The Ministry for the Future

Ambitious and well-informed, but politically and emotionally implausible in key respects. That, of course would hardly be a criticism in much speculative sci-fi (hell, it defines the genre!) but good world-building invites us to embrace certain implausible (or outright ridiculous) foundations, by drawing us into a compelling story or novel vision, hopefully both. Here, alas, the vision far exceeds the power of the underlying stories to draw the reader in, and so the limits of character development and political-institutional simplicities become increasingly grating. Still, things could be (marginally) worse: he could have written Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock instead! :/

I thought I would enjoy this book a lot more, and it ended up being a bit of a slog towards the end. A lot of the writing is very "stream of consciousness", and there's not much of a plot to speak of.

In terms of finding ideas for addressing climate change, there's too much focus on blockchain and geoengineering. Not really solarpunk.

I became enthusiastic fan of #KimStanleyRobinson's (#KSR) work after reading the #RedMars Trilogy. The way he weaves ideologies and predictions into his space operas is delightful. KSR's tropes of nonsexual nudity in hot tubs and saunas, raucous parties with bands, and zeppelins bring me joy every time he repeats them.

#TheMinistryfortheFuture is a space opera in our earth ship. KSR's ideas in this sprawling text are an interesting companion to @Doctorow's #Walkaway: #Collapse, the power of finance, collective power, the regressive force of greed, the trauma of climate change, and the inevitability of violence in social change.

The various interconnecting plotlines of The Ministry of the Future have given me another way to think about collapse and avoid the doom inherent in understanding the road ahead.

So his answers for both, basically: maximalism. The point he's sort of making is that making the planet safely inhabitable is going to take every tactic and every ideology not necessarily working together but working on some piece of the thing. No one actor gets to be the hero (though I do enjoy that KSR's favorite kind of protagonist remains the middle-aged competent lady technocrat–guy's got a type) and while he's sort of indicating that capitalism as we know it has to die, he's not saying that happens through inevitable worker uprising. Some of it's coercion of central banks and some of it's straight-up guerrilla terrorism. Geoengineering happens at varying scales for better and for worse. Massive economic collapses occur. Millions die. And the point I think from KSR is that's the outcome in his most optimistic take. In general with KSR I don't know if I ever fully agree, but I always feel fully engaged.

This is also probably the most not-novel-y of his novels in that there's a couple of recurring characters running through the book but a ton of it's just first-person unnamed narration of events happening around the world. Someone describing a drought, a refugee describing a camp, a miner describing the nationalization of his mine. One very weird and fun chapter from the point of view of actual carbon.