The Ministry For The Future. Kim Stanley Robinson. Orbit. NY. 2021.
Soft Cover. Glued. 567 p. 1.1 lbs.
Read review in The New Yorker, purchased at Alibris.com.
Dear Kim Stanley Robinson,
You write science fiction based on science reality. This is why I want to understand one decision you made in writing “The Ministry For The Future.” But before getting to that question, let’s see if I correctly understand your story overall…
Adler and Van Doren, in How To Read A Book, suggest when reading a novel to “read it quickly and with total immersion.”
The point is to let the characters into one’s mind, suspend any sense of disbelief, not judge any character’s actions, and just live in the world created by the author. If one wants to savor the story, one can do so on the second, more thorough reading.
That first reading is meant to answer the first question of reading a book: What is the book—as a whole—about?
This may be even more necessary with The Ministry For The Future, for it does not follow a typical story arc. I find it akin to Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Your book is full of many asides, facts, insights, and even philosophies.
You paint a tableau. To read the book over a short time period helps to see that full picture and appreciate its graphic portrayal.
Your depiction reminds me of another book: Dune, by Frank Herbert, which is one of my long-time favorite sci-fi books that paints a compellingly detailed portrait of a planet full of people. The planet’s history, ecology, mythology, politics, philosophy, flora and fauna are all set against the fraught backdrop of a global-scale environmental issue.
You do the same with The Ministry For The Future.
The first chapter was difficult to read—even tortuous. It turns out this chapter feeds and bleeds into the rest of the book. The agony is necessary.
For those reading this review who are looking to get a detailed glimpse of climate change, what the near future may hold, and have it ultimately be hopeful, this book is as good as it gets. Read it to understand just how complex the topic of climate change is, and for one fictional account on how we could find a way out of this rabbit hole.
You, as author, never use the word ‘hyperobject,’ but I wonder if you are familiar with this concept as coined by Timothy Merton, for you have a passage that could have been Merton’s description of the word:
“But there was so much more going on than any one person could know, reality was so much bigger than the self, that it was alarming to contemplate.” P 476.
But try to contemplate climate change, you do.
In your story, you even give a photon a character’s voice; and a carbon atom is able to ruminate as well.
I personally appreciate how much India has a place in this novel; I spent over 14 months of my life there in three separate trips. I love its multifarious culture (talk about hyperobject!), its landscape, and its weather. You incorporate all three of these aspects of this highly-complex land into your story: India becomes a touchstone for the globe, its judge, and its hopeful exemplar.
As climate change progresses in your novel, you talk about the wide range of psychology humans will likely experience both as individuals and as groups. There is hate, blame, greed, guilt. There is hope, despair, revenge.
An edge to the book that challenges me is the one of poetic justice. How some of that hate and despair is channeled into revenge against supposed perpetrators of climate change, against the greedy and selfish ones who seem to drive our whole planet towards self-destruction only so they can get financially wealthier before it all implodes.
I want to cheer those avengers on while also cringing at my own support for that kind of action, even if against greed.
But perhaps war-like conditions forces people to make hard choices they might not otherwise have had to make. How would I react upon seeing millions of my compatriots die from a heat wave caused by blindly selfish behavior?
You do not make the book an easy beach read; while your book could be seen as ultimately hopeful, it is written to provoke thought as well.
For example, you search out the world financial systems that support and perpetuate climate change. You give lessons on how deeply entangled our monetary systems are: the central banks, local banks, legislative financial laws, even things as simple as tradition because “this is just how things have always been done.” Money flows while the rich get richer, the planet warmer, and the climate more deadly for the poor.
You also look to unconventional answers. Amazing ideas pour out, such as California using its natural topography for filling its aquifers to offset droughts; India using the principles of permaculture and organic farming to feed itself; the Basque region’s sound business model of cooperative economics.
Technological solutions you explore include geo-engineering such as dusting the stratosphere; airships that don’t run on jet fuel; ships propelled by photovoltaic sails with hydrofoils; space-based solar power using microwave transmission.
The ideas you explore both in depth and briefly can harken to a hopeful, almost steam-punk kind of thrill.
You spend several chapters sprinkled throughout the book detailing the unproven technology to slow the glaciers’ slide into the oceans. Drill holes miles deep through the glaciers using oil-drilling technology, vacuum the water from underneath, and hope the glaciers eventually collapse back onto solid earth instead of gliding along the waterslides that have formed underneath them.
You have a reputation for basing your science fiction novels on current science-based research and concepts, and it turns out that this idea of slowing the glaciers has been discussed for many years and holds credence amongst certain groups of glaciologists.
This is incredible technology, but untested and therefore uncertain.
This leads to my question for you.
David Deutsch, in The Beginning of Infinity, spends a good deal of time examining the interrogative ‘why.’ He contends it is not specific enough. Really, when one is using the word ‘why’ in a question they invariably want to know either ‘how come’ or ‘what for.’
Why is the sky blue? This question can be answered by addressing how the sky comes to look blue to us, and talk about the electro-magnetic spectrum, human optics, and more. Or, one can answer the question with a ‘Just So’ story that might suggest the sky is blue for reminding us of god’s love.
I learned in my previous social work that using the word ‘why’ can lead another to feel defensive. Why did you do that? Then one has to explain oneself as though on the witness stand.
I wanted to ask a why question, but when thinking on the above points, I realized I needed to better hone my question. I want to know ‘how come’, and I don’t want a defensive answer; I do, instead, seek a fuller understanding of your reasoning.
I have respect for you and your approach to sci-fi because you do rely so heavily on real, up-to-date science. This book is remarkable for the wide range of topics you include. But it wouldn’t surprise me if others noted what you do not include.
There are all kinds of topics you don’t approach that I cannot reproach you for—the topic of climate change is truly a hyperobject.
For example, other topics one could consider include: In nature, there is the simple power of beavers to help regenerate aquifers and the amazing potential of fungi; in politics, so much more could be said about the power of youth and regional movements; socially, there is the potential of viral ideas and memes.
When considering the scope of your book, it’s more amazing what all you did include: the stark realities of climate change, the many characters in the play of climate that you give voice to, the geopolitics you bring to the forefront, the deep psychology we will all experience in the face of these stark realities, the lessons imparted on how our financial systems contribute to climate change, as well as all the potential solutions we could enact, now. And there’s so much more you’ve included that I’m not mentioning.
But one missing topic confounds me and that is nuclear energy. You mention nuclear subs once, and in two sentences—at least that I could see—you mention turning nuclear waste into nuclear power. And that is it.
Nuclear energy: as mentioned in the previous review, a tried and true technology for generating power that produces no carbon.
I would like to understand how it came to be in such a vast and hopeful book on how our dire future could look brighter, that nuclear power was not a topic of conversation.
What was the reasoning for setting up several chapters on such an uncertain technology as glacial slow-down but not putting other heroic characters into the already-existing technology of nuclear power?
As a writer, I am trying to suss out your own line of thinking, to better understand the crafting of a large complex story, and how some topics end up in the final cut and others don’t.
What is it about nuclear energy that prompted you to decide it was not worthy of attention in this novel on climate change and how we humans might ultimately meet that change in a hopeful way?
Thank you for your time and consideration,
Sincerely,
W.E.B.
Other reviews that mention this post: A Bright Future, Essay based on The Science of Storytelling