The Ministry for the Future

A somewhat mishmashed narrative, splicing together riddles, reporter accounts, eyewitness accounts, a climate expert narrator, articles, and two or three recurring characters to tell the story of the next twenty seven or so years of earth in the midst of climate change. Novel exists at a macro level, depicting the very real effects of climate change, but also at a micro level, in the very human story of the head of the Ministry of the Future, Mary Murphy, and a survivor of the first Indian Heat Wave, Frank. Their paths intersect early as Frank kidnaps Mary in an ill-advised attempt to get her agency to conduct more extralegal activity to combat climate change.

The novel is awash with ideas and reminds me of the science fiction of Cixin Liu – expansive, virtuosic, deeply knowledgeable, playful with ideas. Many are calling it the most important book they read the year it came out in part because of the very realistic depiction of the devastating effects of climate change on all human civilization, and also for the steps it posits we need to take to stave off elimination. This is definitely a political novel – it imagines a future where we need to severely reduce our meat consumption, and eliminate the last vestiges of our robber baron capitalism and eliminate billionaires, to reinvent capitalism, to blockchain our money.

Themes and Motifs

Ganymede and the Eagle

Much of the novel takes place in Switzerland and specifically Zurich, and many of the scenes refer to a watchful statue of Ganymede overlooking the action, a sort of bio-TJ Eckleburg. Ganymede was abducted by Zeus to be his cup-bearer at Mt. Olympus.

The novel gives us this as a final potential explanation for the significance of this statue:

He was definitely saying something. That we could become something magnificent, or at least interesting. That we began as we still are now, child geniuses. That there is no other hom for us than here. That we will cope no matter how stupid things get. That all couples are odd couples. That the only catastrophe that can’t be undone is extinction. That we can make a good place. That people can take their fate into their hands. That there is no such thing as fate.

utopian novel

The novel has been categorized as a utopian novel, largely due to it’s ending, where humanity has actually managed to not only stop the growth of carbon in the atmosphere but reduce it, as well as cutting back or eliminating the meat industry, repurposing military equipment to combat climate change, reverse inequality, establish minimum and maximum economic standing, and establish the rights of future generations. It is a hopeful novel, but hard to imagine given the current state of the world and how little we are doing to combat climate change.

KSR’s narrative tells us that to get to that utopia, millions need to die, and we need to lose decades of progress to global depressions. The argument implied is that we can skip the tragedy and make changes now to prevent it.

intergenerational equity

The Ministry for the Future isn’t a completely fictional entity – it has a basis in current litigation arguing for human rights for those not born yet, for fairness and justice for those not born.

blockchain and the carbon coin

Some interesting ideas around a carbon coin, but I really don’t know enough about economics to know if it’s feasible or not. Like most things in this book, I’d imagine it’s either based on something that has already been proposed or grounded in research and science. The entirety of our money being blockchained seems less feasible, however. Cargo culting the magical blockchaining.

Thoughts

KSR has called this a slurry of forms – at it’s core, this is a human story. A woman, Mary Murphy, dealing with the trauma of losing her partner at 28, and Frank, dealing with the trauma of being the sole survivor of a mass death event, and how they found each other. Cast more largely, it is about earth and dealing with the trauma humanity has inflicted upon it. It is a really ambitious novel, one that has certainly made me a fan of KSR, and one that has painted the potential realities of climate change in a all-too-realistic hue in my mind.