The Ministry for the Future
The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year, this extraordinary novel from visionary science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson will change the way you think about the climate crisis. ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR “The best science-fiction nonfiction novel I’ve ever read.” —Jonathan Lethem "If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future." —Ezra Klein (Vox) "One hopes that this book is read widely—that Robinson’s audience, already large, grows by an order of magnitude. Because the point of his books is to fire the imagination."―New York Review of Books "If there’s any book that hit me hard this year, it was Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, a sweeping epic about climate change and humanity’s efforts to try and turn the tide before it’s too late." ―Polygon (Best of the Year) "Masterly." —New Yorker "[The Ministry for the Future] struck like a mallet hitting a gong, reverberating through the year... it’s terrifying, unrelenting, but ultimately hopeful. Robinson is the SF writer of my lifetime, and this stands as some of his best work.
Stats for nerds
69recommend
216mentions
146people
2020–2026years
39% recommend52% neutral9% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Ministry for the Future is, in my view, much better.
- There's some interesting, sad, but hopeful science fiction about where this is headed.
Ministry for the Future: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50998056-the-ministry-fo...
Excerpt here: https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-ministry-for-the-futur...
- The ministry for the future by Kim Stanley Robinson explores technological and societal solutions to climate collapse in a novel form.
Starts in somewhat current time and follows humanity’s trajectory for the next 30-ish years.
I found it especially interesting because it does expose and address the socioeconomic issues preventing us from taking action on climate.
- I recommend KSR's The Ministry for the Future
- Thanks for the suggestion. Two I’ve already read that I thought were decent were Bill Gate’s “How to avoid a climate disaster” and Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Ministry for the Future”. I have Drawdown next on my list.
- I recently read The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, and one of the ideas in it that I thought was very good was replacing our cargo ships with wind-powered ships, basically giant sailing ships. In the book, they were incredibly slow, with shipments taking months to complete, but if supply lines were set up correctly, that wouldn't matter for a lot of cargo. Cargo ships are a massive CO2 contributor, and it was interesting that a solution could be to return to sailing ships.
I know there are probably huge engineering problems preventing this from happening, so feel free to tell me why it's impossible.
