The future history novel is a very specific type of science fiction: relying on a narrative rather than a plot. It’s desperately unfashionable and since Wells and Stapledon novelists have made their histories implicit and revealed through action and plot rather than attempting to write a ‘history of the future’. Kim Stanley Robinson’s work, especially his Mars series, might be seen as tiptoing into this arena. Now with The Ministry of the Future he’s dived straight in. The ecological and political themes that have always driven his work are now front and centre as he tracks the history of the earth over the next thirty years.

The novel starts with an apocalyptic event: an extreme heat event in India that kills millions. Virtually the only survivor is Frank, an American aid worker. He is one of only two characters who have what could be called a storyline. The other is Mary, an Irish politician who is chosen to head the titular Ministry, brought into being in Switzerland to advocate for the generations not yet born in decision-making that affects the planet’s sustainability. Their paths cross when Frank, radicalised by his experience, kidnaps Mary to impress upon her that respectful lobbying and polite advocacy is not enough.

And this is KSR’s central theme: that what politicians, business leaders and international organisations are currently proposing is not enough. So what might be enough? The Ministry of the Future is a future history that looks back to track how a vast cast of characters across the globe could plausibly arrive at a course of action that was enough. He puts this ending upfront, shifting the narrative from focusing on whether to how.

The future history format frees Robinson from even pretending to use his research for anything more creative than informing.This novel will leave most readers knowing much more about carbon sequestration, glacial movement and methane production than they did at the start.
A vast cast: refugees, Presidents, scientists and even non-humans voice a collective oral history of how the world moved, at great cost, from heading towards catastrophe and extinction to sustainability. This may be the only novel where the photon and the market are chapter narrators. And it’s the operation of that market that Robinson sees as lying at the heart of the climate emergency: from offshore tax havens and globalisation to the actions of central banks he sees the economic game is firmly rigged against the implementation of any meaningful change through the current channels.

Mary - with Frank as her prompter and conscience - has a central role in finding new channels, from trying to persuade world central banks to adopt the carboni, a new global currency that would reward carbon capture; to sanctioning a ‘don’t tell, don’t know’ campaign of terrorism by others within her Ministry. Might the death of a few thousand business leaders and populist politicians be the ‘enough’ that will lead to the necessary change? Here they are seen as committing crimes against humanity: their actions not just robbing, but killing, future generations before they are born.

Read this as a novel and I suspect the lack of action and characters could be frustrating. Read it as a roadmap of our future and it challenges us to think about how much we would be prepared to do: and whether that might be enough.

I got Ministry for the Future from netgalley for a fair and honest review

Established in 2025, the purpose of the new organization was simple: To advocate for the world's future generations and to protect all living creatures, present and future. It soon became known as the Ministry for the Future, and this is its story.

Told entirely through fictional eye-witness accounts, this book is the story of how climate change will affect us all over the decades to come.

Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. One in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face.

Review

This is one of those books that I saw in NetGally and that I should request it, as I had read a number of Kim Stanley Robinson's books before.

However there was some trepidation as well, as the last book I had, Green Earth, was one that while interesting was a little below his usual standard. But with this book The Ministry For The Future he is back to his best.

The way that this book is written is like watching a documentary, with a lot of things being described by eyewitnesses such as the scene at the start of the Book with the Heatwave in India. Which gives the book an added feel of realism as we all know that type of format.

Between the documentary type chapters was the scenes with the Ministry for the Future, itself including the work of the staff and in particular, their leader Mary, these were told as a normal story almost like dramatizations seen is some Documentaries and here was were the arthur was able to bring the reader emotionally into to both the story and in particular the characters themselves.

The only weakness for the general reader with this book is that Robinson is one of those writers that puts a lot of information in his books, which could be science, economic or any other subject that will fit in with the type of book he is writing. Which means there are times when reading the story is like reading a textbook.

Having said that the way that he writes the information in the book is easy to understand, is there to enhance the story. For example, the reason that ice glaciers are moving faster than normal because of climate change, was done in such a way that I wish my textbooks at school were written.

Who would I recommend this book to? The easyone is people who read and enjoyed, Kim Stanley Robinson, before as I feel he is back to his best with this one.

In addition if you are interesting to read a Science Fiction book based on climate change, or you are interested in the subject and how the world may handle it, but do not want to read a dry textbook, then The Ministry For The Future, the latest book by Kim Stanley Robbinson, should be on your reading list.

