How The Story Continues: The Ministry For the Future

 The Ministry For the Future

By Kim Stanley Robinson

Orbit (new in paperback)

 Towards the end of Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2004 near-future novel Forty Signs of Rain, a superstorm batters the U.S. East Coast, flooding streets and subways in Washington.  He called the storm Sandy.  Eight years later in the real world of 2012, a superstorm called Sandy flooded streets and subways in New York City, with winds, rains and floods wreaking extensive damage in 24 states and several Caribbean islands.

 In the same novel, at about the same time as Robinson’s fictional Sandy hit the East Coast, an enormous storm attacks the West Coast, resulting from what is now called an “atmospheric river.” That name didn’t exist then. We have that name now because many have since battered the real world West Coast, including this year.

 So attention must be paid to the harrowing opening pages of Robinson’s The Ministry For The Future, describing the effects of an intense heat wave covering a large area of India that generates temperatures and humidity that overwhelm the human body’s ability to function.  The heat and air conditioning demand lead to the prompt disappearance of electrical power. Old people, babies and young children are the first to die.  In the one town described, people stand in the lake to escape, but the water is close to the boiling point. In the air as well as the water, they are being cooked. Night does not save them. By the next morning, nearly everyone is dead.  Across this region of India, perhaps twenty million people die.

 In several instances (one of them in the U.S.), the real world has briefly reached this combination of heat and humidity. The only ingredient missing so far is extent of time-- that it lasts for perhaps a few days. But on this heated and overheating planet, a disaster of this magnitude may be only a matter of time, and not much time in the future.  It could happen next year.

 The Ministry For the Future was published in hardback in 2020.  This recently published paperback edition bears a new cover: an old pocket watch without hands.  Because the future is now. 

 Nevertheless, this is a story in the utopian tradition.  It suggests paths to a better world, or at least better than it will otherwise be.  Robinson has been saying recently that his definition of a utopian outcome is avoiding a major extinction event.  Period. 

 So compared to the trilogy centered on the climate crisis that Forty Signs of Rain began early this century (later condensed into one long novel titled Green Earth), The Ministry of the Future is darker and harder, more morally complex, filled with uneasy choices.  It still is carried along by Robinson’s easy style, inventiveness and humor (even if the humor is a little black at times, as when he gleefully describes the total inundation of Los Angeles and surroundings.)  But its implications are as grim as they are hopeful. 

In this novel’s near-future world, a conference of parties to the international Paris Agreements sets up a new organization to “advocate for the world’s future generations of citizens,” and to defend “all living creatures present and future who cannot speak for themselves.”  This organization, headquartered in Zurich and headed up by former political leader Mary Murphy of Ireland (a character based on former president of Ireland Mary Robinson), soon becomes known as the Ministry for the Future.  (This concept is based in part on a real world movement, led by environmental lawyer Carolyn Raffensperger and others, to create a framework in which future generations have legal rights to a habitable planet.)

 But even after the catastrophe in India—and the new Indian government’s determination to prevent it happening again by deploying a controversial geoengineering technique of scattering sulphur dioxide in the stratosphere to temporarily block solar radiation and slightly lower global temperatures for a few years, much as the volcano Pinatubo did in 1991—the Ministry’s efforts aren’t having effects commensurate with the crisis.

 The India event was described from the point of view of an American aid worker named Frank May; he turns out to be its only survivor, though he is psychologically as well as physically damaged.  Followers of Robinson’s fiction know of his predilection for naming one of his main characters Frank.  The author has claimed (perhaps with tongue in cheek) that he gives this name to characters who are not truthful.  However, in his two climate-themed utopian novels, his Frank character gets the action going precisely by being frank.

 In Green Earth, scientist Frank Vanderwal writes a scathing letter to his boss at the National Science Foundation, charging the NSF isn’t doing enough to address the climate crisis, which leads to action and a forward momentum for the rest of the story.  In this novel, Frank May does something similar, but the difference in how he does it reflects the new urgency.  This time, Frank briefly but forcibly kidnaps Mary Murphy to demand that the Ministry for the Future do more.

 A frightened but chastened Murphy does just that, including the embrace of secret means.  She stirs up significant opposition, resulting in attempts on her life and the need to go into hiding.

 If the Ministry’s “black wing” doesn’t exactly engage in violence, there are other groups that do—like the Children of Kali, that uses targeted assassinations and other acts, some of them in cyberspace.  Both the ethics and effectiveness of such methods are debated, but they remain as measures of the desperate moment, which is neither exaggerated nor minimized: sobering in itself.

 But the novel also does the basic work of the utopian story, at least in Robinson’s formulation: it maps out how the better world might be created.  There are a number of technological ideas, at least one of them fairly novel, but the momentum of change is created in the way Robinson has been suggesting in speeches and interviews for several years: through financial systems as backed by the world’s big banks.

 I found notable that the major players in this utopian scenario are India, China and the European Union as well as the Ministry in Switzerland.  In his earlier climate crisis utopia, changes were led by the United States government, and even five years before this present novel, Robinson was spinning out his ideas on global finance with the United States playing the key role.  But in this novel, the U.S. is characterized in passing as a reactionary force, paralyzed by its peculiar ideological and political conflicts.   Though not quite irrelevant, America is no longer the leader or hope of the world, but at best a dead weight.

