem daunting, but we can do this if we keep trying. Another is that “there is no such thing as fate”, I.E., our future lies in our own hands. Other insights that Stanley Robinson provides, such as “the status of women is fundamental to the success of any culture”, and that “when everyone in the world has their dignity, we will be all right”, provide us with needed guideposts for climate action. In the end, The Ministry for the Future is and inspiring and hopeful read.
Reviewer Opinion: Well done
Reviewer Rating of Book: Thumb up