Optimism in the Face of Catastrophe: Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future

Abstract

Optimism in the Face of Catastrophe:Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future Steven Shaviro (bio) Robinson, Kim Stanley, The Ministry for the Future. Orbit, 2020. 576 pp. 14.99. (pbk) Kim Stanley Robinson's new novel, The Ministry for the Future is one of his best books. It is a near-future novel, starting a few years from now, and continuing for several decades thereafter. It is about global warming and the possibilities for alleviating climate catastrophe. The novel begins with a real punch to the gut. The opening chapter depicts in excruciating detail a disastrous, and all too plausible, weather event. Recent scientific studies demonstrate that human beings cannot survive a wet-bulb temperature—measuring the combination of heat and humidity—of over 35 degrees Celsius (Raymond et al.). The worst extreme-heat events across the world have almost reached this threshold (Thompson); it is not unlikely that the threshold will be crossed sometime in the near future. When it gets that hot and humid, human bodies are unable to cool themselves any more; people die, even when they are in good health, have access to drinking water, and do nothing but sit motionlessly in the shade. Robinson's opening chapter extrapolates such an event, imagining it taking place in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, and killing 20 million people in the space of a couple of days. After this harrowing opening, the novel looks at responses to, and ramifications of, a gathering awareness that something has to be done about climate change. The novel focuses on two protagonists. Frank May is an American aid worker in India, one of the few survivors of the opening chapter's climate event. Unsurprisingly, he is both traumatized by PTSD and weighed down with survivors' guilt. Mary Murphy, the other protagonist, is an Irish politician who is named head of the eponymous Ministry for the Future, a UN agency founded in order to enforce the Paris Agreement and other international climate accords. It is underfunded and has no military or police power to punish nations or corporations that violate the agreements, but it [End Page 108] has some room to give financial support to modest climate initiatives and to exercise moral pressure on governments and banks. The Ministry for the Future is far more loosely organized than most of Robinson's previous novels. Though it keeps coming back to Frank and to Mary, it also offers a wide range of other voices and perspectives. Robinson is not interested in exploring bourgeois interiority in the manner still typical of literary novels today (and even of literary novels that flirt with science fictional conceits). Rather, these two central characters are by design fairly flat and generic. Even their particular personal characteristics are forged in a kind of feedback response to the economic, social, political, and technological forces in the world they inhabit. The lives of Frank and Mary are (aside from the initial catastrophe Frank suffers through and witnesses) not all that dramatic. What's dramatic are the events that unfold around them—worldscale in their impact, but most often local and small-scale in their enaction. The book is divided into over a hundred chapters, all of them relatively short (on the average, each chapter is three pages long or so; though individual chapters range in length from a single paragraph to fifteen or so pages). Though some chapters give thirdperson accounts of the lives of Frank and Mary, most of them come from other voices. Some are fairly straightforward infodumps; others describe local happenings in a wide range of voices, usually anonymous and often collective ("we" rather than "I"). Here we learn of the experiences of, among others: • climate refugees who flee ravaged developing countries and spend years in refugee camps in Switzerland and other western countries; • engineers in Antarctica, experimenting with various techniques to slow down the melting of the glaciers; • economists and lawyers seeking to convince the world's central bankers to adopt more climate-friendly policies; • terrorists who carry out targeted assassinations of oil company executives and other megarich people who are directly responsible for ruining the climate in the interest of short-term profit...