It took me nearly 4 months to read this book, as I had to take a break from it after the opening. I've never had such a physical reaction to a first chapter before (pounding heart, goosebumps, ready to have a good sob). I'm not going to argue that this was always an easy book to read in 2020. The horror is necessary though - it grounds the whole rest of the book, and lets you see what everyone is working to avoid. It also makes the quietly (and most importantly) realistically hopeful ending resonate that much brighter.
Though it did start to feel less urgent in the last quarter, for the most part (after my break from it at least!) I absolutely could not put this down. It's so ambitious (chapter from the POV of a molecule, anyone?) and gave me lots to think about. I really liked the switching points of view, and the tone going between almost factual to standard literary. This book probably won't be to everyone's tastes, but I foud it extremely engaging and with important points to make.

Overall, I really enjoyed this one. The premise, world destroyed by climate change is a bit of unique take on the usual nuclear disaster/meteoroid line.

But, It so hard to read. I've described it as an information dossier. Which is about as close as I can come to what it is. The book is told through a cast of characters, scientific reports, letters, memos, meeting minutes and bizarrely at one point is narrated by a photon.

I love KSR, and I've ordered the audio to see if its easier to digest that way.

This is a fascinating and frightening novel about the future of our planet.
It’s very much subject lead with a small cast of reoccurring characters. Although the character driven chapters are sparsely populated throughout the novel they were the chapters I enjoyed most. The best being the horrific description of India as the temperature soars and people in a small village die each day due to heatstroke and a lack of resources.
This is a brilliantly researched novel that deserves to be read widely.
Thanks to NetGalley and Little, Brown Book Group UK for the early copy.

This is KSR’s roadmap to how we might avoid total climate disaster in the coming decades. I say avoid, yet many hundreds of thousands of people die during the course of the book. Grimly, this is the optimistic view. The pessimistic one is much worse. The book engages with politics, global finance, geo engineering, technology, sociology and constructive terrorism to offer a path to a twenty second century Earth that is in much better shape than she is at the moment. There is a framing narrative around the formation and work of the titular Ministry, led by Mary Murphy, the closest thing to a main character there, but really it’s a collage novel. There are short discursive interludes from all kinds of viewpoints, and the plentiful chapters hop between viewpoints and locations to give a global picture. It’s a good read, with some fine writing - the opening chapter is particularly effective. I do worry that some of the obstacles to Robinson’s ideas are overcome too easily. It’s a long way from Trump and Johnson to even the 2025 actions depicted in this book, and that’s before we get to the destruction of capital a decade or two further down the line. It’s going to be a long hard road, but this gives us the hope that it might be worth walking.

Synopsis: It's 2025, the founding year of the Ministry of the Future which is an agency established in Zürich, Switzerland, to ensure health and safety for the generations to come.  A heat wave crawls over rural India just before the yearly monsoon, killing twenty million people, and everything changes. 

The story follows Mary Murphy, head of the new ministry, and tells her troubles founding the ministry, bringing banks and governments to political agreements over climate issues, and her long way to retirement. Her live is interleaved with that of Frank May, the sole survivor of the heat wave.

Review: This clifi is a very typical Kim Stanley Robinson novel: Less of a plot, more of a speculative extrapolation. Where his New York 2140 featured the rising sea level, his new novel focuses initially more on the direct impact of higher temperatures with the dire killing of people who cannot flee into cooled buildings, because there are none. This is not the only place which KSR lets the reader visit, but also beloved Antarctica with updated climatic implications since his great novel of 1997. 

Another central showplace is the city of Zürich. As I lived there for a year, I can assess, that KSR's lovely descriptions of the town are top notch, and I once again fell in love with this place. 

The author wouldn't be himself if he wouldn't introduce some radical protagonists into his story who try to change the way our capitalistic world works. In this case, the trauma of the heat wave radicalized Indians who call themselve the "Children of Kali", a Hindu goddess of Destruction. He envisions them to destroy the whole aircraft business by bringing planes down using an army of small drones directed into the flight paths of the planes. The message is obvious: stop flying, and the industry follows. But they don't stop there.

Robinson offers an optimistic view into the further future, one where humanity can overcome the climatic change using terraforming technologies, a reformed capitalism disempowering the connection between banks and governments by issuing a blockchain certified carbon coin, and wiping away crappy Facebook by implementing a people owned and operated new Internet.

He finds many angles which are needed to save our children's world, some may be naive, others could be counterargued. But together they form a holistic view that could work - something that I'm missing in so many dystopian clifis of these days. 

I can fully recommend this Near Future Hard SF for everyone who doesn't focus on plot or character but wants to see a solution oriented future of climatic change.

