Ministry for the Future

J'ai lu la version originale en anglais.

Je suis partagé sur le livre :

la mise en scène initiale bouscule et fait réfléchir, l'anticipation s'avère clairvoyante. le livre est bien documenté à de très nombreux titres, malheureusement il y a tellement de sujet à traiter que certains développements (technologiques) s'avèrent inexactes ou au mieux de la fantaisies l'auteur bascule entre description voire essai (documentée) et perspective de personnage. Sur la deuxieme partie ce style s'alourdit et rend la lecture difficile. la discussion des perspectives morales au travers des personnages s'avèrent être la partie la plus intéressante, selon moi. j'ai trouvé le développement heureux final déconnecté avec les travaux récents du GIEC, en particulier la perspective de sobriété n'est pas assez développée j'ai également trouvé certaines résolutions trop candides, j'avoue rester fort cynique quand à l'altruisme des puissants. Cela étant, je trouve cette fiction une bonne introduction au sujet avec des perspectives alternatives.

The Ministry for the Future follows the history of the eponymous ministry created by the UN in 2025 to represent the interests of future people when addressing #ClimateChange; given that the solutions to climate change will take effect over hundreds of years, so don't immediately benefit the current generations, the ministry would speak for future generations in order to ensure long-term thinking is applied.

The novel has three main characters: Frank, who we meet in the first traumatising chapter, is an American relief worker, and the only survivor of an Indian town struck by a devastating heatwave that wipes out millions. Frank suffers the rest of his ruined life with acute PTSD, which drives him ever more desperately find ways to avoid such a catastrophe from repeating. Early in the novel, it spurs him to actions that introducing us to the second main character:

Mary, an Irish lifetime diplomat, is the Minister for the Future, a role that make her a target for activists from both sides of the climate struggle, and requires her to assemble and coordinate a team to establish legal standing for future generations, and promote solutions that protect them.

The novel interleaves short chapters between Frank and Mary and the third main character: The Situation Itself. This unusual character's chapters are either extremely short whom-am-I riddles that impart a set of disparate but germane concepts, or they are vignettes told from the perspective of unnamed witnesses to some aspect of climate change's effects or solutions.

Appreciating that the story is global, vast, and epic helps to understand that this apparently scattershot narration style is a cleverly devised mechanism (and maybe the only way) to ensure that the novel includes everything needed to grasp the problem and its solutions. Indeed, in parts it's so saturated that it reads like a draft of a #CliFi novel, with long lists and shorthand notes, that was rushed to print before some of the chapters were fleshed out, and maybe before some of the events played out in reality!

The novel is somehow both harrowingly realistic and implausibly optimistic, in that some of the manifold solutions involve changes that just seem impossible to achieve. But Robinson already understands my pessimism and dread:

"... the order of your time feels unjust and unsustainable and yet massively entrenched, but also falling apart before your eyes. The obvious contradictions in this list might yet still describe the feeling of your time quite accurately…"

On reflection, although it may be naive, it's also possible the exact formula we need in order to confront inexorable, nonfictional climate change that is definitely already arriving.

What would a worldwide, lasting revolution look like? What would be the obstacles and what tactics would be needed to overcome them? How are we going to survive climate change? These are the themes Kim Stanley Robinson tackles in his 570-page cli-fi novel THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE.

The narrative is disjointed, with epistolary chapters placed throughout. If you roll with it, it works well. You get a well-researched, fairly well-rounded picture across class, power, and geography. The format makes for a clever way to introduce details that otherwise might not fit into a traditional narrative. I also appreciate the global perspective of this book. The U.S. is not at the center at all, and is critiqued heavily and fairly.

THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE envisions a world that includes the Half-Earth concept as one of its solutions to combat climate change. Half of the planet would be reserved exclusively for nature; the other half for humans, centered in sustainable cities. It sounds plausible in the novel, but I had this nagging, bad feeling about it. I kept thinking, you're never going to get 100% compliance on that, no matter how many incentives you offer. And we have a terrible history of forcing Indigenous peoples off their land. Nowhere in the book is that addressed and, so far, what I'm reading about Half-Earth doesn't assuage my concerns.

So, I'm feeling meh about this novel. When I was able to believe it, its hopefulness felt inspiring and relieved some of my fears. When cynicism (reality?) got the best of me, I had to set it aside for a bit, which is why it took me so long to finish it. Plus, I have major problems with a top-down approach that is just repackaged state power claiming to be a solution. (Obama loving this book should have been a red flag for me.) But this is science fiction. It doesn't have to actually solve anything. There were plenty of moments where the book imagines creative ways to forge ahead, and for that, I'm glad I read it, even if I'm probably not going to pick up another Kim Stanley Robinson book in the future.

Ambitious and well-informed, but politically and emotionally implausible in key respects. That, of course would hardly be a criticism in much speculative sci-fi (hell, it defines the genre!) but good world-building invites us to embrace certain implausible (or outright ridiculous) foundations, by drawing us into a compelling story or novel vision, hopefully both. Here, alas, the vision far exceeds the power of the underlying stories to draw the reader in, and so the limits of character development and political-institutional simplicities become increasingly grating. Still, things could be (marginally) worse: he could have written Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock instead! :/

Auf der einen Seite beschreibt das Buch die beginnende Klimakatastrophe und Möglichkeiten dagegen entwas zu tun ganz gut, auf der anderen Seite sind die Lösungsvorschläge, die in dem Roman präsentiert werden fast alle technokratisch und auf eine andere Art und Weise auch wieder nicht akzeptabel. Z.B. wird die Kryptowährung "Carbon Coin" weltweit eingeführt und ständig die Vorteile einer Währung mit totaler Transparenz in der Blockchain betont. Antikapitalistische Perspektiven kommen kaum vor, außer das Beispiel Mondragón. Wirkliche antikapitalistische und antistaatliche Alternativen, wie Rojava oder die Zapitistas fehlen. Schlimmer noch: An einer Stelle wird sogar ein kurdischer Nationalstaat ausgerufen, was zeigt, dass der Autor keine Ahnung von der kurdischen Freiheitsbewegung hat. Ebenfalls schade ist, dass die "Children of Kali", die "grüne Terrororganisation", immer nur am Rande vorkommt und nicht weiter ausgeführt wird. Da hätte ich mir mehr von erhofft.

I thought I would enjoy this book a lot more, and it ended up being a bit of a slog towards the end. A lot of the writing is very "stream of consciousness", and there's not much of a plot to speak of.

In terms of finding ideas for addressing climate change, there's too much focus on blockchain and geoengineering. Not really solarpunk.

So his answers for both, basically: maximalism. The point he's sort of making is that making the planet safely inhabitable is going to take every tactic and every ideology not necessarily working together but working on some piece of the thing. No one actor gets to be the hero (though I do enjoy that KSR's favorite kind of protagonist remains the middle-aged competent lady technocrat–guy's got a type) and while he's sort of indicating that capitalism as we know it has to die, he's not saying that happens through inevitable worker uprising. Some of it's coercion of central banks and some of it's straight-up guerrilla terrorism. Geoengineering happens at varying scales for better and for worse. Massive economic collapses occur. Millions die. And the point I think from KSR is that's the outcome in his most optimistic take. In general with KSR I don't know if I ever fully agree, but I always feel fully engaged.

This is also probably the most not-novel-y of his novels in that there's a couple of recurring characters running through the book but a ton of it's just first-person unnamed narration of events happening around the world. Someone describing a drought, a refugee describing a camp, a miner describing the nationalization of his mine. One very weird and fun chapter from the point of view of actual carbon.