Review: The Ministry For The Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

This massive cli-fi tome begins in 2025 in northern India. A young US aid worker, Frank May, wakes into an apocalyptic heatwave, 38 degrees Celsius at dawn. Quickly the temperature climbs above the survivable (what’s known as a wet-bulb temperature of 35°C, a deadly combination of heat and humidity). Such temperatures are exceedingly rare in today’s climate, which is unsurprising given that humans exist on Earth, but will become more common as the world warms. There’s some scientific debate about the threshold, and how many people could be exposed, but there’s always the unpredictability of nature (want something new to keep you up at night? Scientists can’t really explain why the past 10 months have been the world’s hottest). In Frank’s case, a couple of days above wet-bulb 35 quickly kills millions of people. He’s one of the few survivors, and leaves India completely broken, to endure a lifetime of PTSD that radicalises him to take extreme measures to prevent the same thing happening again.

This heatwave incites more than just Frank, and triggers a global reckoning, although not one that happens particularly quickly. India breaks with international rules and begins releasing sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere to provide short-term cooling. Back in Switzerland, where the main action of the novel takes place, countries meeting under the 2015 Paris Agreement create a new body, the titular Ministry for the Future, with responsibilities of defending future generations. Formed in 2023, the Ministry is finally given teeth after the heatwave. Led by Irish woman Mary Murphy (one of the few, perhaps unintentional, light touches in the novel is the names. My favourite characterisation by far is the marine scientist “Estevan Escobar. Chilean. Oceans. Prone to despair.”), the bulk of the novel follows the Ministry’s machinations.

Composed of meeting notes, political-economic-philosophical debates, first-person detours via refugees in camps and Antarctic scientists on the ice, voiced sporadically by inanimate things like the sun or, memorably, a carbon atom that longs for freedom, Robinson has a scattershot approach to narrative. Its most straightforward sections, following Mary crossing paths with Frank in the Swiss city of Zurich, operate in Bond-esque action-thriller mode. The writing is almost entirely expository, reveling in the technological language of its world. It is concise to the point of curt, and the more Robinson excises the components of a sentence, the more it takes on a certain sly, deadpan humour. This reaches its apotheosis in the Ministry’s meeting notes in which the various experts report on the state of the world:

Jurgen: Insurance companies in a panic at last year’s reports. … Entire system therefore on brink of collapse.

Mary: What mean collapse?

Jurgen: Mean, money no longer working as money.

Silence in room. Jurgen adds, So you can see why re-insurance hoping for some climate mitigation! We can’t afford for world to end! No one laughs.

But I did, partly in recognition that I have no doubt that somewhere in the world there are roomfuls of technocrats speaking exactly like this. It often reads like an extended trailer for an overly serious prestige show developed by Apple. Characters are ciphers, yet the the novel does have a certain compelling drive.

That comes from the rigour with which Robinson has imagined this immediate future. Published in 2020 and leaping off from effectively now, there’s a real thrill in the “this could really happen”, in fact could be happening. This is hard sci-fi, but instead of the technical focus being on physics, it is far more concerned with political economy and governance. Chapters upon chapters deal with the carbon currency, quantitative easing, central banking, blockchain and the other financial instruments that Robinson portrays as the levers that must be pulled to get us through the climate crisis. Others see real visions for geoengineering and carbon sequestration become reality. It’s a perhaps surprisingly conservative vision, centred on modern states and the rule of law, backed by military and police; and when not above board sees shady arms of the state pulling the strings with impunity. This is a political bug that Robinson doesn’t delve into; I was more drawn to the transformations of community through rewilding or regenerative agriculture that the book skims over.

The Ministry Of The Future’s political project is what it sees as the most possible. Perhaps most enervating is its relationship with the very idea of speculative fiction or science fiction. Climate policy is built around various well-defined greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, which are themselves founded on various economic, political and social assumptions. One of these scenarios (it’s called RCP2.6 for those playing along at home) is pretty close to the one Robinson portrays, with large amounts of carbon taken out of the atmosphere, keeping global warming below the catastrophic level of 2°C. The novel’s most interesting provocation is to pose that if the real scenarios that we use to plan the future are essentially fiction, perhaps they are more mutable than we think.

Its structure also neatly solves one of narrative problems of climate change, its timescale, that even as the situation gets increasingly dire, the pace of change remains slow to those observing, punctuated at intervals by moments of catastrophe and revolution. The whole problem with addressing climate change is the inertia of our political and economic systems — we’ve passed so many critical years and decades, the house is on fire, yet the pace of change remains sedate. Robinson imagines that this not be the disaster it seems.

Gay rating: 1/5 for they/them coder Janus Athena. Otherwise resolutely not gay, including using the symbol of Ganymede throughout but erasing the (rather dark) homosexual aspects at the core of the myth.