The Ministry for the Future
Nov. 26th, 2021 11:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
meteordustBy Kim Stanley Robinson.
I haven't read World War Z, but from osmosis I would compare this to World War Z. Except instead of being a history of the zombie war, it's a future history of climate change.
The book opens with a devastating heat wave in India that kills twenty million people in a week. Unflinching and relentless. A worst case scenario of exactly what is at stake.
It's too much to say it's enough to galvanise the world into immediate action. But it's one turning point. Another is the creation of the Ministry for the Future, an international body established by the Paris Agreement signatories, to advocate for the rights of the world's future generations of citizens, and to defend all living creatures present and future who cannot speak for themselves.
I really enjoyed this book! But with KSR, you kind of have to know what you're getting into. It's not a conventional narrative, but more of a mosaic novel - told from multiple viewpoints, and spanning several decades.
Two of the main viewpoint characters are Mary Murphy, head of the Ministry for the Future, and Frank May, former aid worker and survivor of the heat wave. Mary is working to prevent an incalculable injustice from landing on future generations. (One of the crucial elements: pushing the world banks to establish carbon coins as a new currency, to pay for the drawdown of carbon.) Frank is trying to cope with his PTSD and find a way to make a difference somehow.
But the strength of the book is in the multitude of voices. Scientists drilling in Antarctica to literally stick glaciers back on the bedrock. Farmers using regenerative agriculture techniques to capture carbon in the soil. Governments buying out dying small towns to create wildlife corridors. Climate refugees trying to rebuild their lives in new lands. And on the darker side, ecoterrorists targeting planes and freighters that use fossil fuels, and infecting beef cattle with mad cow disease.
With KSR, it's never just about science and technology, but our social systems: politics, economics, philosophy. Working towards a just and equitable world. (One chapter has a US Navy sailor talk about how admiral salaries top out at $200,000, while a new recruit gets paid $25,000. So the pay differential is one to eight, while in the corporate world the average is one to five hundred. And she wonders what if the maximum wage ratio was set at one to ten? Otherwise, this staggering level of inequity makes people stop caring. "At that point you throw a rock through a window, or vote for some asshole who is going to break everything, which may give you a chance to start over, and if that doesn't work then at least you have said fuck you to the thousand-getters. And so on.")
And yes, there is the obligatory mountain climbing scene. (The headquarters of the ministry are in Zurich, convenient to the Swiss Alps.) KSR loves his rocks.
The science is incredibly well researched, as always, with detailed and comprehensive information about the current state of affairs. But the science fiction - ah! - this is the kind of thing science fiction was made for. Not only foreshadowing the problems of the future, but showing us a vision of what we could do and what we could be. What I took away was, it will take many people working on many different things, to turn our trajectory around. But it is possible. It's a reason to hope. We can all do something.
Sometimes it's hard to see a way forward. The Ministry for the Future shows us many possibilities.
*
Some memorable quotes:
*
We have to live, we have to give this place to the kids with the animals still alive and a chance to make a living. That's not so much to ask.
(p 248)
*
Here's the true economy, these people said: since the Earth's biosphere was the only one available to humanity, and its healthy function absolutely necessary to humanity's existence, its worth to people was a kind of existential infinity. Gauging the price of saving the biosphere's functions against the cost of losing them would therefore always be impossible.
(p 344)
*
You will find us out there already, now, and then you must also realize we are only about one percent of all the projects out there doing good things. And more still are waiting to be born. Come in, talk to us. Listen to our stories. See where you can help. Build your own project. You will love it as we do. There is no other world.
(p 428)
*
The new versions had sails made of photovoltaic fabrics that captured both wind and light, and the solar-generated electricity created by them transferred down the masts to motors that turned propellers. Clipper ships were back, in other words, and bigger and faster than ever. ...
It was beautiful! And she was getting her work done. So--where had this obsession with speed come from, why had everyone caved to it so completely?
Because people did what everyone else did. Because first no one could fly, then everyone could fly, if they could afford it; and flying was sublime. But also now a crowded bus ride, a hassle. ...
On the eighth day her ship sailed into New York harbor, a dream of a harbor, Cosmopolis itself, and she debarked on a Hudson dock and took a cab to Penn Station and got on a train headed west.
(pp 418-419)
*
As they flew they saw a lot of other airships. Giant robot freighters, circular sky villages under rings of balloons, actual clippers of the clouds sporting sails or pulled by kites, hot-air balloons in their usual rainbow array. There had not yet been any regularization of shapes and sizes; Art said they were still in the Cambrian explosion moment of airship design.
