Fiction of Our Climate: On Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Ministry for the Future"
Kim Stanley Robinson | The Ministry for the Future | Orbit Books | 2020 | 576 Pages
Reading the headlines one day this summer—“Alarm as fastest growing U.S. cities risk becoming unlivable from climate crisis,” “The northern hemisphere is baking in record heat as fires rip through Europe and U.S., China temperatures soar,” “Europe plans to force countries to ration gas as Russia weaponizes energy”—I could imagine I was back inside Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. Yet reality looms more ominously than Robinson’s fiction: “The thirties were zombie years,” we read midway through his novel. “Civilization had been killed but it kept walking the Earth, staggering toward some fate even worse than death.” We seem instead to be rushing headlong into disaster on multiple fronts. The novel deals exclusively with the climate crisis, setting aside the way an out-of-kilter world threatens the always tenuous balance among organisms, peoples, and nations: “Not a pathogen, not genocide, not a war; simply human action and inaction… killing the most vulnerable.” But alongside this summer’s heat waves, fire, drought, and flooding, the ravages of pandemics, genocide, and war are still with us, and the vulnerable bear the brunt of all of these.
In this final review in a series considering candidates for “the great climate novel,” in conversation with Amitav Ghosh’s critique of climate fiction from 2016, I turn to a science fiction novel—despite Ghosh’s dismissal of the genre as escapist when it comes to addressing climate change. He argues in The Great Derangement that by setting cataclysmic effects far in the future, science fiction abets the denial that we are suffering now. Robinson, whose novels 2312 and New York 2140 looked centuries ahead to the effects of climate change, seems to be responding to this critique in The Ministry for the Future, which confines its scope to the next couple of decades. Further, whether intentionally or not, it incorporates all four elements Ghosh identifies as ripe for exploration in novels serious about wrestling with climate change: the nonhuman, the cataclysmic, the extractive mindset, and the collective.
The novel begins all-too-presciently with a heat wave in India, a sunrise that “blazed like an atomic bomb, which of course it was.” Through the eyes of American aid worker Frank May, we witness the hellish hours of a power outage and high humidity that lead to upwards of 20 million deaths. May shares his AC and generator with neighbors until he’s robbed at gunpoint, then leads those who can still walk to immerse themselves in the lake. Of the 200,000 inhabitants of a town in Uttar Pradesh, May alone survives. The two cans of cool water he kept to himself ensure a lifetime of PTSD and survivor’s guilt.
May’s narrative is braided into the novel but never again reappears with the immediacy of the opening. Rather than immerse us in a single mind—the “individual imaginary” critiqued by Ghosh—Robinson dips us into perspectives from around the globe, and sometimes beyond it. The second chapter, for example, gives voice to the nonhuman in a paragraph-length riddle that ends: “Someday I will eat you. For now, I feed you. Beware my regard. Never look at me.” Turn the page, and we read about the international response to the Paris Climate Agreement’s failure to curb carbon emissions: the creation of “the Ministry for the Future,” a new agency “charged with defending all living creatures present and future who cannot speak for themselves, by promoting their legal standing and physical protection.” The chapters continue these free-wheeling shifts in point of view and narrative tone, propelling us through surprisingly readable treatises, academic discussions, and minutes from the ministry’s meetings, alongside first person accounts of, among others, refugee and slave labor experiences, Davos participants, of an ecoterrorist group, scientists working on Antarctic glaciers, and small model organizations working on sustainability and restoration around the world—all interspersed with riddles spoken by blockchain, the market, a photon, herd animals, the Earth and Sun, and History. The result is a whirling, ironic collage that feels both arbitrary and congruous.
Robinson’s novel entertains by educating. In the first 50 pages, we learn how heat affects the human body, how spraying aerosol into the atmosphere can cool the earth, the definition of “ideology” and commentary on its usefulness, different treatments for PTSD and their limitations, how much carbon is left in the earth and the small minority of humans who will decide whether to burn it, and about the 6th extinction and the 20 million years it will take for the earth to repopulate. In later pages, we learn in some detail how water might be pumped from under glaciers to prevent runaway melting; about the Hebrew tradition of Tzadikim Nistarim, the hidden righteous ones scattered around the world; the Jevons Paradox, that as use of a resource becomes more efficient, its use increases; the history of the Bank of England; Götterdämmerung Syndrome, a kind of narcissistic rage during end times, applied by metaphor to capitalism; and the history of taxation. We read about the creation of a carbon coin, the economic “discount rate” applied to the future, the cooperative economies of liberation theology, and the Gini coefficient, which measures income or wealth inequality in societies.
