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A review by pascalthehoff
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
4.0
This is one of the very few contemporary books that everyone should have read or at least given a fair shot. So why the reservation, why the 4/5 and not an outright 100% end-to-end recommendationt?
For starters, what places the novel in a favorable spot is the severe lack of mainstream-ish fiction on climate change. The very nature of the topic renders it unwieldy for fiction: Since climate change is a collective problem and its solutions need to be collective efforts, there can't be individual hero characters that shine. All plausible and believable villains must be faceless and too manifold to grasp. Progress (in any direction) is slow, rarely fast-paced and exciting. What Kim Stanley Robinson creates on that basis is, in the first few chapters alone, more than admirable and should be enough to sway even the most dispassionate reader towards some degree of climate activism.
At the same time, there are #literaryqualities about this book that make it stand out from your everyday science fiction novel. However, it's exactly these more sophisticated elements that inflate the novel more than would be necessary. Especially towards the end, there is a hefty chunk of pages that engages in forced attempts to paint emotional character arcs. And that is not what I came here for or what the novel builds up for most of its chapters.
I love that Ministry for the Future is not all doom and gloom. It's cautious optimisim is what makes it bearable in the first place. At times, it feels like the novel tries to hide its rather idealistic solutions in overly detailed explanations. At other times, though, this willingness to go into detail is what makes the novel so interesting. However, there is a limit for how much I can suspend my disbelief when it comes to the coordinated behaviour of the entire planet's population.
That being said, these "flaws" are part of what makes Ministry for the Future such a great gateway drug to understanding the real implications of climate change as well as the importance of climate activism, green politics and all that is connected with it - including the consideration of violent revolution and eco-terrorism as a valid solution.
Despite its very maximalist approach, every few pages, Ministry for the Future makes you lean back and take a breath filled with existential dread. Some of the theses and individual sentences this novel flings at you are just sizzling hot. Beneath that are the lingeling, yet towering epiphanies that make you realize, for example, that - even in a best-case scenario - WE who are reading this might not even see the near future this novel takes place in. With a long-term survival rate of roundabout 33% once we hit the 3°C threshold... Well, that's just how reality MIGHT turn out and ignoring that possibility is a short-term solution at best.
For starters, what places the novel in a favorable spot is the severe lack of mainstream-ish fiction on climate change. The very nature of the topic renders it unwieldy for fiction: Since climate change is a collective problem and its solutions need to be collective efforts, there can't be individual hero characters that shine. All plausible and believable villains must be faceless and too manifold to grasp. Progress (in any direction) is slow, rarely fast-paced and exciting. What Kim Stanley Robinson creates on that basis is, in the first few chapters alone, more than admirable and should be enough to sway even the most dispassionate reader towards some degree of climate activism.
At the same time, there are #literaryqualities about this book that make it stand out from your everyday science fiction novel. However, it's exactly these more sophisticated elements that inflate the novel more than would be necessary. Especially towards the end, there is a hefty chunk of pages that engages in forced attempts to paint emotional character arcs. And that is not what I came here for or what the novel builds up for most of its chapters.
I love that Ministry for the Future is not all doom and gloom. It's cautious optimisim is what makes it bearable in the first place. At times, it feels like the novel tries to hide its rather idealistic solutions in overly detailed explanations. At other times, though, this willingness to go into detail is what makes the novel so interesting. However, there is a limit for how much I can suspend my disbelief when it comes to the coordinated behaviour of the entire planet's population.
That being said, these "flaws" are part of what makes Ministry for the Future such a great gateway drug to understanding the real implications of climate change as well as the importance of climate activism, green politics and all that is connected with it - including the consideration of violent revolution and eco-terrorism as a valid solution.
Despite its very maximalist approach, every few pages, Ministry for the Future makes you lean back and take a breath filled with existential dread. Some of the theses and individual sentences this novel flings at you are just sizzling hot. Beneath that are the lingeling, yet towering epiphanies that make you realize, for example, that - even in a best-case scenario - WE who are reading this might not even see the near future this novel takes place in. With a long-term survival rate of roundabout 33% once we hit the 3°C threshold... Well, that's just how reality MIGHT turn out and ignoring that possibility is a short-term solution at best.