The Ministry of the Future
Kim Stanley Robinson
Orbit Books, 576 pp, copyright 2020
Kim Stanley Robinson is rightly praised as one of the most brilliant and scientifically solid SF writers around. He took everything Arthur C. Clarke brought to the genre and moved it forward at least as much as Clarke did.
But like Clarke, he can be a bit dry at times. Clarke dabbled in interpersonal conflict amongst his characters, but it was always with clear reluctance, and tended to be quite polite and very British.
With Kim Stanley Robinson, the characters are very much stronger, but they tend to be a technocratic lot, scientists, politicians, bureaucrats. There’s a lot of ‘process’ in his stories, and the reader sits through a lot of committee meetings and formulations of policy. The reader will, however learn a lot, about science, about the real world, and about human nature.
But if that were all there was to say about either Clarke or Robinson, then they would be considered very good writers, and they would belong in any decent SF collection, but people wouldn’t line up to get their books or see movies based on their books.
The real magic comes in amazing bursts of imagination and imagery that leave the reader gasping for breath. With Clarke, it’s when they first enter Rama, the appearance of the Overlord Karellen in Childhood’s End, Arvin’s escape from Diaspor.
With Robinson, it’s such things as the fall of the space elevator in his Mars series, the collapse of the WAIS in Antarctica.
In The Ministry for the Future, Robinson wastes no time creating a jarring and utterly unforgettable event. In the near future, the monsoons fail to arrive on time in northern India. A heat dome, normally dislodged after a few days lingers and intensifies. The heat, barely tolerable, increases to levels dangerous to human health. People start dying. Over several days, it becomes worse, and worse, and worse. People take refuge in a lake, but in the day time the water temperature rises to the upper 30s centigrade.
Millions die. A survivor of this goes on to become one of the main characters in the book.
We are on the verge of this happening in our immediate future. This isn’t speculation. Global temperatures are rising and will continue to rise, and eventually places will experience wet bulb reading that linger above 35 C. We’ve already come close—the wet bulb reading in Chicago hit 34 a few years back, and both India and the middle East have experienced similar close calls. It’s not something that might happen—it’s something that will happen, and in the very near future.
The Indian heat wave isn’t the only indelibly stunning moment in the book: “Crash Day” for example, should strike fear into the hearts of any airline executive.
The rest of the book is a diagram of the political, academic, social and bureaucratic efforts to halt and then reverse the damage two centuries of greenhouse gas emissions have caused. He addresses this with an amazing variety of ideas and concepts, and how to defeat the filthy fuel lords who profit immensely from this racial suicide race.
Like Clarke, Robinson inspires wonder and makes the reader think. This is one of his best yet.