Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate-fiction blockbuster, The Ministry for the Future, has galvanized readers both within and outside the science fiction community—riding the wave of anxiety catalyzed by last year’s extreme weather events, along with increasingly urgent warnings from climate experts and activists. The novel’s power relies on a two-pronged strategy: offering an imaginational way to confront the massive suffering that now seems probable, given humanity’s failure to act in a timely way so far; and a vision of one successful path toward climate solutions and a more equitable world.
With this double-edged approach, the novel starts with a fatal humid heat wave in India that kills millions. It’s experienced by a young aid worker, Frank May, who becomes one of the few survivors of the climate disaster. That’s the first chapter; the aftermath takes up the rest of the book and centers on a new UN agency, The Ministry for the Future—set up to act in the interests of our descendants and the future well-being of non-human creatures and the land. (This wonderful concept builds on the Native American “seventh generation” principle, and on legal precedents such as Bolivia’s “Law of the Rights of Mother Earth,” giving legal standing to the environment.)
One issue for writers of climate fiction is conveying the scale and multiplicity of the challenges in a single narrative. Robinson is known as a master of deploying complex, large-scale narratives in novels such as The Years of Rice and Salt, which constructs a huge alternate-history tapestry, and New York 2140, another near-future novel about climate change. Many of his books have a global reach, and he’s eminently qualified to bring this approach to bear on the overwhelming scale of the climate crisis.
There’s a kind of heroic hopefulness here, existing alongside the acknowledgment of terrible loss. The book is also shot through with desperation—not just on the level of plot, which follows Frank as he tries to grapple with survivor’s guilt and the scale of the threat, as well as shadowy groups who turn to eco-terrorism to shift the global balance away from fossil fuels. In this book, It feels to me that Robinson has translated the desperation many of us feel over the climate emergency into a complex, jittery meta-narrative structure that pokes readers beyond their usual immersion in story.
The novel is stuffed to bursting with different storytelling types, bringing up the question: can one novel hold it all? The intertwining arcs of the two main characters, Frank May and Mary Murphy, the head of the Ministry for the Future, actually take up only about a third of the book. Here’s how I see the different narrative approaches and what they bring to the novel.
- Straight third-person voice. The two main characters’ stories, told this way, give us an emotional rope-bridge over the uncertainties of the immediate near future—the 2020s through the 2040s. Some chapters also follow the point of view of other Ministry staff.
- Notes. A few chapters follow Mary’s experience in the form of a stenographer’s notes of Ministry meetings. Their jagged sentence fragments, quick and dirty, propel us through the meat of those policy discussions with an urgency that feels exactly right.
- First-person voice. One story-strand follows an immigrant family displaced by climate disruption, through the eyes of different family members. Then there’s the first-person view of a scientist leading a massive geoengineering project in Antarctica. Both of these have the effect of highlighting their stories among the rest, elevating climate displacement and geoengineering as significant issues.
- Omniscient narrator/authorial idea-wrestling. This voice steps in at times (in about 10% of the chapters), mostly to fill the reader in on major historical events of the coming decades. A related voice, appearing about as often, feels like the author thinking through certain ideas: wealth disparity or Keynesian economic principles, mass extinction, nihilistic social movements. These chapters echo the anonymous, editorializing “Citizen” chapters that were part of New York 2140, and they have an unfiltered, provisional feel that’s similar to the meeting-minutes chapters.
- Dialogues. Some chapters are structured as Socratic dialogues between unidentified speakers—a teacher and a reluctant student—debating whether technology drives history or not, for example. These also echo New York 2140’s “Mutt and Jeff” chapters, and may be an homage to Stanislaw Lem’s Dialogues.
- Riddles. These micro-chapters retool an ancient language game to render some really abstract concepts into something more embodied and grok-able. Though the riddle chapters are short and infrequent, they effectively poke the reader to shift gears, to think about photons, encryption, or the free market in new ways. The riddles also pop up in counterpoint to those concepts’ emergence in the narrative.
These, along with the digressive monologues and the Socratic dialogues, are all attempts to “describe the elephant” that is the full-scale problem. For Robinson, that means laying out the role of late-stage capitalism in both causing and obstructing solutions to the problem at hand.
Yes, these rhetorical variations stop the traditional narrative flow. Deal with it, Robinson seems to be saying to the reader: traditional narrative alone won’t do the trick here. Finally, there are the
- Collective voices. I think of these as the “We” chapters, which take up a good 20% of the book. They become a kind of Greek chorus, giving eyewitness accounts from all over the world—of floods and drought, employee rebellions and social strikes, and climate-caused displacement. The apotheosis of this chorus comes when, late in the book, we hear a roll-call of representatives of grass-roots organizations all over the world, announcing the work that needs to be done where they are: desert greening, permaculture, reforestation, biodiversity projects. Here we feel the heroic hopefulness, couched in a way that emphasizes the need for collective action. For me, it’s the most “hopepunk” moment in the book.
This isn’t to say that the book is all optimism. There’s an elegiac note running through it, reverberating from the struck bell of the mass deaths in India that set the book in motion. Frank May is broken by that experience. Mary Murphy has no personal life beyond the office, and her inner life is shaped by the oversized fears and concerns over climate change that it’s her job to consider. In effect, Frank holds a pain that is too outsized for one person; Mary holds the global-sized fear, and the perseverance that’s needed to move forward.
Change happens through persistence, synergy, luck, and some dirty dealing. That dirty dealing, including black ops and eco-terrorist tactics, seems to indicate some doubt that policy change alone can accomplish what’s needed. On the other hand, Robinson leaves out of his near-future equation the growing presence of backward-facing movements including authoritarianism, nativism and white supremacy, some fed by climate-caused suffering, and which will make progress that much harder.
Still, the book brilliantly embodies the near-impossibility of making a global-scale shift in humanity’s relationship to its planet, and the necessity of trying to do that. We’re all members of the Greek chorus. We are the “We” who suffer forest fires, intense heat waves, rising seas, and the “We” who come together to try to do something about them.
Also published on Medium.
