110 pages • 3 hours read
Kim Stanley RobinsonThe Ministry for the Future
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
The War for Earth: Confronting Climate Change
Robinson’s central purpose in Ministry for the Future is to speculate on what the coming decades will and can look like as the effects of climate change—rises in global temperatures, increasing sea levels resulting from the melting of glaciers, and the effects of these two trends—become impossible to ignore. His novel belongs to several science fiction genres, namely, climate fiction and speculative fiction.
Robinson’s novel is an example of climate fiction, a genre rooted in the idea that we are living in the geologic age of the Anthropocene, defined in Chapter 12 as a human-effected “biosphere catastrophe that will be obvious in the fossil record for as long as the Earth lasts” (43). Robinson develops this theme through direct representation of catastrophic events and multiple voices to show the concerted effort it will take to escape the consequences of failing to prioritize Earth.
Robinson engages with this theme in Chapter 1 by showing the impact of the heat wave in Uttar Pradesh. He uses vivid, visceral details, as when he describes the town as a “morgue” (8) and the “sudden smell of rotting meat” (9) as the death toll rises. The aid worker who rescues Frank in Chapter 5 describes the aftermath of this extreme weather event by noting the smell of burning bodies, the heat from fires burning surrounding vegetation, and Frank, who has “skin that was all peeling off […] [and] looked like he had been burned, or boiled” (22). Robinson follows up this introduction with a riddle, the answer to which is the sun. The sun as it appears in the riddle promises the reader, “Someday I will eat you. For now, I feed you. Beware my regard. Never look at me” (14). Chapter 1 shows what it looks like when the sun eats a human being.
For most people, however, especially those insulated from natural forces by technology and high standards of living, dealing with the sun means taking basic precautions like wearing sunblock or sunglasses. In other words, such precautions make most people see the power of the sun as something humans have learned to control. Coming after the chapter in which the sun has scorched an entire town to death, however, the warning to “beware” is a reminder that nature in the form of the sun can deal out life or death. The representation of the heat wave and the riddle redefine nature as a dominant force over humans just in case readers have forgotten this fact.
Such graphic descriptions and the riddle are meant to shock or even disgust the reader into acknowledging how vulnerable humans are to the extreme weather events caused by climate change—we are part of the biosphere. This opening helps readers overcome the “tragedy of the time horizon. Meaning we can’t imagine the suffering of the people of the future, so nothing much gets done on their behalf” (172). Because Ministry for the Future is set in the near future, it forces readers who are attentive to recent extreme weather events, such as heat waves, wildfires, and droughts, to consider that the victims of climate change are living right now, not just in the future.
Ministry for the Future is also speculative fiction, in that Robinson imagines a world in which the actions of international organizations, central banks, nonprofits, and individual idealists are sufficient to stave off immediate catastrophe. In over 500 pages, Robinson shows that it takes bureaucracy, technology, applied science, radical changes in our economic organization, and death and violence on a massive scale for the world to survive.
The UN Climate Change conference he describes in Chapter 94 shows the “birth of a good Anthropocene” (475) started with an event that is a contemporary one for the reader, the 2015 signing of the Paris Climate Accords. By painting a future in which this “weak” (475) beginning results in the more resilient world he creates in the novel, Robinson gives the reader hope that work on climate change is not futile so long as the reader is willing to accept admittedly radical changes and take action.
The Death of Capitalism
Robinson’s book has a traditional plot that follows what happens to Mary and Frank, but their individual stories are overshadowed by dense chapters that show why a shift away from an economics grounded in self-interest and toward a more collectivist economics is central to the battle against climate change. Robinson uses multiple voices, including that of an economic philosopher, dialogues between a professor and their skeptical student, meeting minutes from the economics team at the Ministry for the Future and the central banks, and first-person chapters of individuals working in their own corners of the world to develop an argument for the death of capitalism as the foundation for a “good Anthropocene" (475).
Human-created carbon emissions are significant contributors to the negative impacts of climate change. Rises in temperature and many of the activities that generate such high levels of carbon dioxide are the result of economic activities, such as manufacturing, transportation of goods that rely on fossil fuels, and extraction of raw resources. In Chapter 8, an unnamed third-person narrator helps establish who is primarily at fault for the dangerous levels of carbon emissions by naming names—19 petrochemical companies led by about 500 people who likely see themselves as “good people. Patriotic politicians, concerned for the fate of their beloved nation’s citizens; conscientious hard-working corporate executives, fulfilling their obligations to their board and their shareholders. Men, for the most part; family men for the most part” (30). This ironic description of the elite, sometimes called “the 1%” in popular attacks on their privilege, makes it clear that removing their power and incentives will do much to address climate change.