Kim Stanley Robinson paints a truly frightening potential future in "The Ministry For the Future". It's not a comfortable read, but it is one that's hard to walk away from. Obviously, KSR did a lot of research - a LOT. I would like world leaders to read this book. Maybe it would push them into taking climate change a little more seriously and start working towards correcting our mistakes... before it's too late. Having said that, this isn't a preachy book, which it so easily could have been. A brilliant story, but a terrible possible reality.

My thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for an advance copy to review. This review is entirely my own, unbiased, opinion.

So, where to begin with this review - the novel starts out with, what I feel, could have been an intriguing premise for the whole book, however, is a snippet of worse times to come for humanity. I enjoyed this opening, the visuals, the characters - the odd feeling of displacement in our own reality. However, the book didn't continue in this vein, rather, it 's more about the topic than the story, which for me, is not my cup of tea! Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the discussions about the environmental state, however, when the point of view is from a molecule you tend to lose me. Well, it's a novel for those who don't want to be character led, rather subject led and, boy, does it do that in spades - interesting novel though.

There have been some tough moments recently: thinking about the world in its current state, the leaders we have, and the likelihood that even now with all the knowledge we have, we're sleepwalking into irreversible climate destruction. Very often, it's hard to see any way we can rescue the situation.

This book offers... hope, or at least the opportunity to suspend your disbelief in the awfulness of the humans in power, and think about the potential for good humans to turn things round. In this case, the fictional Ministry of the Future – part positive-action pulling-everyone-together global agency, and part dark-ops sabotaging-the-bad-guys secret force – is the pivot for change.

There were times earlier on when I wasn't sure about the book. Some chapters felt like big slabs of information being slung at me like a text book or lecture, when I was wanting to push on with the plot and characters. That information, though, felt crucial later on as the plot (and the Ministry's efforts) flowered. There's a lot in here I want to look up now: are these technologies real and possible? Can we drill holes in glaciers, pump out water and stop them sliding, for example? It feels tangible, and has made me want to find out.

I liked the structure: lots of chapters, told from different viewpoints and in different structures (from straight narration to meeting notes etc). By the end, I was running with the novel, eager to understand how the tide of the climate emergency was turning, and to think about what that might mean for us in the real world. It's very long, but a very worthwhile read.

Kim Stanley Robinson is a big name in sci-fi, best known for the Mars trilogy and 2312. His work tends to focus on ecological sustainability with a utopian rather than dystopian slant – less common in modern fiction. However, despite being a sci-fi fan, before picking up ‘The Ministry for the Future’ I’d never read any of his work. I’ll be interested to hear from other reviewers how this compares – the idea is fascinating, but the execution doesn’t have me completely sold.

‘The Ministry for the Future’ is established in 2025 in Zurich by the United Nations, an organisation aimed at conserving the future of humanity by battling the largest threat of the time – climate change. It brings together experts from around the world in various fields to tackle the problem from all sides – policy, economics, artificial intelligence, and direct action. However, the wheels of change are slow, and the effects of climate change are starting to be felt. The book follows the Ministry – primarily its leader, Mary Murphy – over decades, chronicling how the Earth might change and society might change with it.

The narrative style is what makes or breaks this book. It’s exceptionally factual, almost textbook-like. There are entire chapters dedicated to theory – of ecology, economics, engineering. Mary is the main character, but there’s still a level of detachment between her and the reader – and her chapters can’t make up more than a third of the book. The rest resolve through other perspectives – major characters, minor characters, unknown characters, even a carbon atom and a photon – and reels of information, regularly breaking the fourth wall to address the reader. As far as I can tell, much of the science is sound, although the feats of engineering are perhaps a little far-fetched for only happening ten or fifteen years in the future. However, it can be a hard-going slog reading multiple chapters of pure theory, especially when the characters remain superficial rather than pulling the reader in and making them care.

The major characters – Mary Murphy, Badim, Frank May – are all interesting, but very much characters. Mary always feels two dimensional. A career woman with no family (her husband died young), she moves between meetings and summits, taking breaks only to swim or wander aimlessly around Zurich. It’s hard to figure out what she cares about – if she’s even passionate about ecology and climate change – as she doesn’t seem to know herself. This may be a deliberate choice; an underlying theme in all of the characters is trauma and how this affects the psyche. However, this apathy can make her as hard to engage with as the reams of economic theory.

Frank is by far the highlight. The only survivor of a horrific heatwave, he suffers from severe post-traumatic stress disorder. He’s unstable and regularly makes terrible choices, but deep down he seems like a nice man – and he cares, which is enough to persuade the reader to care.