(p 524)
I haven't read World War Z, but from osmosis I would compare this to World War Z. Except instead of being a history of the zombie war, it's a future history of climate change.
The book opens with a devastating heat wave in India that kills twenty million people in a week. Unflinching and relentless. A worst case scenario of exactly what is at stake.
It's too much to say it's enough to galvanise the world into immediate action. But it's one turning point. Another is the creation of the Ministry for the Future, an international body established by the Paris Agreement signatories, to advocate for the rights of the world's future generations of citizens, and to defend all living creatures present and future who cannot speak for themselves.
I really enjoyed this book! But with KSR, you kind of have to know what you're getting into. It's not a conventional narrative, but more of a mosaic novel - told from multiple viewpoints, and spanning several decades.
Two of the main viewpoint characters are Mary Murphy, head of the Ministry for the Future, and Frank May, former aid worker and survivor of the heat wave. Mary is working to prevent an incalculable injustice from landing on future generations. (One of the crucial elements: pushing the world banks to establish carbon coins as a new currency, to pay for the drawdown of carbon.) Frank is trying to cope with his PTSD and find a way to make a difference somehow.
But the strength of the book is in the multitude of voices. Scientists drilling in Antarctica to literally stick glaciers back on the bedrock. Farmers using regenerative agriculture techniques to capture carbon in the soil. Governments buying out dying small towns to create wildlife corridors. Climate refugees trying to rebuild their lives in new lands. And on the darker side, ecoterrorists targeting planes and freighters that use fossil fuels, and infecting beef cattle with mad cow disease.
With KSR, it's never just about science and technology, but our social systems: politics, economics, philosophy. Working towards a just and equitable world. (One chapter has a US Navy sailor talk about how admiral salaries top out at $200,000, while a new recruit gets paid $25,000. So the pay differential is one to eight, while in the corporate world the average is one to five hundred. And she wonders what if the maximum wage ratio was set at one to ten? Otherwise, this staggering level of inequity makes people stop caring. "At that point you throw a rock through a window, or vote for some asshole who is going to break everything, which may give you a chance to start over, and if that doesn't work then at least you have said fuck you to the thousand-getters. And so on.")
And yes, there is the obligatory mountain climbing scene. (The headquarters of the ministry are in Zurich, convenient to the Swiss Alps.) KSR loves his rocks.
The science is incredibly well researched, as always, with detailed and comprehensive information about the current state of affairs. But the science fiction - ah! - this is the kind of thing science fiction was made for. Not only foreshadowing the problems of the future, but showing us a vision of what we could do and what we could be. What I took away was, it will take many people working on many different things, to turn our trajectory around. But it is possible. It's a reason to hope. We can all do something.
Sometimes it's hard to see a way forward. The Ministry for the Future shows us many possibilities.
Some memorable quotes:
We have to live, we have to give this place to the kids with the animals still alive and a chance to make a living. That's not so much to ask.
(p 248)
Here's the true economy, these people said: since the Earth's biosphere was the only one available to humanity, and its healthy function absolutely necessary to humanity's existence, its worth to people was a kind of existential infinity. Gauging the price of saving the biosphere's functions against the cost of losing them would therefore always be impossible.
(p 344)
You will find us out there already, now, and then you must also realize we are only about one percent of all the projects out there doing good things. And more still are waiting to be born. Come in, talk to us. Listen to our stories. See where you can help. Build your own project. You will love it as we do. There is no other world.
(p 428)
The new versions had sails made of photovoltaic fabrics that captured both wind and light, and the solar-generated electricity created by them transferred down the masts to motors that turned propellers. Clipper ships were back, in other words, and bigger and faster than ever. ...
It was beautiful! And she was getting her work done. So--where had this obsession with speed come from, why had everyone caved to it so completely?
Because people did what everyone else did. Because first no one could fly, then everyone could fly, if they could afford it; and flying was sublime. But also now a crowded bus ride, a hassle. ...
On the eighth day her ship sailed into New York harbor, a dream of a harbor, Cosmopolis itself, and she debarked on a Hudson dock and took a cab to Penn Station and got on a train headed west.
(pp 418-419)
As they flew they saw a lot of other airships. Giant robot freighters, circular sky villages under rings of balloons, actual clippers of the clouds sporting sails or pulled by kites, hot-air balloons in their usual rainbow array. There had not yet been any regularization of shapes and sizes; Art said they were still in the Cambrian explosion moment of airship design.
(p 524)
