Tildes Book Club discussion - The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

The violence in the book felt very inconsistent to me.

The author opens the book with a genuinely harrowing account of human suffering and death, and later leans on the assassination of Tatiana for similar resonance. Both of these seemed to understand and convey the horror and grief of loss, even a “minor” one (not that Tatiana was minor, but that she was only one person).

But then stuff like Crash Day, or the torpedoing of ships, were given a sort of opposite emptiness. There was no attempt at emotional resonance at all. No accounting for the human element. They were reported on as if they were, well, the weather.

I think this may be the author intentionally inverting things: make climate-related deaths feel impactful while downplaying human-led ones. That’s a genuine reversal of the norm we live in, and I think it’s quite clever to subvert our expectations like that. So, if I’m giving Robinson the benefit of the doubt and the most charity I can muster as a reader, that’s the best explanation I can come up with for the inconsistency.

I will be honest though and say that feels like a bit of a reach on my part. Instead, it feels like the narrative just deliberately glossed over some genuine horrors when they were in service of fighting climate change. Fighting climate change is, of course, a noble goal, but sanitizing outright acts of terrorism that support that, instead of honestly accounting them, felt a little disingenuous to me.

Also, narratively speaking, it would have been way more interesting had Robinson actually dove into those. Those passages should have been some of the most compelling in the book, but they felt more like bland asides to me.

This may sound a bit bloodthirsty but, the promise of violence was the main thing that attracted me to the book. The way it had been described to me was something of a revenge fantasy. I was looking forward to seeing the common man stand up and force billionaires and giant corporations to quit fucking up our future.

I really enjoyed the conversation comparing killing an assailant in self defense, to preventing large polluters from killing millions. I was interested by how closely it matched the conversations around the killing of that Healthcare CEO a while back.

Theres this whole side story that we only see glimpses of, where terrorist groups and possibly a secret arm of the ministry are staging bombings, assassinations, kidnappings etc. I can't help thinking that would have been a way more exciting plot to follow.

I noticed my main reaction to the violence was that is felt super plausible/to be expected. I mean maybe not something so coordinated and huge as 'crash day', but it made me surprised that we don't see more of it (at least eco-motivated violence against property) in real life.

The use of violence that was used in the book reminds me of the flight or fight response. The reason for this is that the majority of the violence that was dealt by was people who were scared or were traumatized by the massive heatwave and wanted to prevent another one or another mass causality event. What I mean is that the violence that gets talked about was either done by the Children of Kali or by Frank, with Frank wanting to join the Children of Kali when they intentionally formed. But Frank only accidentally killed that one random rich person in Switzerland, and kidnapped the director of the Ministry, Mary Murphy, and he only did that because he was scared and wanted the ministry that was set up to tackle the climate crisis, to do something (I am not trying to excuse his behavior, from Murphy's perceptive, months after this kidnapping, she slowly realized why he did it (if I remember correctly)). And like @Dr_Amazing had said about the healthcare CEO killing last month, I had also drawn some parable of what happened to the killings of the polluting industries CEOs and their killings in the book.

The crypto part was WILD. First, because having crypto at all increases emissions so much and there was no discussion of this. Second, because their system was a privacy CALAMITY. Imagine, trying to escape an abusive relationship if your purchases are this transparent?? Third, because I don't see how it's even possible to guarantee non-anonymity here? There would be SO MUCH fraud and falsified records etc. The new 'tax haven' would be 'get a new identity' havens. And if you can't get a new identity, what about (for example) trans people?

This is the part that I think requires the least specialized knowledge to find flaws in, and it was such a disaster that I am assuming most solutions he talks about are completely bullshit but I don't know enough to see the problems with them

which is not necessarily to knock the book, I enjoyed it overall, but I don't think there's anything practical here

Some science parts seemed very real (like pumping water under glaciers), but then there was crypto-stuff that was way off, others have already mentioned it.
So at the end, whole book left me questioning if any science had any merit. Maybe it will nudge me to investigate all of those more on my own. But if all that was pure fiction, then I'm not sure if it was necessary to make them feel so real.
I guess the most difficult part to believe was end of capitalism as it is right now.

I liked the role that India had played in this book. India (in the book) really played the role model how to change course from the heavy polluting of getting electricity to more of green way of producing it, moving from the large scale coal burning to the solar farms co-ops. And the whole sale pushing off of the right-wing politics, specifically Hindutva, and electing people that would actually protect them from foreign entities that would try to exploit the land and the people.

The geoengineering that India had done was justified. The reason for this is that the government of India had only one goal in mind, to prevent another heat wave that would kill about the same or more people in their country. What I mean that if it could bring the Indian temperature a few degrees down, and that had helped with preventing another heat wave at that level, that was at the beginning of the book, then the geoengineering had done it's job. And I don't remember if they talked about any side effects that would come off of this.

The opening chapter was horrific and incredibly well written. My first reaction was depression because I know this is where we're headed.

In the end I was glad it was over. I really dislike finishing any decently written book feeling like that, it makes me feel like I somehow failed to connect with the author or the characters.

I didn't find the end as hopeful as I've seen referenced, though it was definitely not as hopeless as the beginning. Many of the fixes didn't feel like real fixes to me or like something that could actually happen, I think that took away a lot.