This focus on economics is no accident, one of the academic narrators tells us. Because inequality threatens stability only in certain political systems, and because people can’t agree on morality, inequality by default becomes considered an economic rather than a political or moral problem: “It’s the structure of feeling in our time; we can’t think in anything but economic terms, our ethics must be quantified and rated for the effects that our actions have on GDP.” That same narrator concludes by saying it’s important to take all this back into the human and social realm, “to acknowledge the reality of other people, and of the planet itself. To see other people’s faces. To walk outdoors and look around.” The quote justifies the form of Robinson’s novel: when narrators aren’t staging academic debates, they survey the planet and its various environments and inhabitants. The novel’s second protagonist is Mary Murphy, a middle-aged Irish woman who heads the Ministry. Eventually her life intertwines with Frank May’s, though uneasily and never quite convincingly. Frank holds Mary hostage one night in her apartment, tells his story and demands that she and the ministry do more. Frank is later apprehended, and Mary visits him in jail with ambivalence; based on what is less a friendship and more of an uneasy truce, she finally sees him through hospice when he falls ill. Mary herself is never grounded the way Frank is with a motivating, lived backstory, and despite belated efforts to stir up a possible romance with someone who roams over the globe in a dirigible, she never fully comes to life.
The real sparks in the novel come from the discussions of economics and ethical dilemmas—If climate destruction is war on the future, should it be opposed with war’s weapons? Is there such a thing as justice for victims, specifically the victims of colonialist capitalism?—and from the shifting style and tone. Dark humor abounds. The ministry’s minutes paraphrase the takeaway of a meeting as “in short, fucked.” One of the Davos participants—held hostage for a week and shown videos and statistics about the disconnect between their lives and those of the majority of the planet’s—gives activists the finger when he says, “so, effect of this event on the real world: zero!”
Moments of beauty and optimism counter the cynical moments. Someone in a city struck by drought becomes aware, as everyone needs water, that society exists, that we live among strangers, and that all these strangers are fellow citizens: “This is what makes it less than desolating—your fellow citizens are a real thing, a real feeling.” More than all the riddles, this narrator’s little aside about carrying water—“water being so amazingly heavy”— brings home both the elemental wonder of life and the wonder of the way community can lighten that weight.
The thrust of the novel balances these two impulses, asking: What’s the best case of the worst case? Taking the world as it is, capitalism for what it is, self-interest for what it is, and given the entrenched resistance to change, what is the best we can hope for? What if we could buy a little time by spraying sulfur into the atmosphere? What if we could buy more by pumping water out from under glaciers? What if a crypto-currency model were used to sequester carbon? You can’t change the values of a banker, but could you make it worth the banker’s while to back such a coin? What if Facebook were replaced by YourLock, giving individuals ownership of their data that they could choose to sell or not? What if fear of ecoterrorist acts, combined with eco-incentives, could nudge people—especially the very few with real power over the climate—toward changing their habits?
As I re-read The Ministry for the Future, I find myself still thinking of Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were, the third book in this series of reviews. Robinson moves from its single village to the entire globe, and likewise takes its child’s point of view a step further, into the abstraction of future generations. For a book focused on the future, children are strangely absent. “All the children were dead, all the old people were dead,” Frank observes at one point in the heat wave, and while this is just in one location in India, the comment resonates through the whole book. Babies are heard crying at one point, and we read that the Davos Hostages are shown videos of their children and statistics of their antidepressant use. Only one of the short chapters is narrated by a child, one of two Libyan refugee girls that Frank (under an alter ego) briefly becomes stepfather to, but the chapter focuses on him. I miss the fullness of intergenerational perspectives and agency that saturated Mbue’s novel. Here, living children have been replaced by the name “Children of Kali,” a radical Indian faction that forms in response and threatens terrorist action against those who don’t work to lower emissions. They—or an international movement they have inspired—are responsible for Crash Day, on which numerous business and private jets crash; for introducing mad cow disease into millions of cows; and for attacks on power plants around the world.