Robinson uses the chapters on economic theory and Socratic dialogues between the professor and the student to attack the system that gives this elite its power. In Chapter 20, narrated by the unnamed economic philosopher, the narrator shows the system that gives the elites power is one riddled with great disparities in wealth. These elites embrace “neoliberalism” (171)—capitalism in which unregulated or lightly regulated markets, efficiency that produces income, and governments that are beholden or subordinate to these economic interests. They believe that whatever is good for the market is good. That good ignores the cost of profitable actions now on future generations, however, leading to the destruction of irreplaceable parts of nature, habitats, and people.
Ministry for the Future is a speculation on what can happen once damaging the biosphere becomes unprofitable in the near term. In his Sand County Almanac (1949), ecologist Aldo Leopold said, “[W]hat’s good is what’s good for the land” (165). This formulation upends what constitutes the good by including land and all that lives on it as part of a community. Activities that damage land are also bad for people, plants, and animals; capitalism requires such activities, while more collectivist forms of political and economic forms of organization protect all life and the planet.
The third-person point of view chapters on Mary reveal that much of her work is in convincing beneficiaries of the current system to embrace that land ethic. To do so requires that they relinquish their outsized portion of economic wealth, specifically money that comes from investments and fossil fuels. She and her team work on arguments and programs to convince the elites not to “short civilization” (240) but instead to “go long on civilization” (240). The use of these investment terms is Mary’s capitulation to the worldview of profit-driven investors, as are her initial efforts to make carbon coin a preferred investment vehicle for these elites. Mary experiences little success until the economic damage from climate change effects, ecoterrorism, and the resulting interventions of central banks forces such investors to invest in carbon coin. Capitalism only dies once legislation, grassroots projects, and terrorism converge to make it unsustainable.
Words Versus Actions
Mary’s difficulties in pushing a land ethic come in part because she continues to embrace the rule of law. The rule of law is the idea that we use words and laws instead of force and violence to accomplish an action that affects groups such as communities but especially countries. The primary document where rule of law and protection of the biosphere meet is the Paris Agreement (COP), signed in 2015 by many of world’s nations. Robinson reveals over the course of the novel that the words of the treaty alone are not enough to ensure that actions called for in the treaty take place. By the end of the novel, it becomes clear that mounting an effective response to climate change requires both words and actions. While some of these actions are science and agricultural projects, many of them are acts of ecoterrorism.
Robinson consistently portrays the climate treaty and the rule of law upon which it depends as “weak” (62, 108, 475): “Words are gossamer [delicate fibers] in a world of granite” (352), but the alternative is the destruction of the rule of law and resorting to violence. The more destructive climate change becomes, the less likely important characters and groups are to stick to words alone to effect change, however. Frank explains why on the night he holds Mary hostage. He argues, “The violence of carbon burning kills many more people than any punishment for capital crimes ever would” (99). Releasing people- and planet-destroying amounts of carbon also destroys the social contract upon which the rule of law is based.
Robinson dramatizes the tension between these two approaches to effecting disruptive change by using the Ministry for the Future and the Children of Kali as foils. As the public voice of the Ministry for the Future, Mary is a strong proponent of the rule of law when the novel opens. She spends much her narrative space in meetings, in fact, arguing over agreements to hold banks and polluters to account. After Frank’s intervention, she loses some of her faith in words as being powerful enough to change the trajectory the world is on. She is forced to concede to Frank that the ministry is not doing enough. She takes the insight to Badim to ask him to start the ministry’s black wing. Much of what this black wing does is left to the reader’s imagination. They are likely responsible for “Captured Davos” (164), an intervention that is largely free of violence and that replicates Frank taking Mary hostage.
At its inception, the Children of Kali embraces a particular kind of action by promising to “break off diplomatic relations and do everything short of declaring military war” by embracing “economic war” (26) to stop polluters. Breaking off diplomatic relations is their rejection of the careful words used by diplomats to head off potential conflicts. By the time Frank visits the group a few years after the heat wave, they’ve moved on from economic warfare to promising to “kill” (49) Westerners responsible for rising carbon emissions.
By the 2030s, a member of the Children of Kali explains in blunt terms, “They killed us so we killed them” (135), and the assassin’s descriptions of their methods for killing polluters and capitalists shows they have gotten good at killing using technology. Crash Day, which likely takes place in the late 2030s or early 2040s, combines economic warfare and explicit violence by making it too risky to burn fossil fuels for transportation and killing thousands of people on those planes. In fact, the more violent the Children of Kali becomes, the more power they exert on elites who profit from carbon-emitting commerce. Where words alone will not work, the threat of violent action does in forcing world governments and economies to reckon with climate change.
Robinson inserts a plot twist in Chapter 79 by having Badim reveal that he is the founder of the Children of Kali. Mary is complicit in this violence because she authorizes the activities of the black wing and even asks Badim to assassinate those responsible for Tatiana’s death. This twist collapses the difference between words and actions by showing all along that what the ministry accomplished was based on their willingness to appear to operate within the rule of law but to violate the rule of law through acts of ecoterrorism. Although the novel overall embraces the utopian notion that working together can help us address the problem of climate change, the novel also implies that some violence and loss of life will be necessary along the way.
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