Let's Talk About “The Ministry for the Future”

First Installment of The Futurist Book Club Discussion Forum

This is a long overdue discussion of the latest Futurist Book Club book, The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. I think my earlier intentions to involve people in a book club in this format aren’t likely to function as I had hoped. Yet, I’m persisting forward if only to use this as a way to process some of the books that I’m reading and hopefully will get to hear some of your reflections as well.

With that, here’s the first installment of the Futurist Book Club Discussion that doesn’t include any major book spoilers.

The Ministry for the Future opens amidst a historic deadly heat wave in India that as The Guardian describes reads “like a slow-motion disaster movie.” This depiction taking place in the near future is captivating, heart-wrenching, and hyper-realistic and puts the reader right into the apocalypse currently experienced by people in lower-income countries and lower-income communities across the globe. 

When I read the book last year, India and Pakistan were, at that very moment, experiencing a real-life deadly heat wave. In The Ministry for the Future, the death toll was closer to 20 million which was far more than in the 2022 heat wave. But the alarming severity and regularity of such heat waves in real life show the effects of climate change are already here. Since the 2022 heat wave, scientists have said that heat waves like that are 30 times more likely with climate change. This means it’s likely to happen again. And so, this “fictional” heat wave in Kim Stanley Robinson’s hyper-realistic climate fiction novel published in 2020 felt not at all like fiction. 

The book is an expansive story that takes place over the course of several decades in the future. The Ministry for the Future is (at the beginning of the novel) a newly established arm of the UN with the goal to move the world into a better future by addressing climate change from many bureaucratic angles. Over the course of over 550 pages in paperback and 20 hours by audio, Robinson tells a story of bureaucratic challenges and processes in the Ministry led by charming protagonist, Mary Murphy while also weaving in a sampling of what else is going on in the world as it relates to climate change including the acts of eco-terrorists, experiences from everyday people navigating rising floods, desperate attempts to cool the planet, regional organizations re-thinking land use, successful rewilding efforts, farmers around the world participating in carbon capture activities, and so so much more that I can’t even remember.

By the time I picked the book up (and by “picked it up”, I mean, “put it in my ears”), the book had been doing the rounds and so many of my friends and acquaintances praised it for its visionary thinking and, dare I say, optimism. But as I read about the fresh hell of capitalist interests winning over urgency, I kept wondering “when will this start being hopeful?” I got about halfway through and as I kept asking this question, I realized that slow movement towards change was meant to be there because it was what was actually happening in real life. Which, I suppose, was Robinson’s point.

“I conceptualized [the world of The Ministry for the Future] as being a utopia that you could still believe in, and that made it hard,” said Robinson in this Bioneers interview. “That made it like a double bind almost, because we’re in such a tough situation now, and it’s not looking good. We’re not on the right course. So I wanted to portray a best-case scenario, but it seems to me that to make it something that the reader can still believe in, starting from now, bad things are going to happen, and there were going to be people impacted so horrifically by the climate disasters coming down on us inevitably.”

And that drum beat of very slow movement towards change in and of itself makes the actual hopeful outcomes of the book feel that much more possible.

I’m not going to spoil anything for you, but as I’ve texted to several friends who were reading the book and just couldn’t take all the early challenges, “just keep reading, it starts to get hopeful soon.” I get it, it’s like listening to the news which one can only take for so long.

Upon finishing the book I actually felt good about the future. I felt like even with the roadblocks and corporations doing their best to roll back time and our environment along with it, that there was still time. That systemic can happen. That the work of climate activists is working. That although things won’t be perfect, it's not too late to avert disaster. I wanted every politician to read the book and use it as a blueprint.

Alas, shortly after reading the book, a friend told me that we’re already behind what even the dire predictions of Robinson’s book detail. But I don’t think that’s the point. It’s still a work of fiction and he was working with the time within what he knew. What we as readers can do with it is, at the very least, even for a short period of time as we read the book, is that we can have a clearer vision of what is possible. That we can truly envision having a better, healthier, and more just world and that the possibilities are out there. And that the work we are doing is making some kind of impact.

It’s not a perfect book. I was confused with where we were at in time a good portion of the time (which, in his Bioneers interview, he even admitted to seeing how that could be confusing after he re-read it later). There might be some areas we’re doing worse in now than Robinson depicted. But I think for me, it was valuable actually seeing that a better world is possible and do-able. The realistic approach and the research he did to conjure up a better future made it easier to do so.

If you read the book, I’m curious about your thoughts. What did you think? Comment below with your reflections.