It’s a topic that Kim has addressed before, but I don’t think that it has ever been more relevant. After showing a world devastated by climate change in his ‘…and Counting’ trilogy, not to mention a submerged New York in New York 2140, Ministry for the Future is another tale suggesting a near future world under stress and approaching environmental catastrophe.
From the publisher: ‘Established in 2025, the purpose of the new organisation was simple: To advocate for the world’s future generations and to protect all living creatures, present and future. It soon became known as the Ministry for the Future, and this is its story.’
Kim has often highlighted such events before, but I think that the first chapter of The Ministry For The Future is perhaps his grimmest yet. Set in 2025, it tells of a heat wave in India as seen by American Frank May, which kills twenty million people. It is bleak, unremitting and devastatingly grim, yet told in an affectingly subdued way that gets a message across – this is our world and it is now.
The result of this catastrophe is a lot of blaming and finger-pointing between different countries. India begins to seed the atmosphere to reduce the temperature, something the outcome of which is unknown and also flies in the face of international agreements. Led by Mary Murphy, The Ministry for the Future, an new international agency set up with Zurich, Switzerland, has the job of trying to ensure health and safety for the future of the world, steps in to try and defuse the situation and try to find a way to make progress. Mary Murphy and her team travel around the world to try and discuss with a broad range of people how to do this. In doing so, she also comes across Frank, who, traumatised by the fact that he has survived the Indian catastrophe, looks to terrorist environmental groups to try and help bring about environmental change. Not every choice is easy, nor every solution workable, but through the book Kim discusses thoroughly possible ways forward.
Ministry for the Future is an ambitiously big book, though with short chapters. It has a broad global sweep, travelling from India to Europe, to Brazil to Argentina and even Antarctica, deals with weighty topics intelligently, and is full of ideas that reflect difficult choices ahead. Admittedly, there are places where it can be a little dry – the book covers such broad topics as the role of tax in global society, the Paris Climate Agreement, the creation and function of the International Monetary Fund, Jevons Paradox and Modern Monetary Theory, for example – the point is that many aspects are examined and made readable in order to suggest ways to show the challenges and then make progress that are rarely easy but refreshingly positive. Whilst the issues discussed are not new, Kim’s low-key style reminded me of Arthur C Clarke’s writing, in that people talk their way around things at look at many options before making decisions. I found it to be one of the more accessible and readable KSR novels of late.
Whilst it could be said that Ministry for the Future is a political agenda dressed-up as fiction, my abiding feeling at the end is that it shows hope – a sensible and rational way out of the mess we live in, and reflects a heartfelt belief that sensible people, wanting to do the best for as many people as they can, can work in difficult situations to make the world a better place. And at the moment, with all of the political and environmental chaos going on around us, it is therefore the novel we need. It does not give easy solutions but it does give well-considered ones.
Thoughtful, literate, intelligent, and most of all positive – Ministry for the Future is not the global catastrophe story some might suggest but it is a tale from one of our genre’s most moral novelists. A book to make you think, and realise that humans can do anything, if they want to.
Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published by Orbit Books, October 2020
570 pages
ISBN: 978 0 356 50883 2
Review by Mark Yon
