This is my first fiction book review for this blog, and fittingly enough it’s the new book by Kim Stanley Robinson, “The Ministry for the Future”. It would be fair to say that Robinson’s works - especially the Mars Trilogy and the earlier Three Californias trilogy - had a formative effect on me and my politics growing up. In recognition of his influence, the epigraph of my second book, “Evolutionary Politics: Socialism for Social Species”, is a quote by Robinson. That said, I absolutely loathed his last novel, “Red Moon” (2018) - which was not a very good book about China, nor a good book about the moon, nor a good book about a revolution. I am pleased to report, however, that “Ministry for the Future” is a return to form: well written, hopeful, and grounded - if not without its own flaws.

Whereas “Red Moon” was something of a narrative divergence for Robinson, focusing on two [intensely unlikeable] characters who were little more than bystanders to great events, “Ministry for the Future” takes the opposite approach: it’s a loose, almost epistolary, alternative future about how the world was saved from climate change. Its main character - Mary Murphy, an ex-Irish Foreign Minister tapped to head a new UN agency set up to save the world - is almost a stock liberal archetype, but over the course of the book’s 560 pages Robinson paints an affecting portrait of her as a human being. There are other characters who pop in and out of the narrative, but the bulk of the novel mixes lectures, short stories, records of meetings and tone poems to such a degree that it reads more as literature than genre fiction.

“Ministry for the Future” owes a lot to Robinson’s earlier works. Certain plot devices are events are so similar to those in “Red Moon” that a few times I thought they were taking place in the same universe. The influence of Robinson’s Antarctica novels is clear, as are the democratic and utopian politics of the Mars trilogy. Thematically, this book is closest to “2312” - whereas in that book, the climate apocalypse had already happened, in this one we’re to learn how it might be prevented. But for me, in style and composition “Ministry for the Future” is closest to perhaps my favourite of Robinson’s standalone novels, “The Years of Rice and Salt” - his alternative history of a world without Europe. Robinson loves writing about non-Anglo-Saxon cultures, and while “Ministry for the Future” is overloaded with reverence for the Swiss [a portrait that, as someone who’s lived in Switzerland, I find a tad obsequious], like “Year of Rice and Salt” it’s the Indians who by-and-large save the world.

An airport book for the Davos set

Robinson is often hard to pin down politically. His writing often reveals a strongly anti-capitalist bent, albeit shot through with a dose of California Ideology techno-libertarianism and environmentalism. “Ministry for the Future” is about a revolution - the revolution necessary to save the world from climate apocalypse - but a revolution that is gradual, incrementalist and implemented by international institutions, banks and scientists. The liberal elite, in other words. This is a book that Ezra Klein would love, and which that seems written specifically with that audience in mind. Realist but progressive. Intriguingly, though, a core component of the transformation this book imagines is brought about by terror - by terrorist groups, and [spoilers] by state terror conducted by the Ministry itself - but we learn almost nothing about this shadowy war taking place in the background of the story.

The politics of the book are also very contemporary - targeting the interests and prejudices makers of policy-makers here in 2020. Its timeline is often hazy - Robinson often describes issues and events that are supposed to be happening decades in the future in terms indistinguishable from what’s happening now. In terms of his socio-economic solutions, Robinson is also very of the moment: digital currencies and blockchain feature heavily - as they did, unfortunately, in “Red Moon” - as does MMT. In large part, it’s ‘carbon quantitative easing’ that prevents climate change, the creation by central banks of digital ‘carbon coins’ that replace the world’s major currencies. The book is almost a paeon to central bankers, mirroring the obsessive search by some on the left for a magic policy solution that can be designed, implemented and measured by technocrats.

Socialism: Utopian and Science Fiction

Big moments in “Ministry for the Future”, the inflection points that shift the course of history away from disaster, take place in board rooms in Switzerland and Silicon Valley. Change happens when well-meaning bureaucrats deliver knock-out powerpoint presentations for an audience of other bureaucrats. A large amount of the first half of the book takes place over ridiculously priced cocktails in Swiss bars [accurate]. In other words, this is book explicitly in the Utopian - rather than Marxist - socialist tradition. If Robinson’s aversion to discussing revolutionary violence doesn’t give it away, Charles Fourier is explicitly name checked in the latter parts of the book. Power doesn’t drive history - ideas do. And in this sort of world the best ideas from all cultures and places rise to the top to build the global hegemony of the future.

Chapter 99 is worth discussing in detail because it lays the thesis statement of this book out in detail. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Chapter 99 was the first chapter Robinson wrote, reading as it does like an author exercise. The book - without putting these words in the voice of any particular character - rejects the idea that there are “totalizing solutions” to the world’s problems. There are no single solutions adequate to the task - success is made from failures, “the cobbling together from less-than-satisfactory parts. a slurry, a broclage. An unholy mess.” People working together to solve the same problems fight with one another, not because their values are mutually unintelligible, but because of the “narcissism of small differences”. Revolutions are "invisible, technical, legal” - one can have the benefits of revolution without actually going through one. Power is an illusion - but laws are everything.

This is not a capitalist realist book - Robinson does envisage the end of capitalism, and he does it better than anyone else writing today. But it is a sober, realist take. Some reviews describe it as hard science fiction but this book - like the Mars trilogy before it - is more sociological than that. It’s for that reason that I’m hankering for Robinson to write a book about political violence. Hell, write a sequel to this book that tells the story of the Ministry’s black ops wing - show us what it means to blow up aircraft, assassinate the heads of corporations and steal the wealth of billionaires. Robinson’s eco-socialist utopia is incomplete because he hand waves all that away - even while acknowledging that it’s necessary [in the world of the book] to get the outcome ultimately arrived at.

Recommended Reading

In the end, I offer “Ministry for the Future” a strong recommendation. If you’re a young reader, the same age I was when first reading Robinson’s works, it’s a great introduction to post-capitalist ideas. If you’re a contemporary of mine, someone who works in government and finance and still dreams of saving the world, then this is also the book for you. But if you’ve already been radicalised - either by Robinson’s earlier works, by any serious reading of left-wing theory, or by the sheer reality of living in 2020 - then the politics of the “Ministry for the Future” will have little to teach you. It’s stunningly well written, and surprisingly affecting. Robinson has a lot of say about life, death, the planet and what it all means. He’s written the most optimistic vision of the contemporary world he could have. What does it say that I’m still unconvinced anything will change for the better?