As some of you may know I have been pursuing a creative writing PhD on climate change fiction. This has involved reading and watching a lot of climate change fiction (cli-fi) and the Fantasy-Hive have kindly given me space for an occasional series of articles where I can share my thoughts and observations.

Well now the thesis has been submitted, the Viva sat, the minor corrections made and approved, the final thesis uploaded to the dusty archives of academia and the Graduation ceremony attended.

So – as an aged but still fresh-faced PhD graduate this will be my last Unseen Academic Post – though don’t be surprised if issues of climate change, end-stage capitalism and toxic inequality illuminate my normal reviews and articles.

For this final post I am choosing to review one of the iconic authors of cli-fi’s more iconic books (one of Barak Obama’s favourites no less) The Ministry of the Future

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.

From legendary science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson comes a vision of climate change unlike any ever imagined.

Told entirely through fictional eye-witness accounts, The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, 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—and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face.

It is a novel both immediate and impactful, desperate and hopeful in equal measure, and it is one of the most powerful and original books on climate change ever written.

The Ministry for the Future (2020) charts our journey into a climate changed future through the eyes of two main protagonists and a wide cast of ancillary characters.

Leading the story we have Frank May, only survivor of a massive heat dome in India that drove wet-bulb temperatures beyond survivability. The catastrophe led to the deaths of tens of thousands as air conditioning failed and desperate people fled to a lake, ultimately becoming so many floating bodies as even that exigency failed to save them from hyper-thermia or heat death. Frank traumatised by survivor guilt struggles for a path to redemption and meaning. His story is perhaps the ‘everyman’ the powerless ground level witness to the climate crisis.

As a counterpoint to Frank we have Mary Murphy, chief executive of the UN agency charged with investigating and co-ordinating action to address climate change – quickly (and eponymously) dubbed The Ministry for the Future. Like other agencies attempting a global impact Murphy and her associates struggle for recognition and authority just as much as for solutions and impact.

In between these two main characters we get a variety of named and nameless witnesses giving their perspective on the decades long struggle. There is the youth witnessing one of Frank’s more disastrous breakdowns on the shores of Lake Geneva, there is the Antarctic glaciologist investigating a desperate measure to slow the inexorable slipping of the ice sheet into the oceans and there is the pilot pumping aerosols into the upper atmosphere to reflect solar radiation back into space before it could be trapped by our ever-thickening carbon dioxide blanket.

Besides the chapters that follow people, there are shorter chapters delivered as riddles, “what am I” or also chapters more purely pedagogical delivering interesting factual information about some aspect of world climate or economics, as though somebody had stuffed a few sets of lecture notes inbetween the pages.

So all in all, The Ministry for the Future is an atypical novel, illustrative of fiction’s efforts to come to grips with the theme of climate change.  Adeline Johns-Putra (Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel 2019) and Adam Trexler (Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change 2015) in reviewing climate fiction both identified the potential for climate change to  change the form of the novel. Amitav Ghosh (The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable 2016) identified the limitations facing traditional realist fiction in addressing the climate crisis and, in Gun Island (2019) delivered something with more mystical undercurrents. Nick Admussen, among other observations, suggested that climate fiction needed to eschew the “portrait of the single soul” (Six Proposals for the Reform of Literature in the Era of Climate Change 2016) and deliver the more collective style narratives that Matthew Schneider-Mayerson suggests characterise more effective and impactful climate activist fiction (Ted Lasso Is an Unexpected Masterclass in Environmental Storytelling 2021). Toby Litt and Rupert Read have both offered insights into what novels need to do to eschew both dystopian and individualistic stories and instead propose models of hopeful “Thrutopian” narratives (THRUTOPIA: Why Neither Dystopias Nor Utopias Are Enough To Get Us Through The Climate Crisis, And How A ‘Thrutopia’ Could Be 2017) that illustrate and empower collective agency (How to tell a Story to Save the World 2021).

In this epic 560 page tome Robinson delivers something that is more than the traditional ‘Portrait of a single soul.’ Given his resolute stance on the significance of the climate crisis, and the way it is a dominant theme in his oeuvre, Robinson has a devoted following of readers who appreciate his intelligent grasp of the problem and his hopeful exploration of some paths to solutions. There are elements of thrutopia in the various mechanisms that Robinson has his Ministry suggest, while the multiple viewpoints gives something of the collective feel to the narrative of James Bradley’s Clade (2015) or Max Brooks’ World War Z (2006).

I have mixed feelings about the book. It took me two stints over a year apart to read through its many pages and it feels like it has taken nearly as long to collate my thoughts for this review. It is a book full of pithy well-expressed observations which I could not help but agree with. My kindle is full of notes highlighting passages that are both apposite and prescient.

