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Library | Shelf Location | Shelf Number | Material Type | Item Barcode | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Palmerston North Central Library | Sci-Fi and Fantasy-Fiction Zone | ROB | Book. | PN364650016771 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
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 )
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, postapocalyptic 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 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 Futur e, 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. It's my book of the year." -- Locus
"Science-fiction visionary Kim Stanley Robinson makes the case for quantitative easing our way out of planetary doom." ― Bloomberg Green
Genre:
| Science fiction. |
| Ecofiction. |
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bestseller Robinson (Forty Signs of Rain) again tackles climate change head-on in this gutsy, humane view of a near-future Earth careening toward collapse. Mary Murphy, head of the Ministry for the Future, a UN watchdog agency created as a result of the Paris Agreement, takes to heart the ministry's mission "to advocate for the world's future generations." Mary spends her days promoting relief for the afflicted and wrestling with the financial powers-that-be to change the carbon balance before it tips too far. She must also be on the watch for ecoterrorists, even as she plans to use their attacks in her pitch for a carbon sequestration cryptocurrency to a group of influential bankers. Then Molly is abducted by the traumatized survivor of a heat wave that killed 20 million in India, who furiously cuts through the political weeds to demand change ("You're killing the world and you want me to remember what words you used to cover your ass?"). Galvanized by his demands, Molly attempts to start a "black wing" working in secret within the Ministry for the Future to make larger changes than she can aboveboard--only to discover that such a group already exists. Robinson masterfully integrates the practical details of environmental crises and geoengineering projects into a sweeping, optimistic portrait of humanity's ability to cooperate in the face of disaster. This heartfelt work of hard science-fiction is a must-read for anyone worried about the future of the planet. Agent: Chris Schelling, Selectric Artists. (Oct.)
Guardian Review
It opens like a slow-motion disaster movie. In the near future, a heatwave of unsurvivable "wet-bulb" temperatures (factoring in humidity) in a small Indian town kills nearly all its inhabitants in a week. The Indian government sends up planes to spray sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere to mimic the dimming effect of major volcanic eruptions. This does not, naturally, meet with unalloyed approval around the world. A new international climate-crisis body has been "charged with defending all living creatures present and future who cannot speak for themselves", and is quickly dubbed the Ministry for the Future. It is led by our protagonist, Mary Murphy, former foreign minister of Ireland. Her outfit may or may not also have a black ops wing, but a shadowy terrorist network called the "Children of Kali" has no white ops wing: it uses drone swarms to crash passenger jets and container ships in deadly protest at continuing carbon emissions. Meanwhile, scientists at the poles are trying to pump water out from under the ice caps to prevent them from sliding into the ocean and raising sea levels catastrophically. Kim Stanley Robinson, who wrote the classic Red Mars trilogy of novels about geoengineering the red planet to be habitable by humans, now offers a story about whether we can geoengineer Earth back into Earth. Within these pages there is much hard science, of atmospheric and oceanic physics, usually helpfully explained by a passing expert; but also speculative military strategy - the invention of "pebble mob" missiles, which converge on a target speedily from all directions, renders almost all military hardware redundant - plenty of economic history and much comforting detail about the grey civility of Switzerland in winter. Robinson shows that an ambitious systems novel about global heating must in fact be an ambitious systems novel about modern civilisation too, because everything is so interdependent. Luckily, when he opens one of his discursive interludes with the claim "Taxes are interesting", he makes good on it within two pages. There is no shortage of sardonic humour here, a cosmopolitan range of sympathies, and a steely, visionary optimism. Dark comic relief comes from fragmentary dialogues between unnamed speakers. "Have you heard," one asks, "that the warming of the oceans means that the amount of omega-3 fatty acids in fish and thus available for human consumption may drop by as much as sixty percent? And that these fatty acids are crucial to signal transduction in the brain, so it's possible that our collective intelligence is now rapidly dropping because of an ocean-warming-caused diminishment in brain power?" The other replies: "That would explain a lot." Indeed it would.
Kirkus Review
This detail-heavy near-future novel offers a window onto the apocalypse looming just behind our present dystopia. As Uttar Pradesh suffers from a crippling heatwave and blackouts, Frank May, an American aid worker in a small city, runs out of options to help the local residents stay cool and suggests that they go into the lake, which unfortunately offers very little relief. He rouses from an uneasy night submerged in the water to discover that everyone is dead but him, a devastating outcome that leaves him with PTSD and a desire to do something, anything, to reverse climate change. But as Frank is the quintessence of the ineffectual White American savior--not equipped to save anything or anyone, even himself--he doesn't have the first idea about how to pursue his goal. His bumbling and his anger drive him to a failed kidnap attempt on Mary Murphy, head of the titular Ministry for the Future, a U.N. agency formed in 2025 to further the aims of the Paris Agreement. Frank drifts through years as a fugitive and then as a convicted felon, Mary works tirelessly through diplomatic and bureaucratic channels to save the planet before it's too late, and the Children of Kali, a group of eco-terrorists also inspired by the Indian heatwave tragedy, pursue more violent--and shockingly effective--methods of combating environmental destruction. These strands initially form the basis of a gripping story, but they're diffused by Robinson's determination to narrate a history of an alternate future timeline, one which naturally excludes our present pandemic and the latest crackdowns in Hong Kong but also apparently ignores the U.S. dropping out of the Paris Agreement and the implications of Brexit. That tale, or more often lecture, is conveyed through dry and snarky infodump essays and brief, punchy accounts from people, inanimate objects, and metaphorical forces. Perhaps the author is angry that though he's spent years writing novels exploring the dire results of climate change, the message doesn't seem to have gotten through; it's clear that he is unhappy at how politics and greed have obstructed opportunities for positive environmental action. At the same time, he seems hopeful that the world can still forge a path forward, if only we have the resolve. High-minded, well-intentioned, and in love with what Earth's future could be but somewhat lacking in narrative drive. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The 2025 Paris Agreement begets the "Ministry for the Future," led by pragmatic Irishwoman Mary Murphy, to ensure Earth's future through the reversal of climate change. Simultaneously, U.S. clinician Frank miraculously survives an extinction-level heat event in Uttar Pradesh. Robinson's dense prose explodes Mary's and Frank's stories (among scores of human, animal, and other stories) into a provocative look at the economic, legislative, and scientific leaps that must be made in order to control rampant climate events that seem all too real. This creates a prickling tension as epic-scale world events are married to micro-scale storytelling, in which even a lowly photon gets a turn to relate its experiences. Humanity is pitted against an inexorably ticking clock as Mary struggles with the ramifications of rogue nation-states manipulating the weather, anarchist political groups trying to force change with violent, massive attacks against wealthy resource-hogging elites, and her kidnapping at the hands of Frank. A breathtaking look at the challenges that face our planet in all their sprawling magnitude and also in their intimate, individual moments of humanity.