 This novel intermittently covers about a quarter century.  There are more disasters, economic depressions and warfare.  But the world starts to look better, with more animals and fewer people.  The ruinous control of most of the world’s wealth by a few is largely over; there is more equality and broader sufficiency.  Airships (high tech dirigibles) replace jet planes, and on the oceans, fossil fuel-driven vessels are replaced by the kind of high-tech sailing ships that brings this utopia more towards the one in Robinson’s first utopian novel, Pacific Edge (1990), which he wrote while living for a year in Zurich.

 He uses a few narrative forms in short chapters (first person accounts by unnamed characters never mentioned again, “Who I am?” riddles like those presented in old school texts and children's magazines, and meeting notes and transcripts) in addition to the main narrative that mostly follows Mary Murphy.  Some of these interpolations are real highlights.  A chapter that is nothing but the names of a number of grassroots permaculture organizations introducing themselves, while functioning as an economical way of suggesting the hundreds of activities that contribute to making this better future, turns out to also be powerfully moving.

  In figuring out ways that an extinction event could be stopped and the future saved from the broadly fatal climate cataclysm, Robinson ends up with a classic utopia: a greatly changed but better world, that nevertheless saves the best of what’s still around. But it is neither perfect nor permanent, especially as climate distortion effects continue, and some of the environmental consequences (such as ocean acidification) are in a practical sense permanent.  But it is a kinetic utopia (as H.G. Wells called it)—built to continue to respond and change. 

 Initially published to wide praise and attention, The Ministry For The Future arrives in paperback just in time to refocus the refracted feelings of cautious hope and dire disappointment engendered by the recent international climate conclave in Glasgow.  Perhaps above all, it embeds efforts to form a better future in experiencing the daily beauty of the present world.  So appropriately, for all its hopes and hard truths, it’s part of that beauty, the beauty of reading. 

 The novel ends with Mary Murphy, newly retired from the Ministry for the Future, and living in the kind of housing co-op that Robinson made up in Pacific Edge  and now actually lives in. She is in the company of a new flame, the less than dashing pilot of one of those new airships, attending an event with centuries of history and continuity: the Fasnact, Zurich’s version of Mardi Gras. 

  Elsewhere in this novel Robinson mentions the statue in Zurich of 20^th century writer of mythic fiction, James Joyce.  In the original preface to his first collection of stories, The Planet On The Table, he conducts a dialogue with it, and the Joyce statue talks back.  Robinson concludes this novel with a circular Joycean flourish (and a final sentence that echoes the ending of Richard Powers’ Overstory), in which the end is also a beginning, in Mary’s testament of stubborn faith in the future:

  “We will keep going, she said to him in her head—to everyone she knew or had ever known, all those people so tangled inside her, living or dead, we will keep going, she reassured them all, but mostly herself, if she could; we will keep going, we will keep going, because there is no such thing as fate.  Because we never really come to the end.” 

The Story Isn't Over: Bewilderment

Bewilderment

by Richard Powers

Norton

 "Anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter life, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light."

Plato

 Bewilderment, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, can mean “confusion from losing one’s way.”  Richard Powers’ previous novel, The Overstory, featured nine major characters (and their back stories), in a narrative told in several voices that took places in many locations over decades.  It is 502 pages long, and ends: “This will never end.” This novel had powerful scenes, memorable ideas and impressive sentences; it broke new ground in contemporary fiction and won the Pulitzer Prize, but bewilderment was probably not uncommon among readers trying to navigate it.

 Except in its basic concerns, Bewilderment is in many ways its opposite.  In just 278 pages (not all of them entirely filled with prose) comprised of short chapters (some just a couple of pages.)  The story is told by one narrator in one narrative voice, and apart from first-person description, it is basically a series of dialogues between two characters.  There are only a few locations, and it takes place in a single year.

 A couple of early reviews (in the Guardian and the New York Times) characterized the book as polemical and unliterary.  Dwight Gardner in the Times (a reviewer no writer should ever read) called it an “earnest opinion page essay” and “middling Netflix sci-fi product.” “As fiction it is DOA.”

 I take an opposite view: to me the book is highly literary, and to suggest otherwise misleads readers who might anticipate a kind of self-help book.

 The narrator is Theo Byrne, an astrobiologist and the single father of a troubled nine year old son, Robin.  Robin is highly intelligent and sensitive, but his behavior endangers both of them (though it would barely seem unusual in novels of a different age): school officials want him in treatment that usually means drugs, and Theo’s parental rights are also threatened.  

Robin’s equilibrium in what we all know is often a nasty world for a sensitive child, is thrown off by the sudden death of his mother, an environmental activist, two years before.  The dialogues between Theo and Robin that form the bulk of this book often center on her. Much of Theo’s reminiscence is also about his wife.   She (Aly) is the novel’s third major character.  There is a phantom fourth, to be noted later.