Russia against the rest of the world: that had been part of their collective psyche for as long as they had been aware of the world.

Everyone alive knew that not enough was being done, and everyone kept doing too little.

However, ultimately this is a book that will be liked by and inspire people who like this kind of thing. Whether it has the capacity to reach to the yet to be converted is less certain. While Mary Murphy at least has some power, the grass roots activists seem limited to outright terrorism or impotence. For Robinson, as with New York 2140 (2017) transformation ultimately depends on financial institutions and instruments. Robinson’s Maguffin is a block chained unit of currency, the carbon-coin, that smooths the costs of transition to a low emission economy. Essentially, people are rewarded not for crypto-currencies mined by absurdly indulgent computing power, but for their commitment to sequestering carbon.

I am wary of such financial sleights of hand. Much of Tesla’s economic value is in the sale of its carbon credits to more polluting automakers (Tesla Hits Record High Sales from Carbon Credits at $1.79B 2024). In the same way the advanced economies of the global north can sustain their planet harming economies (carbon dioxide emissions have continued to rise throughout this century (Emissions from Fossil Fuels Continue to Rise 2024)) by buying the carbon allocations of the global south. This kind of legerdemain feels like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.

I’m also sceptical of some of Robinson’s technical solutions. While he does have his characters recognise the dubious potential of storing carbon underground, he does have one note

Direct Air capture now more powerful and less expensive, need to scale up appropriately.

Where ‘scale up appropriately’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Carbon capture and storage is always an unscalable greenwashing fantasy of the fossil fuel industry used to lull docile consumers into thinking there is a way to carry on as we always have.

In another narrative motif he envisages bringing the slipping Antarctic glaciers to a halt by extracting the lubricating seawater from two miles beneath the glaciers’ surface. This is a massive industrial undertaking in the most hostile environment in the world.

There are simpler and cheaper solutions, investing in renewables, stopping oil, prosecuting climate crime and prising the cold dead hand of neoliberal capitalism off the levers of political power – but those lack the ‘The Day After Tomorrow (Emmerich 2004)’ drama of desperate men fighting nature itself, or the technical allure of sci-fi style solutions.

There are however, narrative elements that I feel Robinson did get right. His prologue depiction of opening heat dome scenario is horrifically prescient, given I am writing this review when the world’s hottest day in 100,000 years has gone shockingly under-reported.  That under-reporting owes much to how the media agendas are dominated by billionaire interests. These are people who have profited from the fossil fuel industry who, confident that their own wealth will insulate them from the outrun of the climate crisis, don’t really care of the world’s population is winnowed down through environmental disaster.

Another aspect that I feel Robinson gets right is in the threat of well-funded violence that with success for Mary and her team, come ‘terrorist’ attacks and a need for military protection from assassination. Manda Scott in Any Human Power (2024) also highlighted how powerful interests under threat have found ways to remove opposition. Elanor Catton in Birnam Wood (2023) has her Peter Thiel style antagonist employ a band of fierce conscience-free mercenaries to protect his plans. At the present time the battle over climate change action is largely a psy-ops one of fossil fuel and petro-state funded misinformation flooding our social and traditional media outlets. However, with Just Stop Oil protesters imprisoned by a judge who quantifies peaceful protest as five times more heinous than sexual assault (UK Climate Campaigners Get ‘Utterly Disproportionate’ Sentences 2024), the push back by fossil fuel industries (delivered by their well-funded politicians and applauded by their well-funded media) is becoming increasingly extreme.

But then what can we expect? The fossil fuel industry has not only lost the environmental argument, but – with renewables now reliably cheaper than the heavily subsidised fossil fuel industry – they have lost the economic argument too. All that is left is to sow fear and confusion while the world burns.

But back to the book!

While I did bounce off the sprawling plot a few times in what was a stretched out read, there are plenty of quotes that show Robinson is not only singing from the same hymn sheet as the rest of us, but doing so with acerbic wit and insight, such that I have plethora of highlights and notes.

My Body Worked so well that eventually all things everywhere were swallowed and digested by me. I grew so large that I ate the world, and all the blood in the world is mine. What am I? You know, even though you are like everything else and see me from the inside. I am the market.

When Mary reminded them that they had quantitatively eased trillions of pounds into existence when needed to save the banks, they nodded; their job was to save the banks. To quantitatively ease trillions of pounds into existence: not their job. That would take legislation.

There are also nice lines of prose

Their idea of charismatic megafauna is their chocolate lab.

