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.”