The Ministry for the Future: A Novel

"Stan has been thinking really hard about what used to be distant speculative fiction in our relationship with our environment. As he says, the timeline gets shorter and shorter and Ministry for the Future is set in the highly accessible, very-near future. One of the things that he does very, very well is he draws a path through what climate change —and the worst aspects of climate change—might look like. Some of it’s quite hard. The book opens with one of the most searing chapters on anything that I’ve ever read, which is a minute-by-minute account of an incredible heatwave in India, which is above what’s known as the ‘wet-bulb’ temperature. The ‘wet-bulb’ temperature is a point at which human beings essentially get poached in their own skin unless they have air conditioning. You can’t cool yourself at a wet-bulb temperature, you need a machine to cool you down. Of course, in India, where this happens, there aren’t that many cooling machines around. He takes you through that. Then he focuses on a couple of characters and he throws up some really interesting ideas. So there is a rather formal bureaucratic decision to create something called ‘the Ministry for the Future’ that is going to think about the future and think about how to bring people together and get them to act. At the same time, there is the pressure of unilateralism, so certain governments engage in their own solar geoengineering. There is also the arrival of eco-terrorism, people who take private planes out of the sky and attack Davos meetings and sink ships and so on. What he focuses on is the reality of the policymaking and this sense that, at some point, the background of this will just be normal, everyday politics. What he finally paints as the outcome is interesting. It’s a really re-wilded world, with a much slower pace. People use much less energy. I have some questions about whether the planet will accept that, whether politics will allow that to happen, but I think it’s worth a read for anyone, really. We’ll always be a high tech society because we can’t put the genie back in the bottle. It’s more that the pace changes. There are sailing ships, rather than diesel-powered ships. There are airships. There are many, many people who viscerally feel the shock of climate deaths and the destruction of humanity and their environment and that is what triggers their value shift to live on less energy every day and to reuse and recycle. There’s a large aspect of what I would call ‘slow tech’ in there. It’s not one of these books where the end state is that we suddenly get nuclear fusion power and carbon sequestration and technology saves the day. There are definitely key technical aspects, like the introduction of a carbon cryptocurrency that incentivises people to sequester carbon, which is great news for farmers around the world."

"This is a genuine eco-thriller and it’s had serious traction since it was published: Barack Obama gave an endorsement to the effect that it was one of the best books of 2020… My politics are more radical than Robinson’s, but the fact that his book exists and that it went as far as it did, means the rest of us have implicit licence to go further. This is definitely a book people would call ‘ cli-fi .’ We open in India, with a ‘wet bulb’ moment , which is when humidity is very close to 100% and the temperature above human body temperature. If the external environment is that hot, and you can’t sweat, you’re going to cook—in the book, 20 million people die. This has happened: we’ve already seen a couple of wet bulb events. They were just quite brief, and fairly localised. But this one in the book hits most of India. Then, as a result, India says it is going to start seeding clouds with sulphur dioxide: pure geo-engineering, which is a seriously bad idea: a product of linear thinking in a systemic and complex world, but the government has to do something . The rest of the world realises that this is a fast road to ruin so they turn to the fictional ‘Ministry for the Future’ previously set up as an act of greenwashing. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Suddenly people want to give it teeth and expect it to have answers. It struggles until an eco-terrorist group realises that the way to get people to do something is to target the private jets of the super-rich. So this frightens people with power into action and gradually the Ministry starts to garner a bit of power, starts to evolve some of the really interesting ideas about different financial systems and different ways of structuring business. On the whole though, it seems still to maintain a world where business continues as usual: where the ‘super-organism’ of predatory capital continues to extract value from anything good and right and beautiful, it just does it in slightly different ways that are not quite as carbon intensive: we don’t stop the ‘ forever chemicals’ leaching into the waterways, or the AI from going rogue, or undo the desperate cultural inequities of colonialism. This is what I find disappointing about the book. It doesn’t say: if we all took this on board, we could work together to create a future that would look very different, but which would be creative and amazing and wonderful. Instead it says: okay, let’s drill down to the base of the glaciers and suck out a lot of water, let’s alter the tax codes to change the economy, and a bunch of other perfectly valid ideas. But it doesn’t fundamentally change the values on which everything else is built, or give us the space to become the connected, compassionate people we could be if we all had the courage. All of which means it’s my least favourite of these books, but it’s one that would probably be at the top of everybody else’s list, and it’s definitely an eco-thriller. Exactly. There’s a linear, reductive mindset that knows we have a problem and then applies the miracle of human creativity to find a solution to that specific problem while completely ignoring the fact that we’re embedded in a hypercomplex system and the one thing we can say without question about geo-engineering is that we’ll see unintended consequences, that they’ll be seriously bad and we won’t know how to undo what we’ve done. Daniel Schmachtenberger , one of the greatest minds of our age, says that what will kill humanity is our incapacity to understand exponential growth. Mainly, he was referring to the double exponents of AI expansion, but I’d add to this that our incapacity to engage with the nature of complexity is just as bad. This is terrifying, because the people want mess with the systems even more than we’re messing now, are doing it so they can continue to cling onto power by burning fossil fuels—they’ll just be able to pretend they’ve ‘solved the problem’. What we need is not magical-thinking techno-fixes. We need a change in our core values. We need to stop trying to heal the wounds inside by buying yet more stuff from Amazon, or private jets for those of us in a different income bracket. Instead, we need to find ways to heal, to reconnect with the broader web of life: to engage in what Tyson Yunkaporta called the ‘Right Story’ in his book Right Story, Wrong Story , which I highly recommend. Then we need to build the narratives where connected, compassionate, thoughtful people bring the whole creativity of humanity to bear on building a future that we’d be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. We are a storied species. Everything we do is predicated on stories we tell ourselves and each other about ourselves and each other. If we could build stories of how we make it through to an entirely different way of being with the human and more-than-human worlds, we’d be in a different place. Imagine waking up in a world where every novel, every TV show, soap opera, movie, song, poem, newspaper column was based on the concept that business as usual is over, predatory capitalism is dead and we all need to co-create something new from the ashes. We can still do this. Human creativity is absolutely extraordinary. The current system is not working for anybody, but we spin our wheels and create a lot of noise and dust over how to change it. The future is in the hands of the creatives. It’s our job to think of how it could look and feel different. So, please: if you’re reading this and you write anything, from poetry to movie scripts or a TikTok video, stop writing as if the current system was working and start writing something that will take us forward to a new, more flourishing way of being that we’d all be proud to leave as our legacy."

"Kim Stanley Robinson always writes with great insight about his subjects, and it is clear he does a mass of research. He’s looked at climate change before, particularly in another piece of speculative fiction, New York 2140 (about a flooded New York in that year), and what I like about his work is the plausibility—the plausible optimism—of it. Having said that, The Ministry for the Future starts with a truly shocking set piece about the horrors that may await us as global temperatures continue to creep up. The book then goes on to detail the work of the titular ministry in galvanising action on climate change. As with all his work, his future seems very possible—certainly it has many things to aim for. So what I find strong is his solution-based approach to telling stories about the future: we need some of those solutions in our own future. Yes—the adoption of a new global currency tied to carbon emissions. From speaking with various people in the writing of my book, such as the economist Dieter Helm at the University of Oxford, I understand that we have to put a price on carbon if we are ever going to tame it. I’m not an economist by any means but it does seem that economists have failed us so far in shying away from the problem of climate change. And economic approaches to reining in emissions, be it a carbon tax or a price on carbon or a carbon currency have been under-researched, and their importance underappreciated. This feeds into another of my five books…"