They used English like a hammer to get their meaning across, they banged in nails of meaning. Strangely articulate and expressive sentences often emerged from them.

Robinson has asserted in an interview that capitalism and the climate crisis are two sides of the same coin – they are cause and effect (To Slow Down Climate Change, We Need To Take On Capitalism 2018). Ursula le Guin said in a 2014 address that the divine right of kings and the associated feudal system once seemed inviolate and unalterable and that capitalism’s hegemony was ultimately just as fragile (Speech at National Book Foundation Awards 2014).  For myself, in this my final Unseen Academic post, I would pick a different analogy.

Our addiction to a fossil fuel driven economy is like the addiction to slavery. That was a system of appallingly harmful exploitation on which (alongside colonialism) the economic hegemony of the western world was built. At the time it was argued that this was the natural order of things, all rationality and humanity twisted to justify an indefensible system that was always about power and profit. However, the fundamental obscenity of slavery is crystal clear to modern eyes. Our addiction to fossil fuels and our submission to the misinformation of the industry and its backers will be equally horrifying to future generations (assuming there are future generations!). Just as the pre-abolitionist world thought it could not survive without slavery, so our present world is assured by fear mongers like Richard Tice of the Reform Party (Reality check: the Reform UK party’s claims on the climate crisis examined 2024), that we cannot survive without fossil fuels. Both were wrong.

The part of Robinson’s book that put be in mind of this analogy is this quote

And they all wanted compensation, even though all of them had agreed in the Paris Agreement to decarbonise. Pay us for not ruining the world! It was extortion.

For even when slavery was abolished, it was done by the government increasing public sector debt to buy the freedom of the slaves – compensating the owners, not the slaves! When (not if!) fossil fuel use is abolished, we must be sure to compensate the victims in the global south, not the shareholders in the global North!

References

Admussen, N. 2016. Six Proposals for the Reform of Literature in the Era of Climate Change. May-June. Accessed July 23, 2022. http://criticalflame.org/six-proposals-for-the-reform-of-literature-in-the-age-of-climate-change/.

Bradley, J. 2015. Clade. London: Titan.

Brooks, Max. 2006. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. New York: Crown.

Cassidy, Emily. 2024. Emissions from Fossil Fuels Continue to Rise. 5 March. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/152519/emissions-from-fossil-fuels-continue-to-rise.

Catton, Eleanor. 2023. Birnam Wood. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

2004. The Day After Tomorrow. Directed by R Emmerich.

Evans, Simon. 2024. Reality check: the Reform UK party’s claims on the climate crisis examined. June4. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/31/factcheck-no-richard-tice-volcanoes-are-not-to-blame-for-climate-change.

Ghosh, A. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Ghosh, A. 2019. Gun Island. London: John Murray.

Jennifer L. 2024. Tesla Hits Record High Sales from Carbon Credits at $1.79B. 13 February. https://carboncredits.com/tesla-hits-record-high-sales-from-carbon-credits-at-1-79b/.

Johns-Putra, A. 2019. Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

le Guin, Ursula K. 2014. Speech at National Book Foundation Awards. 19 November. https://www.ursulakleguin.com/nbf-medal.

Litt, Toby. 2021. “How to tell a Story to Save the World.” Writersrebel.com. December. https://writersrebel.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/How-to-Tell-a-Story-to-Save-the-World-by-Toby-Litt-for-Writers-Rebel.pdf.

Read, Rupert. 2017. THRUTOPIA: Why Neither Dystopias Nor Utopias Are Enough To Get Us Through The Climate Crisis, And How A ‘Thrutopia’ Could Be. 6 11. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/rupert-read/thrutopia-why-neither-dys_b_18372090.html.

Robinson, K. S. 2017. New York 2140. London: Orbit.

—. 2020. The Ministry For The Future. London: Orbit.

—. 2018. To Slow Down Climate Change, We Need To Take On Capitalism. 2016 November. Accessed July 23, 2022. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kimstanleyrobinson/climate-change-capitalism-kim-stanley-robinson.

Rosane, Olivia. 2024. UK Climate Campaigners Get ‘Utterly Disproportionate’ Sentences. 18 July. https://www.commondreams.org/news/just-stop-oil-record-sentence.

Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew. 2021. Ted Lasso Is an Unexpected Masterclass in Environmental Storytelling. 17 September. https://gizmodo.com/ted-lasso-is-an-unexpected-masterclass-in-environmental-1847695754.

Scott, Manda. 2024. Any Human Power. Tewkesbury: September Publishing.

Trexler, A. 2015. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. Charlottes Ville and London: University of Virgina Press.