 To avoid drugging his son, Theo seizes on the hope implied in an experimental treatment called decoded neural feedback.  (It is being developed by a scientist he and his wife knew, who becomes a subsidiary but important character.)  As a literary device, this works like Wells’ time machine: it’s plausible and drives the story. It’s also a real and potentially useful and scary thing, though Powers gives it superpowers it may never possess.  In the novel, Robin entrains with the ecstatic state previously recorded by his mother, absorbing her equanimity and empathy as well as their shared passions for the natural world.  For a while it works: with his sketchbook in hand and his eyes wide open to the non-human world, “Fascination had made him invincible.”

 The precocious and angelic child, the child who sees and feels what adults are too jaded and conflicted to see and feel, has a long literary pedigree, going back at least to Charles Dickens.  Paul Dombey, the son in Dombey and Son is a clear precedent.  Their literary nature is as memorable, revelatory and tragic characters.  Readers who are looking for tips on how to deal with their own children suffering from “eco-anxiety” (a now leading source of mental and emotional problems for the young) should not expect a happy ending in this sense.

 As substitute bedtime stories, Theo shares with Robin examples of radically different forms and fates of life that may be possible on distant planets, based on Theo’s astrobiology but with literary models in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities for example, and the mind-bending varieties of civilizations in an acknowledged science fiction masterpiece, Olaf Stapledon’s Star-Maker (which Theo mentions late in this book.) 

 There’s also the precedent of Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes, which both major characters mention in this novel as a kind of model for Robin’s experience.  Powers has said in interviews that when he went back to re-read that book, he saw that Keyes prefaced it  with a version of the quote from Plato at the top of this column, about the two types of bewilderment: of going from darkness (in Plato’s cave of illusions, for instance) into the light, and of leaving the light for the darkness. That in essence is the movement of Bewilderment. 

The irony of Robin’s angelic vision is that he is the only one who is attuned and attends to this earthy, physical world—the not just human but planetary universe that humanity ignores (and therefore is profoundly ignorant of), that humanity misunderstands and is actively (if not always consciously) destroying.  For example, only Robin sees the huge great horned owl in their own neighborhood that is invisible to others until they see photos of it on their phones.

 As often in literary tradition, the character names don’t appear to be arbitrary.  Maybe Robin Byrne is a bird whose wings are burned when he flies too close to the sun, so perhaps this is also a slant on the Daedelus and Icarus story. Theo is the flawed god of this tale because he’s the sole teller, revealing what he’s tried to create and what he has failed to fix.  But Robin’s journey is also joyful, and (in a book in which Buddhism is referenced more than once) he lives a kind of enlightenment: of being in the present moment, and the intense presence of the planet.  The ghost of his mother Aly, as patterned in the neural feedback machine, becomes Robin’s ally, like a goddess to a mortal.  Even the neuroscientist Currier is a carrier, bringing Robin together with his mother, and ultimately uniting them with Theo.

 The structure of this book aids the simple magic of its sentences to create beautiful reading.  There is more going on than simplicity would cover, and some of it remains puzzling to me, but re-reading is likely to either solve the mysteries or deepen them.

  The novel is set in a kind of near future or alternative present, or slightly skewed recent past, in which Trump is triumphant.  This recognizable political background noise becomes deafening and defining at the end, which makes this also seem like a literary equivalent of a realistic novel set in Nazi German in the 1930s. 

Robin’s voice reminded me especially of the Quibbler boys in Kim Stanley Robinson’s similarly near-future or alternate-present Science in the Capitol trilogy, reborn as the long novel Green Earth.  There are other literary connections there as well.

 The missing fourth character I mentioned is the one non-human (also ghostly) character in the story (though lots of animals—and aliens—are mentioned): Chester, the family dog, whose death shortly after Aly’s precipitated Robin’s crisis.  Robin wanted to get “a new Chester” but Theo demurred.  He thought better of that decision later, but too late. As a literary matter, a dog in the family might take the story places the author didn’t want to go.  But as a practical matter, the father’s decision seems under-explained and flawed.  For a child so desperate to bond with non-human life, an animal companion could be better therapy than drugs, or a machine.

Part of Robin's sweetness becomes the ecstasy he feels just seeing the world underneath, above and around the human world.  It becomes part of the beauty of the reading.  But this also makes his tragedy all the more troubling, as well as the essentially artificial way he comes to it. 

 As he did with The Overstory, Powers challenges the assumption that literary fiction can’t include non-human life as legitimate subjects. Other writers in other traditions do this routinely—Powers mentions sci-fi in interviews, but there’s also Native American fiction and other forms and traditions that often get overlooked if not sneered at by the literary establishment.  But Powers has too much literary cred for them to ignore.  That some feel compelled to deny literary legitimacy to this novel, which is less than a frontal assault on human supremacy, is telling.  There is a vital movement in law to assign rights to non-human life and the natural environment as a whole.  That may happen before those captive to a Manhattan mind get an inkling.

 Readers seem far ahead of them.  More important than being short-listed for the Booker, Bewilderment was selected for the Oprah book club.