563 páginas
Idioma English
Publicado el 17 de marzo de 2021
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.
From legendary science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson comes a vision of climate change unlike any ever imagined.
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.
It is a novel both immediate and impactful, desperate and hopeful in equal measure, and it is one of the most powerful and original books on climate change ever …
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.
From legendary science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson comes a vision of climate change unlike any ever imagined.
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.
It is a novel both immediate and impactful, desperate and hopeful in equal measure, and it is one of the most powerful and original books on climate change ever written.
I'd thought this one might be solarpunk. It most definitely is not that style, much more old-school, hard-SF. And it is full-on dystopian in the beginning. (The first chapter is traumatically good.)
But the rest of the book was like an economics lecture to me. Never hit emotionally. Plus, some of the solutions didn't seem plausible, so it was hard to see the characters as experts.
By which I mean it's long and has an interesting idea for a plot, but is written in a way that isn't always interesting.
There's something didactic about KSR's novels. He does a lot of telling rather than showing. There are pages and pages of this. Some of it was so tedious that in the last 20% of the book I skipped over parts. I longed for it all to be over so that I could move on to something more interesting and better written.
There are chapters narrated from the point of view of unidentified people who are scientists, refugees, etc. A lot of these all sound like the same rather breathless, over-excited person.
Because of these faults I wouldn't particularly recommend this book.
I waded 50 or so chapters into this book. Great start, honestly one of the most compelling starts I've every read, some good early chapters with plot and character development and then they just disappeared. I really wanted it to succeed on the basis of it's beginning alone so I got 10 hours of sleep caffeinated myself fully and read three chapters straight that did not include any specific advances in plot or even mention of a single character. I passed out twice. This book goes on my permanent pause shelf. If I'm wide awake and need to be asleep... I'll come find it again. Two stars for the first chapter being fantastic.
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 …
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.
4.5. I have a lot more to say about this book but I need to digest. Needless to say, this just sucked me in. I loved the polyvocality.
A bit rosy view of the world.
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, …
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.
