The Ministry for the Future

I've seen this book described as a 'thrutopia', as in a rendering of the ways we might find our way from our current consumerist society to a more sustainable one, and I enjoyed it on that basis. It's somewhere between fiction, essay, thought experiment and manifesto, and speaks to our current situation in a way that opens up new ways of imagining the future, which is something I'd argue we desperately need to be doing right now.Robinson is known for his thorough research and fondness for detail and in some of his books I have found that a bit much (hello, Mars trilogy!), but I'm happy to geek out when it comes to saving the actual real-life world in a way that I might not be to the same extent for a fictional one.This is a bit of a doorstop of a book, but the chapters are short, the characters have enough going on to sustain my interest and the digressions into environmental solutions are pitched in a way that pulls the story along rather than slowing it down.From the harrowing opening scene I was pulled into the world of the characters, although perhaps more by the world than the characters if I'm completely honest. I needed to see what happened to it, if everything would work out in the end. And the world of the book is our world, so let's hope it does. Robinson certainly paints a convincing picture of how it might.

I think the best bit was the start. People get to hear lots about climate change, but it often sounds like people are being dramatic, and many struggle to understand how something like 3 degrees of warming could really be all that bad. The book imagines that millions of people die from heat stress. Rather dramatically.Honestly, I'm not really sure how likely this is. In fairness, it is fiction. And it is better than some of the other depictions of climate change I've seen. Age of Stupid was very over the top.For much of the first 100-200 pages, it really felt like the book was succeeding at infusing drama into climate change.And the book does constitute a popular introduction to some other important climate concepts, including discounting and the tragedy of the horizon.Overall though, the book was long and meandering, and definitely would have benefited from an editor pushing for the 566 pages being cut down by a couple of hundred.The author also seemed to be slightly too in love with the idea of a carbon coin (which I think was meant to be on the blockchain?) But it didn't seem to have any solution for the oracle problem: it's disbursed on proof of carbon sequestration, but how do you get proof of carbon sequestration? Sequestering carbon effectively is actually really hard!I don't like the fact that the book sometimes introduces the reader to real, legitimate facts about the world, but also mixes in the author's wild speculation, and it's not always easy to tell them apart.The relationship between two characters is a big part of the plot of the book (spoilers coming!) Mary heads up the Ministry for the Future, and Frank angrily accosted her. He is jailed for his troubles. Despite the fact that they meet through Frank essentially kidnapping her, Mary decides she wants to visit him in jail.In some ways their relationship had a certain charm, but overall I struggled to suspend my disbelief on this. If we're really reaching, we could maybe imagine that Frank represented Mary's conscience, but I don't think the person who kidnaps you is a great conscience. In the book Mary says she doesn't know why she keeps going to visit him, and nor do I.If you're really looking for climate-flavoured fiction, you have certainly come to the right place, and I don't think I know of any better recommendations, but more than anything that suggests to me that the field needs more people to write better climate fiction.

A marmite book and I loved it. A teasing glimpse of a possible benign future. But how hard did they have to work to make it happen? If you haven't read it you should. Fiel Spas!

This book is absorbing. I did spend a considerable time looking up references, and the meaning of words.It was not the first Kim Stanley Robinson book that I have read, but it was the most difficult read.

It all feels so incredibly real and possible - all the beautiful and ugly. Everyone should read it and soon!

A masterpiece. It is supposed to be science fiction but is is so well thought and so documented on a matter which is not science-fiction at all that you learn a lot in every chapter. A must read

I was torn between 3 and 4 stars because this really isn't a very readable book. Except that it's our future and that of our children being written about so it's unputdownable. I want everyone to read it because it shows how desperately urgent it is to DO SOMETHING, immediately, tonight, about climate change. For everyone in the world to do it, right now. And then it goes into immense, lengthy and often tedious detail about how this might possibly be done which makes perfect sense because, clearly if we are going to stop the destruction of our habitat and make it possible for the world to continue to support our future generations, there will be a simply huge amount of immensely detailed and tedious work to be done.So it loses 1 star for being such hard work and maybe another half a star for making some of it sound a bit easy - lovely ideas and lots of them but some of them sound a bit optimistic.Still, I really hope lots of people will read it even though many of them won't like it. It certainly made me think - yet again. Which can't be a bad thing.

This book contains several things an author isn't supposed to do. You'll find passages with too much unnecessary description, long lists of names, an area written in note form, but the note taker appears to be omnipotent. Some bits of the book drag and could have been omitted. Some bits are unnecessarily complicated. Despite all this it's a book worth reading because it deals with climate change, possible horifying effects and offers some solutions.