Short takes: ‘The Ministry for the Future,’ ‘Death’s End’ and ‘One by One’

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Feb. 14, 2021

Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 publication, The Ministry for the Future, might be a science fiction novel. It has various characters who interact with each other and the world over a number of years from the early 2020s through the 2040s or so. The author describes his characters’ thoughts, conversations and actions. The people in the book battle with nature — or more to the point, a planetary ecosystem that has been badly affected by humanity’s late industrial period. The characters also come into conflict with other individuals and with society and the complicated mechanisms that it has instituted to prevent the upsetting of a status quo that favors the wealthy and powerful at the expense of most everything else.

In these ways, The Ministry for the Future very much satisfies the conventions of traditional long-form literary fiction. But Robinson’s book is also an environmental manifesto. It suggests a path that will lead us from where we stand today, on the brink of disastrous, irreversible climate change, to a sustainable future.

The book opens with a harrowing chapter in which a young American aid worker named Frank May experiences a heat wave in a small- to medium-sized city in India. A situation that is mildly worrisome one morning becomes extremely hazardous after the power fails.