I am, by my own admission, a character-driven reader. The stories I love the most are those with intriguing, engaging characters – they don’t have to have a strong plot, just characters that feel real. This, with its carefully maintained distance from the characters, and arguably barely a protagonist at all beyond climate change, was never going to be a favourite. I think that some readers – especially those with a science background – will love this, but it’s very much a Marmite book. Recommended for fans of more complex sci-fi that emphasises the science over everything else and those looking for a bit of hope for humanity’s future.

Vivid and almost depressing since I saw no light ahead until well into the book. Frank survives appalling heat to link with possible action .. I think this is meant as political tract and I expect no less from this author. It is no longer possible to read the best science fiction without contemplating anomalous futures .. so if you are going to engage, it might as well be with such top, serious writers as Robinson .. the rest is flummery .. brilliant, disturbing and gripping ...

Robinson never disappoints. The Ministry for the Future has made me loose faith in the described fictional humanity within these pages if only to later have it restored. Wow. As true to the blurb, the environmental state Robinson describes in his latest book is definitely as believable as our own current climate and that global warming hopefully is something that, if it does get worse, we'll be able to predict or adapt to much easier and quicker than the unfortunate souls I've been reading about here.

Tl;dr: I want to believe. But I find KSR’s answers vague and unconvincing, so much so that this attempt at a hopeful, needle-threading future has left me more worried about our collective future than when I started reading it.

—————

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a sci-fi writer in possession of a utopian plotline must be in want of that quote about the end of the world being easier to imagine than the end of capitalism. I think KSR gets a good 5% of the way in before he paraphrases it here. It’s a great declaration of intent, a signpost that this novel won’t just indulge in apocalyptic visions (which he summons to terrifying and moving effect in the opening chapter) but try to chart a course between Scylla and Charybdis to a better future.

The problem is that KSR doesn’t actually have a very good idea for how to get there, so he cheats. Repeatedly. Relentlessly. Remorselessly. Scylla actually has an allergy to ships, you see, and Charybdis is definitely super-scary but needs to wash its hair when the protagonists come by so we’re all good. It’s the equivalent of reading a right-on but fundamentally incoherent editorial in The Guardian — I really sympathise with the author’s politics and aspirations, but this isn’t the argument for them.

Now, before I lean in to technical nitpicking and evidence of heavy-handed authorial shenaniganry, a quick word about The Ministry for the Future’s literary quality. Which is often good, sometimes great, but wildly, spectacularly uneven. There are moments — the harrowing opening chapter “somewhere near Lucknow”, a majestic description of the sun as godlike creator-destroyer, a fraught late-night traverse across an Alpine glacier — that are compelling and even transcendent. But they stand tall above a sea of infodumps barely disguised as lectures or bureaucratic notes, a sketched-in protagonist with inexplicable persuasive abilities (more on that later), and frankly jarring interludes where we hear from the personifications of photons, blockchain, the economy, and a carbon atom, amongst others. Some are OK. Some are not. It turns out carbon atoms are hyperactive, ditzy, and into molecular threesomes! Who knew? You do now, reader.

But on to the plausibility issues. In the style of the infodumps above, I’m just going to list some of them out here. There’s a new global carbon e-currency which is guaranteed to increase in value but doesn’t create deflation or liquidity issues because, I dunno, blockchain? (At some point the monetary trilemma and all other macroeconomic concerns are memorably hand-waved away as [Žižek sniff] pure ideology, even if we end up majoring on MMT). Unstoppable Mach 2 swarm missiles with seemingly unlimited range are used by shadowy extra-state actors but don’t problematically destabilise geopolitics. An open-source replacement for all social media immediately overcomes the network effects of incumbents in about a week, unproblematically circumvents most of the Great Firewall, and doesn’t seemingly require armies of half-traumatised mods and admins to police its content. A UN agency undertaking a weeklong abduction of everyone in Davos isn’t discovered by national intelligence agencies even years later. Wholly unspecified carbon air capture technologies are ready and scalable in the next twenty years. Microwave power transmission is happening from space by the 2030s, which likely means those satellites are being designed and funded…about now?

