From science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson comes a vision of climate change over the coming decades. The Ministry for the Future uses fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all.
Robinson’s dense prose explodes Mary’s and Frank’s stories (among scores of human, animal, and other stories) into a provocative look at the economic, legislative, and scientific leaps that must be made in order to control rampant climate events that seem all too real ... A breathtaking look at the challenges that face our planet in all their sprawling magnitude and also in their intimate, individual moments of humanity.
Robinson’s view of climate change is deeply personal, inescapably human and utterly horrifying ... Although Robinson’s prose is evocative, the book isn’t exactly exciting. Robinson’s writing is sparse, and what plot that exists within the pages of this book is often obscured by its structure. Much like the future, The Ministry for the Future doesn’t lay itself out in a straight and orderly fashion ... Well researched and beautifully written, The Ministry for the Future is a thought-provoking (and sometimes even hopeful) read for anyone looking to the future and wondering what’s coming next.
The Ministry for the Future is Kim Stanley Robinson’s grimmest book since 2015’s Aurora, and likely the grimmest book he has written to date — but it is also one of his most ambitious, as he seeks to tell the story of how, given what science and history both tell us to be true, the rest of our lives could be anything but an endless nightmare. It is not an easy read ... it’s a book that calls on us instead to imagine living through a revolution ourselves, as we are, in the here and now.
