The Ministry for the Future
I just read Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, recommended with great enthusiasm by my friend Rahul. In taking his recommendation, I was following my own recent advice https://nicheless.blog/post/135.
Unusual for me was that this was a book of science fiction. Nothing against the genre - I just hadn't read any sci-fi books since Asimov and the Dune series in my teens.
Rahul thought this book would appeal to me. First, because it is in the near-future, requiring lower levels of disbelief suspension; second, because it is about climate change - a field I have been involved in for over thirty years; and third, because India features heavily and, ultimately, positively. I discovered that the book is part of a growing subset of science fiction called cli-fi (climate fiction).
This novel is so vast in scope that to attempt a summary, much less in 300 words, would be foolish. I'll mention three things:
It is written from the perspective of multiple narrators, first and third party, including inanimate objects like protons and concepts such as history.
The book is deeply researched. KSR, as the in-crowd call him (sounds like a South Indian film star/politician), writes convincingly and engagingly about subjects as varied as central banking and global economics, Indian politics, carbon capture, climate geopolitics, drilling to create ice in the Antarctic, wildlife, Zurich and the Swiss Alps.
The humans in the book are sensitively but not sentimentally treated. They remain central to the future of the planet but are not the only object of it.
The book's message is positive, even optimistic. Some of its scenarios may appear implausible, and Francis Fukuyama critiques it as such https://www.americanpurpose.com/blog/fukuyama/were-cooked/, but it provides food for thought on what the art of the possible to combat climate might involve.
Strongly recommended.