The Ministry for the Future

I’ve long been a fan of Robinson’s fiction. This recent book tells the story of how humanity navigates the climate crisis, starting a few years from now and going maybe 30 years into the future, centered on the people leading the new (fictitious) UN organization of the title.

Robinson pulls all the strands together plausibly – increasingly severe impacts, everyone thrashing around trying responses, and conflict. He doesn’t shy away from violence, errors, tragic choices, or the vast scale of disruption and suffering climate change holds in store. Yet I find it a strangely optimistic book. The worst doesn’t happen.… show more.

This book on utopian monetary policy is absolutely astonishing.

It is set in a near future that is very much like today, but with climate change just coming into full swing. Alongside terrorists who are using armed drones to physically stop heads of polluting industries, there is an international institution (the Ministry of the Future) whose leader Mary Murphy is trying to stop climate change by getting central banks to emit and create a market for a global carbon coin granted for CO2 avoidance.

The suspenseful novel explains Dalton Chen’s blueprint and the best strategy I know of… show more.

We’re living in the 6th mass extinction of life on Earth, while key ecological systems like oceanic currents and weather patterns are being destabilized by climate change. What will happen as ecological collapse accelerates and as governments and corporations continue to fail in their responses?

Kim Stanley Robinson’s book explores a near-future scenario in which, as millions die in climate disasters, organized groups of “climate militants” begin assassinating fossil fuel company executives and sabotaging key industrial facilities. This catalyzes transformations in the entire global economy, shifting the course of the world.

While Robinson has more faith in the role of… show more.

The Ministry for the Future starts with a bang. Then, as in so many of Robinson’s books, the setting and theme take center stage.

The setting in this ambitious novel is the world at large. The theme is the demise of that world as a human habitat, brought on by the greed of its human inhabitants. Robinson offers a powerful polemic on the evils of capitalism. But at the same time, he puts forth a multiplicity of well-considered ideas, many even now being earnestly discussed or realized in dealing with ecological emergencies worldwide.

This book reads more like nonfiction. I’ll… show more.

I read this novel when I was about three-quarters finished with my novel, and was just blown away by the attention to detail, possibilities, and hope between the pages.

This is another hopeful near-future novel, in which humanity is trying its best to overcome the worst of climate change. Unlike my novel, however, which is told from the perspective of one family, Ministry for the Future is a truly global story, with dozens and dozens of narrators, many unnamed, who give us snapshots everywhere from the Arizona border to Antarctica to Switzerland to India, all coalescing into what becomes a… show more.

There are few novels that show how we might get from where we are now to where we’d like to be, with a focus on climate change.

This is the only one I can think of that does this in a realistic way. KSR presents us with a plausible vision of what might be in store for us and the wins and losses and how we could just get through it. It’s a real tour de force, demonstrating a broad spectrum of knowledge and ideas.

I was especially intrigued by innovative solutions such as carbon-based currency. It also proposes that… show more.

Kim Stanley Robinson hooked me immediately with this fast-paced novel about how humanity finally wakes up to the deadly consequences of pumping 54 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year and decides to do something about it.

I could not put down this page turner which reads like a science fiction thriller but is filled with interesting facts and perspectives about global warming. This book inspired me to write my book and will prepare you to engage in the enormous task of decarbonizing the economy and creating a sustainable civilization.

Humans need imagination to help us see a way beyond or through problems.

This is exactly what Kim Stanley Robinson’s book provides for climate change. As someone who works in and writes about climate change every day, I found this book deeply optimistic and uplifting.

Stanley Robinson is a genius at creating a realistic political and social landscape, and his storytelling thread pulls you through what meaningfully halting climate change might look like. The first third of the book is very bleak—but hang in there.

The book is impactful because it is rooted in a beginning that feels so realistic—things… show more.

The Ministry for the Future is a fictional story with very real lessons for those fighting for a stable climate.

It begins with a terrifying scene from an extreme heatwave and ends with humanity more or less solving the climate crisis. How? We watch a range of characters explore a range of strategies over decades.

Some work to restructure macroeconomic policy, others geoengineer glaciers, still others gently shift consumer behavior. In the end no one person can take full credit, but millions can point to their contributions.

Storytelling is its own form of strategy., Characters sow actions and reap results;… show more.

I struggled to keep my recommended reading list to five books. The subject is much bigger than the succession of oversimplified opinions discussing resilience, adaptation, and protection. I was greatly influenced by Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction and the need to ensure that we can adapt and protect ourselves even as we seek to mitigate the changes we have caused in our world. I am also a pragmatist at heart and often find myself referring to Hirschman's essays—he was probably the arch-pragmatist among economists.

He spoke of the dangers of trying to fit the world into a model, as opposed to… show more.