There’s a case study to be had in one of KSR’s coolest ideas, pumping meltwater out from under glaciers to re-ground them. Just drill a hole, and then pup with minimal energy input because the water comes almost all the way to the surface! But would it? Well, a) even contained reservoirs don’t bear all the pressure of their overburdens, so probably no, and b) if the meltwater is venting to the sea what pressure there is should be largely relieved by the flow, so double nope. And that’s just the surface-level problem with the idea. Are meltwater pools even connected on a useful scale? What about channelisation under the ice? Is runoff even all that important in affecting glacial velocities? What’s the relative impact of (effectively unpumpable) warm sea water in driving changes in ice shelf pinning lines in Antartica versus (pumpable) surface meltwater runoff? In the end, even this nifty and concrete idea seems built on a raft of best-case assumptions. And it’s one of the most superficially plausible things in the book.

Beyond the technological nitpicks, however, there’s just a seeming desire to wish away the realities of the last twenty years. Unprecedented floods of refugees and global depression, fine, very plausible, but the political backlash is contained to, uh, some rightwing tough guys making trouble in a park, not even more brutal versions of the Lega, Vox, BNP, and FN rising politically? We’re told nationalism is back in a big way, but I guess it’s basically impotent? Seven thousand travellers die in a single day in an ecoterrorist strike against airlines and states do absolutely nothing of relevance to the plot in response except meekly draw down airplane travel? (Though to be scrupulously fair, ineffective counterterrorist operations are mentioned at one point and then utterly dropped from the narrative). Never mind when the same thing happens with micro-drones threatening swathes of the world population with BSE infection if they continue to eat beef, or power plants being systematically attacked around the world without apparent consequence or backlash. Libertarian ranchers in the US leap at the chance to abandon farms and rewild the prairies, except for unpopular militias easily defeated by a Wild West calvacade. China/US or China/India geopolitical rivalry don’t even get a look in.

What planet is this? Apparently one where the entire politics of reaction, cultural grievance and zero-sum realpolitik that have led to this moment no longer exist. One where the revolutions of 1848 weren’t crushed and replaced by 66 years of revanchism and brutal inequality ending in a catastrophic war. A better place, surely. One I’d like to live in. Just not, you know, the real world.

Instead, Green Lanternism just runs riot here, from central bankers being convinced to upend the global monetary system by a Paddington-style Hard Stare to the Swiss government being convinced to try and buck the global power structure by a Hard Stare to the aforementioned Wild West show, which seemingly does not involve Hard Stares but maybe does off screen, I dunno. All you have to have to save the planet is willpower, and apparently the psychic mojo of the Hypnotoad.

So where does this leave us? It’s a painfully earnest, occasionally lovely book that will hopefully inspire like-minded people to action. Maybe even useful action! And there’s nothing wrong with that. Just pray civilisation doesn’t need anything like the sequence of improbable coincidences, spectacular breakthroughs and authorial meddling KSR seems to think we do.

The shape of things to come according to top US science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson and the forecast is grim. Following a catastrophic 2020s Indian heatwave which kills more people in a few days than the First World War did in four years, Irish politician Mary Murphy and an obscure UN department known as the Ministry for the Future are determined to save the planet. But does the planet really want to be saved?
Likely to be dismissed as 'alarmist' or 'preachy' by the dwindling minority who are still in denial about these increasingly urgent issues, Robinson skillfully informs this work of science fiction with healthy doses of science fact to create a very readable and terrifyingly plausible portrait of a mid-21st century world in crisis.
Read it and then do something about it.

I think the book started with an awful rush to get where the author wanted it to go so the setup featuring the heat wave was less than believable. The galley format (with paragraph numbers everywhere) also did not help me to get sucked into the story.

I think you either like this author’s writing style or you don’t, as this was my first venture reading a book by this author unfortunately, I fall into the latter category.

This is a big book. It's not often I read a book and come away with a list of things I want to look up and find out more about, but this book did that for me. It's moving and painful and hopeful and inspiring, and I found it utterly absorbing.

What's it about? It's about everything, but primarily global warming. The horrors we are unleashing are laid out clearly. This is a call to stop and think and change. Kim Stanley Robinson places global warming firmly in the context of our neoliberal lifestyle and expectations - continuous growth - as if cancer is the paradigm for our society. He pulls in everything - the lack of parity between developed and developing nations, potential technological solutions, the need to sort out global finances and the super-rich if we are going to get any change on this. He segues smoothly between the near past and the future, carrying you along, making this feel almost like reportage, rather than fiction. There are many voices here, all with their own stories.

The main characters are Frank, a young relief worker, and Mary, the "Minister for the Future". Their paths intersect in an unexpected way in Zurich, but their stories weave around each other, they don't really merge.

This is not an action-packed thriller. It's thoughtful and densely packed. It's one of those books I want to badger people to read.

