A review of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanly Robinson
Climate change and environmental degradation have always been important issues to me but the urgency has never felt greater than when I became a father. Watching my young toddler's immense love of nature and wanting her to have a fulfilling life has driven the point home.
As Martin Hagglund says; "Our ecological crisis is a stark reminder that our lives depend not only on the fragile self-maintenance of our material bodies but also on the fragile self-maintenance of the global ecosystem to which we belong."
I picked up Kim Stanly Robinson's the Ministry for the Future on Audiobook, it had been on my radar for some time after a great interview he gave to the podcast Chapo Trap House. The novel takes place in a not-so-distant future in which the climate catastrophe has worsened and a range of organizations, nations, and individuals pitch in to try and save the planet.
I've also noticed the novel has received mixed reviews from climate activists and the literary community. Because the Ministry of the Future is a work of fiction it's going to have some shortcomings in what it's going to be able to contribute to the climate movement. It's also flagrantly ideological and intensely interested in offering all it can to the climate movement, so it's going to subsequently blunt its literary edge at times.
I can see the frustrations as someone who loves both language and political activism. That said, where I think a novel should be able to deliver for the climate movement, the Ministry for the Future delivers. Incidentally, this is exactly where KSR's writing is at its most beautiful.
I've always liked the quote by David Foster Wallace that suggests the role of fiction is to "comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable". This is exactly what fiction can offer the climate movement and what KSR does with the Ministry for the Future. KSR's framework of the immediate future is heavily detailed, acutely covering a range of possible scenes as though engaged in a type of world-building. Except the world is our world in another couple of decades.
Since KSR's forte has always been science fiction he really excels here. When he imagines the climate catastrophe it is deeply disturbing; a lot of literary critics point to the opening chapter about a heat wave that strikes rural India while one of the novel's protagonists is there and describe it as harrowing. Seems like an understatement, the first chapter is horrific. I was listening to it while on a jog and had to stop because it was literally making me feel ill. Talk about disturbing the comfortable. The Ministry of the Future is full of tragedy that feels so incredibly real and possible, those passages alone could do more to encourage action on climate change than any white paper could hope to accomplish. But KSR's world is also a comforting one, reading about recovering eco-systems just as well-researched and possible as the tragedies can inspire a lot of hope. Something I think the climate movement has a hard time getting across is the reality of what even the immediate future can hold for us. The Ministry for the Future paints an incredible world of possibilities that can only serve to engage readers in - at the very least - thinking about which world they want their children to inherit.
If imagining the future as a type of world-building is where a novel is going to excel, the detailed logistical transition for how to achieve this future is going to be where it suffers most and indeed this is where the Ministry for the Future falls flat on its face. While KSR has done his research as to potential planet-saving technologies and philosophies, how we watch society transform is entirely vacant and improbable. The entire time I found myself asking a pivotal question: where are the mass movements?!
If one were reading Ministry of the Future as a guidebook for how to change the world their key takeaway would be either outright bloodsheding terrorism or top-down technocratic maneuvering. People need to stop flying in gasoline-powered airplanes so there is a massive terrorist attack that conveniently ends the industry entirely. Rather than the governments of the world responding with a grotesque anti-terrorism effort they...comply? Seems to be an imaginative blindspot. A new bomb technology renders the militaries of the world useless and therefore primed to pick up the mantel of environmental protection and clean-up, which they do instead of being deployed to wage war over the rest of the world's resources because....reasons.... Central banks implement a new crypto-currency that incentivizes carbon sequestration. Governments implement job guarantees and lift entire towns to make room for animal corridors without the slightest inclination of political struggle. The list goes on.
Not only are these transition passages improbable, but they're also terribly written. Forced and unfathomable monologues, Sorkin-esque diatribes that at some points felt like a left-wing Ayn Rand novel. Head of the Ministry for the Future and one of the novel's protagonists Mary Murphy gives a multi-page speech to the world's central bankers that I literally cringe through, but that "works" nonetheless. The monologues by people in other countries or climate refugees or townspeople being evicted could get cartoonish and even offensive at times (though some are beautiful and written in a totally realistic voice). Scenes of local organizing, movement building, political revolution, and democratization are entirely absent. The beautiful future KSR imagines is accomplished because it is clumsily rolled down the hill at us by technocrats and terrorists.
Despite all of this, it's still really important to read the Ministry for the Future. Ultimately fiction is mostly going to fail in helping us understand how to build a better future, organizing our communities, and engaging with one another to impart real change. But it can, as I believe KSR does, demonstrate what is at stake; what can be lost and what can be gained.
