by Kim Stanley Robinson, Simon Saito
4.4 · 5 reviewsThe Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all.
The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year, this extraordinary novel from visionary science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson will change the way you think about the climate crisis. ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR “The best science-fiction nonfiction novel I’ve ever read.” —Jonathan Lethem "If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future." —Ezra Klein (Vox) "One hopes that this book is read widely—that Robinson’s audience, already large, grows by an order of magnitude.
5 reviews
Dense, yes. Worth it, absolutely. Read it slowly over a month and it changed how I think about the next thirty years.
Most climate fiction is apocalypse. This one insists on a future that's difficult but survivable, and it does the work to show how. Mary and Frank's thread holds it together.
For every extraordinary chapter there's a fifteen-page digression on monetary policy. I'm glad I read it. I won't pretend all of it was enjoyable.
It's an eyewitness archive, a policy paper and a thriller taking turns. The chapters on carbon quantitative easing shouldn't be gripping and somehow are. Robinson is doing something nobody else attempts.
The opening heatwave chapter is one of the most terrifying things I have ever read and I have thought about it every summer since. What follows is a serious, granular attempt to imagine how we actually get out of this.