Last week, I finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘The Ministry for the Future’, a remarkable book in many ways. This review first appeared as a thread on Twitter/Mastodon (and is thus organised into sentences rather than paragraphs).
I’m not a big sci-fi reader, but this CliFi speculative fiction work had me gripped from start to finish. I guess it might fit into the solarpunk genre (which I’ve recently discovered) too, at least the hopeful parts in some ways.
For the unfamiliar, the book centres around a new UN agency set up in the wake of the Paris Agreement in a time of runaway global climate change and how they are charged with protecting the interests of the people of the future.
It came out shortly before the Pandemic, so it was a little strange seeing a vision of the present and immediate future in which Covid19 hadn’t happened.
However, given the extreme weather events of recent years, it painted a very plausible picture of how events might unfold over the next few decades and some of the social, political, economic and environmental changes we might come to see in the rest of my lifetime.
Parts of it are irrepressibly bleak, like the wet bulb heat wave that opens the book. Other parts felt quite hopeful, like the slow solar-powered airships touring over the Earth’s surface and alighting on places of interest.
The book raises the prospect of humans still not taking global temperature rises seriously enough and so finding ourselves at times having to deploy major feats of geoengineering (and socio-geoengineering, if that’s even a thing).
In one example, scientists experiment with and ultimately enact an initiative to refreeze parts of Antarctica. In another example, the ‘Half Earth project’, humans are moved out of great swathes of the Earth, which are then devoted to animal corridors, enabling biodiversity to re-establish itself.
The world that Robinson builds also asks profound questions about capitalism itself, as our economies go through decades of economic slumps and crashes, the extremely wealthy are targeted as culpable in climate change, and a blockchain-based new currency becomes the dominant currency.
Because transactions are ultimately traceable, that means that things like the stockpiling of offshore wealth that we take for granted today largely becomes a thing of the past.
Thinking beyond capitalism is a hard thing to do in many cases, but Robinson makes a very plausible attempt at sketching out what post-capitalism might look like. Trade still happens, but there are more co-operatives and less competition, over time.
Some books stand out from others on the shelf as they take very different approaches to most books. ‘A Clockwork Orange’ was like this as Burgess had invented his own language for the narrator to use (some kind of mixture of English, Russian and street slang, if I recall).
This made the book quite difficult to read at first, as you couldn’t understand a lot of what was being said. I finally picked it up in the end when I read it, and found the next book I read (in normal English) really strange having gotten used to Burgess’s mongrel prose.
I once had a book by an Argentinian writer (‘Hopscotch’ by Cortázar) where you could read the chapters in different sequences of order. I could barely get started with it. The fundamental logic of the medium of a book to me is to read it in a linear fashion — from cover to cover.
Some languages (eg Japanese) have their books as to be read right to left, which feels backwards for an English reader. But there’s still a linearity to that, just in a different direction.
‘Ministry for the Future’ has over 100 chapters and many/most of them are told by different narrators, a lot of whom we never hear from again. However, there are central characters that are woven throughout the story, so the overall narrative retains a coherent structure throughout.
This had a very useful effect towards creating a whole literary world, rather than just one viewed through the eyes of a small subset of characters. The strange thing is that it’s our world too, just one that gets radically changed by the actions and events of the book.
The other new thing for me with this book was reading it as a Kindle edition, but on the Kindle app. This meant I could read it in larger format on the iPad when I had time and space, and I could switch to the pocket version on the iPhone when more confined.
I wasn’t 100% comfortable with the notion of my place in a book being a data point on a remote server somewhere, which would never happen with a paper book, but it was ever so convenient to have it open on the right page whichever device I picked up.
‘The Ministry for the Future’ then — both a warning of and a guidebook to our possible future, as the carbon continues ticking upwards.