I feel like there’s a good book within this, but it’s not the whole thing as is. I almost feel like someone could make a reading guide of only certain chapters, which would chop the book down to its core, and it would be a quicker, more fulfilling read. As is, it feels too diluted.

I enjoyed the ideas he presented. I enjoyed the shifting perspectives. I genuinely liked a lot of the infodumping. I prefer nonfiction myself, so the more “nonfictiony” a section was, the more at home I felt.

That said, and this feels very harsh of me to say, I didn’t care about any of the characters. Mary’s storyline was initially compelling to me. I was excited to hear about her role as the head of the Ministry. What sort of decisions would she have to make? How would she run things? What conflicts would arise and how would she make tough calls?

I didn’t really get that at all though. Instead, I feel like we got bland meeting notes and completely unnecessary details about irrelevant things. Her chapters were some of the longest in the book, but so many of them felt insubstantial. Like, when she goes into hiding and has to scale the mountain? It went on for PAGES.

Meanwhile, in other chapters, Robinson’ll casually throw out major information in a sentence or two, then keep going. Those chapters felt like the scrolling chyron at the bottom of a news station: terse, rapid, significant. Mary’s chapters, meanwhile, felt slow and often meaningless. There was actually a period of time where I forgot that she ran the Ministry. I remember asking myself: “Why are we focused so much on her again?” OH, right. The Ministry! You know the thing from the title of the book? Despite the focus on her, the Ministry itself felt separate and absent a lot of the time. This was disappointing to me.

This contrast also created an odd mix of pacing that persisted throughout the whole book. It felt ridiculously fast at times, and downright glacial (yes, that was on purpose) at others. I was glad when it ended, but I was also glad that I read it.

For all my complaints here, I did genuinely like a lot of it, and I also found myself genuinely inspired. My anxious brain always tends to think in worst-case-scenarios. Climate change, naturally, lends itself perfectly to that sort of catastrophizing. One of the techniques I have to counter that is asking myself “What if things actually turn out okay though?” I use it all the time as a way of cutting through my own cognitive distortions.

This book is ultimately an exercise in that sort of thinking. What if we are able to stop or even reverse rising CO2 levels? What might that look like?

The cynic in me wants to say that it’s naive to think that way, but there’s an optimist in me too that’s still got a flame lit on their candle of hope. I like that the book tries to honor that flame, rather than snuff it out.

I read it on inauguration day, and wow was the beginning depressing. I appreciated that it became more optimistic for sure

In a lot of ways, the book was deeply grim (which maybe was the point? I can't really decide). Even though it tries to end on a bittersweet note, I can't help but feel like the overall thesis was essentially: "Even if a bunch of impossibly good things happen, like wildly successful geoengineering with no negative consequences and a global socialist revolution, it's gonna be really fucking bad for almost everyone for a really long time". I can feel myself retreating back into just not thinking about it, because, now maybe more than ever, I feel like I have essentially no impact here and have no idea what I could possibly do to have one.

I liked their relationship, while it lasted it was really the only thing that felt stable to me throughout the book. Mary not knowing why she kept going back felt very relatable to me.

I was really interested in the anonymous person in the town which ran out of water and am disappointed that storyline went nowhere.

I'm also disappointed by the way the Children of Kali just kind of dropped off and stopped being mentioned after the meeting with Badim. Did they officially end? Did some of them decide they still had work to do while others moved on? We don't even know for sure they actually did anything.

I liked the dirt farmers, though I don't understand why they weren't growing anything. I'm curious what they did with the money they got, did they start playing crops and live happily ever after? I can't remember if they had formally had farming skills, did they realize they didn't actually know how to grow anything and have to turn to their neighbors for help?

I've not heard that term before, but it seems to me that describes most disaster movies.

I don't think the book falls into that category despite the first chapter. That chapter did its job, it dragged you into the reality of the program and the consequences of doing nothing. Then the book moved on.

I didn't love it.

Half the chapters were these little thing that I didn't care about. (The chapters with a carbon atom and sun light doing the narration were especially silly.)

Then there were chapters that were more interesting than the main protagonist, but they're never seen again.

I liked it a lot! The audiobook was narrated by a huge cast (but one chapter at a time, not full-cast style), and it was cool to have that variety of voices. I really like books with sprawling plots and many different POVs

It felt fractured to me. I tend to read one book with my eyes before bed and have an audiobook I listen to while doing chores. It pulled away my focus more than the completely unrelated audiobook I was listening to did.

I did really like a handful of the tangential chapters. It took me a while to realize the people in those weren't going to come up again, several ended up seeming like half of a short story.

I very much disliked the meeting notes chapters. They made me feel like the book was unfinished.

In the end, I felt like we spent so little time with Mary and Frank that I had trouble caring very much about their character arcs. I'm having trouble figuring out how to express this but: somehow we spent very little time with Mary (given that she was the primary protagonist), and yet it felt like too much of the book was dedicated to her character development? In a book where so much of the narrative content had nothing whatsoever to do with Mary or Frank, quite a lot of time was dedicated to developing them as characters in ways that had similarly little to do with the plot of the book. Maybe it felt like the book was trying to be too many things at once?