Violence is an undercurrent through the novel, but it is held at arm’s length. Frank tries on terrorism and discards it, Mary comes to grudging terms with the existence of the ministry’s “black wing,” and the Children of Kali take conscientious care to avoid “collateral damage” of innocent life. Robinson seems much more interested in exploring socio-economic and technological solutions. In this he takes up the gauntlet thrown down by Mbue: What effective action can an individual take? Frank thinks darkly, at one point, “One-eight-billionth wasn’t a very big fraction, but then again there were poisons that worked in the parts-per-billion range, so it wasn’t entirely unprecedented for such a small agent to change things.” But if terrorism is discarded, the other hope is to become one of the few capable of making change. Despite its attempts to give voice to refugees and others who are disempowered, the book spends more time in Zurich than anywhere else, and is dominated by the elites. Their theories, their science, and their meetings over fine meals and alcohol seem designed to appeal to policy wonks.
Prognosticating into the near future is a risky venture. The Ministry for the Future has a very close relationship with the world, and the downside is that it risks being dated with every development. In the 2022 India heat wave, there were no mass fatalities. With any unpredicted geopolitical shift—Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, say—the book is put on the defensive, as if it got something wrong. It’s hard not to ask: What about the renewed rise of totalitarianism, the renewed threat of war among nuclear powers, the ongoing pandemic, the threat of inflation and recession? Where are the narratives of disinformation or of entrenched working-class interests? Robinson decenters American politics—the U.S. government is referred to only in an aside as one of the most reactionary—and yet as the largest global emitter of carbon dioxide, its political paralysis seems a significant obstacle worth a few pages.
If the most important thing is to avoid a mass extinction event, one narrator notes, the field of economics should reorient from profit to biosphere health and begin asking questions like, “Why do we do things? What do we want? What would be fair? How do we best arrange our lives together on this planet?” The novel proposes a few positive models: a New India based on social justice and sustainable agriculture; a Spanish model of a cooperative economy; and a Californian rejuvenation of the environment through sustainable groundwater management and carbon-neutral energy use. The narrative draws to a close on notes of hope, with a “harmony day” in which three billion people around the world, as “the children of this planet… sing its praises all together, all at once”; with refugees released from a camp, given “not money… not freedom… but dignity”; and with the end of Mary’s tenure at the Ministry of the Future, after the 58th meeting of the signatories of the Paris Agreement. On the positive side, the ministry’s actions and other activism—a combination of incentives and terrorism—have turned the tide, CO2 levels are dropping, income inequality has flattened, the human population is slowly declining, large swathes of land have been rewilded, and there are signs that ecosystems are beginning to heal. Then there are the outstanding problems: ocean acidification, nuclear waste and other pollution, the thirty poorest countries, the mistreatment of women, and, unacknowledged at the conference, the hubris and economic imperialism of the United States. We end on Mary’s internal mantra: “we will keep going.”
Mbue’s novel will have a longer life, I predict, but Robinson’s is one for the moment. It answers a very real psychological need: it signifies that climate change is here, and it suggests possibilities for action. Instead of stirring empathy—which has been shown to be poor at motivating moral action—The Ministry for the Future engenders both guarded hope and a sense of urgency. It’s a political treatise, in that sense, and its novelistic trappings ultimately fall away. After reading it, we can follow the news by its lights, balancing each cynicism with a moment of optimism. It looks like the U.S. Congress may at long last act on climate change, even as Republican state treasurers penalize companies that try to reduce greenhouse emissions and the executive branch asks Saudi Arabia to produce more oil and resumes leases for drilling. Meanwhile, we deplore when a low-income country, impoverished and destabilized by colonialism, does the same: “Congo to Auction Land to Oil Companies: ‘Our Priority Is Not to Save the Planet.’” It’s never been ours, either. But it could be.