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The Ministry for the Future - Textual Relations October 2021 Reading

Falselogic

Falselogic

Lapsed Threadcromancer
(they/them)
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

Established in 2025, the purpose of the new organization 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.

Told entirely through fictional eye-witness accounts, The Ministry For The Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, the story of how climate change will affect us all over the decades to come. Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us - and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face.

About the Author: Bestselling author Kim Stanley Robinson is widely recognized as one of the foremost living writers of science fiction. His work has been described as "humanist science fiction" and "literary science fiction". The winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards, he is the author of more than 20 books, including the bestselling Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars) as well as Forty Signs of Rain, 2312, Aurora, Fifty Degrees Below, and Shaman. He lives in Northern California with his spouse.
 
Violentvixen

Violentvixen

(She/Her)
Got it from the library! Apparently 7 people have it on hold after me so I can't renew it, dangit! Might just buy a copy, this is a large book and I wanted to save it for our train trip later in the month.
 
Egarwaen

Egarwaen

(He/Him)
This is a dense book, and not a comfortable read. I haven't touched KSR since bouncing hard off Red Mars in middle school. It's definitely very much the same style, with an extremely decompressed narrative and a sprawling ensemble cast, but I've got more tools now for following that kind of structure. I definitely like how it doesn't shy away from confronting the tension between the scale of the problem and presumptions about effective strategies for confronting it.
 
Falselogic

Falselogic

Lapsed Threadcromancer
(they/them)
That was the worst part for me and it makes me think KSR didn't do much research into blockchain or this was all written when the idea was shiny and new.
 
Egarwaen

Egarwaen

(He/Him)
It’s a mix of really well-researched and thought-through concepts and… Well, that. Or the whole Janus Athena thing. And it’s definitely a KSR novel; lots of high concept philosophy woven through a very decompressed narrative that jumps around. Direct antagonists who may or may not exist.

I’m really enjoying the single chapter POVs - I think they’re much stronger than the Mary or Frank chapters, which get a bit same-y through the middle of the book. They at least try to advance perspectives that aren’t normally showcased - even in ecological fiction or alt-history - and the range of details KSR throws in really makes them sing. I particularly liked the stubborn farm-wife and the kayaker.
 
Egarwaen

Egarwaen

(He/Him)
I finished it!

The philosophical aspects of the novel are the strongest. The assorted minor character PoV chapters are great, providing lots of different perspectives on a complex situation, and trying to bring forward different economic stations, ages, and cultures. The very short anthropomorphic interjection and anonymous dialog chapters are also clever, though the lack of variety in content started to grate a little by the end. Frank's chapters dealing with the initial killing heat wave and then his PTSD and violent experiments were very engaging, but his subsequent refugee work felt like a very ham-handed redemption arc. Mary's chapters were frustratingly one-note - yes, Mary can't do much by herself, this is frustrating and tragic. Oh! But now she's learned that direct action can have an effect, and then she's saved by the blockchain and a false flag attack, and so the central bankers jump into action and save the planet by embracing cryptocurrency. Tragic! Her closest friends die, as a metaphor for the transience of all things and the death of the old world.

The science in the book varied between fascinating and aggravating. KSR showed the appropriate level of skepticism towards schemes to prevent ocean rise by pumping onto Antarctica, but conjures gigatons of direct carbon capture out of thin air with hardly a comment. Blockchains somehow fix banking without baking the planet. On the other hand, as far as I'm able to tell, he gets the science on heat waves and droughts, transportation (airships & sailing ships good), renewable electricity generation (coal's not actually that cheap, it's just heavily subsidized), and wildlife corridors right.

Even with the iffy science (and iffier cover blurbs), I think having more near-future SF grappling with the impacts and implications of climate change is worthwhile. KSR does a fantastic job of laying out the stakes and the effects of even a small temperature rise; in that regard, opening with a killer heat wave is very effective. And he does a fantastic job of highlighting that climate change is a solvable problem that we need only to treat as a problem that affects us.
 
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Falselogic

Falselogic

Lapsed Threadcromancer
(they/them)
I think the most likely thing to happen in this life that happens in the book is
that a country with the means will eventually start pumping material into the atmosphere in order to help reflect back heat.

I don't know who will do it, but I'd put money on it happening before any other actual large actions that will actual reduce our carbon emissions happen.

I have to agree with everything you said Egar. It seems that KSR just didnt do the research on the blockchain before making it a key component of his book. He doesn't seem to know the gross energy costs that it requires. If he does then he needed to explain how the concept could be implemented w/o contributing to the destruction of the planet.
 
Violentvixen

Violentvixen

(She/Her)
I found this book exhausting and confusing. To me it read more like a compilation of the results of some online call for stories where a bunch of people wrote things on similar themes then it just all got thrown into a book roughly chronologically.

It's good I brought this on a train ride with no wifi and minimal phone signal because it forced me to pay attention to it. If I was just at home normally I would have given up before I got a third of the way through.

The only recurring group I really followed/cared about after about halfway through the book was the Antartic drilling group. There was just too much jumping around between characters and ugh the economic stuff was a slog for me.

Some nice ideas in there but I found it a muddled mess and agree on all economic aspects of this book. I can't completely hate it since addressing climate change is important but ugh. The riddle/what am I chapters were especially insufferable.
 
Falselogic

Falselogic

Lapsed Threadcromancer
(they/them)
@Violentvixen I wouldn't recommend any of KSR's other work to you then. While I really enjoy his Mars Trilogy it does the same thing of jumping between characters with radically different points of view and such in telling its story as well.
 
Violentvixen

Violentvixen

(She/Her)
Yeah, I have learned this year that I do not do well with books with multiple viewpoints. Two or sometimes three characters/plots seem to work but otherwise I have a really hard time with it.
 
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