Thank you, NetGalley, for letting me read this one.

Scary! I had just read ‘the Waugh report’ from Huffington Post about the government’s handling of the Russia threat and Coronavirus and then picked up this story again.....are we absolutely sure that Kim isn’t a real life time traveller? A little later, as I really cannot cope with read this for too long, after searching for a small holding in Cornwall on Rightmove I then read this ‘Self-sufficiency was a dream, a fantasy, sometimes of xenophobic nationalists, other times just a decent wish to be safer.’ .....can this guy be a mind reader? More likely and reassuringly I am not alone in my wish to be safe from our present. I did at this point have to read the last chapter where I found references to Jules Verne who was my favourite read as a child, so much more positive than H G Wells. I will not give anything away, I have always disliked spoilers (from the person who had to read the last chapter before reading on from the middle!!). Many thanks to Netgalley, Author and publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is such an impressive piece of literature by one of the best science fiction writers of the last 30 years, In a very similar way to the works of John Dos Passos, or more pertinently, the classic Stand on Zanzibar, Robinson takes climate change, global warming and the destruction of the ozone layer and posits the ways that humanity could potentially reverse global warming if the ministry of the Future of the title really existed.
It's terrifying what humanity has done, and will do , to the Earth , but the methods and solutions suggested by Robinson, whilst immense in scale and hideously expense (and involve radical changes to the global society as a bonus) appear to be based upon existing science and economics, and could be actually doable, if we are willing to take the steps required. This is way up with Robinson's Mars Trilogy as far as I am concerned, it is really that good, and I'm very pleased to have been given th chance to read it by the publishers and Netgalley.A masterpiece.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy is a core piece of my science fiction development. Slow burn Utopianism, set generationally (despite some significantly long lifespans) he managed to balance the speculative aspect of science with the corresponding political and social changes. He juggles a broad canvas over the books, and despite terrorism, disasters and war, ends with a terraformed Mars which felt broadly plausible from where we were in the early nineties (and it was a lot of fun getting there with each book coming out after a summer of University for me)..

The Ministry For The Future is not dissimilar in being a near future bit of terraforming, except here Robinson is terraforming Earth itself for survival. There has always been an ecological aspect to his work, which seems to culminate here in a speculative roadmap to how we get out of the shit we have made for ourselves. It starts in 2023 with a deadly Indian heatwave, and ends about thirty years later, and it is true that his Utopianism has not been destroyed. But it is damn difficult to get to the place of potential safety he gets to and his view is that we won't get there without significant natural disasters, murder and economic and political overhaul. Indeed what is interesting here is not just some of the scientific solutions (draining the bottom of glaciers to stop them slipping into the sea, dying the sea a more reflective colour), but how much of this is economics. That the engine for the the destruction of the human biosphere is mainly driven by capitalism, corporations as machine for growth and profit with no other considerations, and national banks who live to defend currencies no matter what.

The Ministry For The Future is an unusual narrative, and not unlike the Mars Trilogy it only loosely has a protagonist (Mary Murphy - head of said Ministry) and there are chapters told from the point of view of a photon, a carbon dioxide molecule and time itself. Robinson is being playful, his prose often sparse, list like to get across the minutes of the meetings with bankers being had. Morally it is extremely ambivalent. It is clear that he believes that without significant direct action (here, mysterious terrorists randomly shooting planes out of the sky and sinking supertankers), that capitalism will not stop polluting. He cannot see salvation without the destruction of cash, Facebook, and the acceptance of mass refugee emigration. At the same time he is in awe of all the people working in this field already, the hundreds of proliferating projects, some of which might come to fruition. And whilst it is a plausible world map, he is - despite the murder - still a Utopian. As such the book slowly draws to a satisfying but low-key end point romance (Mary Murphy never gets much of a personality beyond trying to save the world, but she is rewarded with a boyfriend at the end). This is not a book to come to for a central personal narrative, the lead character is the biosphere with permaculture and train travel as suitors. But its collage of twenty or so short stories which slip into the flow, state of the world explorations of the African Union taking back mines, or a truly horrendous (but surprisingly undeadly) flood in LA makes the world building work. It believes that humanity can save the world, even that science can do a lot of that heavy lifting, but not without everyone playing a part, though with a sacrifice which is shown to be not that great (again some interesting economic theories come into play). It feels like one last big bit of work, what does the futurologist do in their twilight years. but both made me feel a little better about the world, and reminded me I do have to bloody well do something about it.

[NetGalley ARC]