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 the book. The disaster hangs over every subsequent page and acts as a prompt and justification for the actions undertaken to combat the crisis.

There are a few central characters. Their lives intersect and progress and change. But what this book really is is a collection of ideas. About bio-agriculture, economics and crypto, the collapse of flying and the re-emergence of travel by ship – air and sea -  the use of solar and wind energy… all alternatives and possible positive optimistic steps.* 

I may be making it sound like a thesis. Dry and academic. It’s not. It’s all extremely readable – even if can still make no sense of crypto and blockchain – and once I started, I didn’t want to stop. 

And reading it, I thought: why not? 

*Although Kim Stanley R is clever (politically aware/cynical?) enough to suggest that, in some cases, only carefully chosen acts of destruction would be enough to prompt change. It’s a dark, unsettlingly positive view of political violence, one that acts as a contrast to the optimism of everything else in the book.