The Ministry for the Future
Talk about the butter calling the margarine soft. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, historian Francis Fukuyama announced that this signalled the ‘end of history’. Liberal democracy had won, he said and would, from that moment on, be the dominating political force of the world. I mention this because the same FF called this novel about possible responses to climate change and global warming, ‘ludicrously unrealistic’. It strikes me as far more ‘ludicrously unrealistic’ to believe that the rise of greed and corruption in politics would cease, and that the lust for power would somehow magically diminish and we’d all live in liberal democratic harmony because an authoritarian system had collapsed under the weight of its own incompetency. But I’m railing. I’m getting away from talking about this book. Which I loved. It begins with a devastating heat wave in India that kills 20,000,000 people and is so vividly described you need no further examples of climate catastrophe in the rest of...
