Travel Documents 100: Ministry For The Future
Genre: solarpunk, social change, cultural change, cli-fi
The Dust Cover Copy
The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year, this extraordinary novel from visionary science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson will change the way you think about the climate crisis.
The Scene
Worldbuilding
What I’ve always liked about Robinson’s worldbuilding is the reality of it. If the hopeful future genre—solarpunk, hope punk, give it what name you like—has a flaw, it’s in imagining gorgeous future worlds of soaring stained glass and gardens, with a vague comment about ‘oh, the transition out of the Old World was really messy’.
We do need those stories, but for those of us living in the very messy now, they can be frustrating. We can’t see how to jump from the current clusterfuck to that gorgeous future. There’s no clear path forward.
Robinson has set Ministry right in the middle of that transition, and he’s done it beautifully. The transition out of our current destructive practices is, in his description, messy. And it’s complicated. There’s bloodshed. There’s frustration.
And there’s tangible possibility.
The Crowd
Characterization
This book is told across many points of view, from that of an atom to that of a young woman planting a carbon-sequestration garden. The mosaic narrative sits on a base of the interplay between two characters—Mary Murphy and Frank May—across decades of change.
I like Robinson’s approach to characterization quite a bit. The interplay between characters and the mosaic of voices keeps things moving, pepping up a story that could have gotten pedantic if it didn’t have so many witty, mobile personalities working on the same problem: how the hell do we get out of the mess we’ve landed ourselves in.
Writing Style
The fact that Robinson manages to get so much real, tangible information into an entertaining narrative is incredible. Without once sounding like a textbook (though this tome is about the same size, I’m not kidding) Robinson educates readers on Qualitative Easing, carbon sequestering tech, some nifty ideas for redesigning long-distance travel, and all kinds of social programs that could get us out of our current rat-race, don’t mind the externalities mindset and into a way of living, being, and doing business that might actually be better for everyone on the planet.
But this isn’t a fluffy hearts and rainbows book, so if you’re getting cynical, hold on. There’s also hints of some real black-ops ecoterrorism in here. The governments didn’t act to take down the most destructive industries? Fine. Eco-terrorism started to happen. There’s a pretty broad hint that the cattle industry is ended by introducing strains of mad cow disease over and over. Planes are taken down by rockets again and again, until the flight industry collapses. My favorite approach? …mmm, no. But it is completely believable, and it makes for good solid storytelling. Bonus, it gets the cynics in the crowd who say change could never happen to shut up and sit down.
The Moves
Plot
This story is crafted as a future narrative of current events spread across a handful of decades, and it is wonderful in its possibility. This could happen. This could be our future; good and bad, terrible and lovely, all moving us towards a sustainable way of being a species and a society. The author gives us breaks here and there with a couple of Everyman characters discussing events, which aren’t too bad; not as jarring as the suegeways in New York 2140, that’s for sure. Here they fit, and they’re a nice breathing space in the narrative.
We end, not with happily ever after, but with something that might be better:
“We will keep going. Because we never really come to the end.”
Overall Rating
I added a physical copy of this one to my own shelf. That, from me, is the highest praise I can give.
Grab a copy. You’ll be glad you did.