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nancyflanagan 's review for:

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
5.0

I've been reading this book for a week--a long time for me, considering I'm also on vacation. It is not an easy, light or fun read. It's long--566 pages--and very dense with ideas and counter-ideas and dystopian/utopian speculation. There's a plot, centered around titular Ministry, and characters who don't give you much backstory or development. So as a fast, can't-wait-to-see-what-happens book, this fails.

But. The book is about reversing changes to the biosphere and what happens if we don't, so it's a book about all of the lives of all of the people on the planet. It is wide-ranging, covering economic systems, political systems, technologies, crypto-currency and carbon sequestration, the internet and terrorism, just for starters. As soon as I started reading it, I looked at the world and the United States differently.

If 'Ministry' has a central point, it is this: We are all in this together, for better or worse. Let's make it better. This is an important read.