By Sometimes you read a book that is so good and so soaked through with the questions and themes that keep you up at night that you feel as if the book was written for you— or rather, you wish that you had been the one to write it. The Ministry for the Future became one of those books for me.
About the Book
Title: The Ministry for the Future
Author: Kim Stanley Robinson
Published: 2020
Genre: science fiction, climate fiction, literary fiction
My Thoughts
The Ministry for the Future starts out by planting us in the middle of a living nightmare. A pre-monsoon heatwave in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh is creating wet-bulb temperatures approaching the limit of human survivability. We witness a single day in an impacted village as temperatures climb and the power goes out, rendering air conditioning unavailable, and the chapter sure sets the tone for the book. (Like, the last sentence of the first chapter is literally “Everyone was dead.”)
The heat wave kills 20 million people in India, rendering the previous formality-driven climate commitments to ring painfully hollow.
Mary, who leads the Ministry for the Future, the international body tasked with solving climate change and protecting future generations of humans and animals, struggles to find a path forward. Meanwhile, a militant cell called the Children of Kali with a mission to assassinate what they deem climate criminals (oil CEOs, etc.) has sprung up among the Indian heat wave survivors.
This book is genuinely part manifesto, part Wikipedia article and part fiction, but I was here for all of it.
It’s about capitalism, it’s about neoliberalism, it’s about the state’s monopoly on violence, it’s about radicalization and human bloodlust, it’s about the sixth mass extinction, it’s about the planetary tipping points we’ve already left behind and those we are currently speeding past.
“You have to stop thinking with your old bourgeois values. That time has passed. The stakes are too high for you to hide behind them anymore. They’re killing the world. People, animals, everything. We’re in a mass extinction event, and there are people trying to do something about it. You call them terrorists, but it’s the people you work for who are the terrorists. How can you not see that?”
“I’m trying to avoid violence,” Mary said. “That’s my job.”
“I thought you said your job was to avoid a mass extinction event!”
“Did I say that?”
“I don’t know, what did you say? What do you say now! Don’t split hairs with me, I’m not here for hair-splitting! You’re killing the world and you want me to remember what words you used to cover your ass? You tell me now! What is your job as head of the Ministry for the fucking Future?”
A sprawling cast of characters: Frank, an aid worker turned terrorist after surviving the Indian heatwave with crippling PTSD and rage. Mary, a bureaucrat trying to keep everything running smoothly and peacefully. A Libyan refugee fleeing the water crisis. Badim, Mary’s underling at the Ministry who may or may not be involved in some… extralegal actions.
“It was what it was: history, the nightmare from which they could not wake.”
It was definitely a bit heavy-handed on the messaging, but because I both agreed with what Kim Stanley Robinson was saying and applauded the eloquent way in which he said it, I didn’t mind.
Usually, I find that ideological messaging works best when couched in dialogue, when characters enter the “marketplace of ideas” in the form of stupidly long dialogue exchanges in which their requisite philosophies are interrogated. (I thank The Brother’s Karamazov for giving me this taste).
But The Ministry for the Future did it differently, interspersing veritable manifestos in between chapters and, well, it worked for me.
This book was extremely and explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-neoliberal, which made the blurb’s mention about how Barack Obama loved it a little confusing and a lot ironic.
If I still had the opinion that fiction and politics were divorced, as I used to think when I was in high school, I think this book would have annoyed me. But that’s no longer how I see literature, politics, or media in general. (It honestly never was– it was just that back then, I didn’t like to read things that made me uncomfortable with my baseline assumptions)
In 2026, we are closer to 2 degrees warming than ever before, and things are getting exponentially worse as governments and people in general continue to act like nothing is happening. If being straight-up is what is needed for people to make these connections, well, be as heavy-handed as you like.
“Possibly some of the richest two percent of the world’s population have decided to give up on the pretense that “progress” or “development” or “prosperity” can be achieved for all eight billion of the world’s people. For quite a long time, a century or two, this “prosperity for all” goal had been the line taken; that although there was inequality now, if everyone just stuck to the program and did not rock the boat, the rising tide would eventually float even the most high-and-dry among them. But early in the twenty-first century it became clear that the planet was incapable of sustaining everyone alive at Western levels, and at that point the richest pulled away into their fortress mansions, bought the governments or disabled them from action against them, and bolted their doors to wait it out until some poorly theorized better time, which really came down to just the remainder of their lives, and perhaps the lives of their children if they were feeling optimistic—beyond that, après moi le déluge.”