It's pretty hard for me to review Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future, a work of fiction describing a hypothetical near-future in which humanity manages to conquer climate change.
It's hard in the same way that it's hard for a socialist, say, to review a libertarian utopian work like Atlas Shrugged, or for an atheist to review a Catholic utopian work like The Dawn of All.
Such reviewers will of course find that they have plenty of things to say. But there's too much disagreement between them and the authors, at too many points, to make writing an actual critique easy. An array of insults, no problem; an essay of reasonable criticism, quite hard.
It's probably nevertheless worth reviewing. In part, because Ministry is entirely about the problem of large-scale coordination in the face of climate change. Such coordination problems are occasionally important for other reasons.
And in part, because Ministry for the Future purports to be a little more than a work of fiction. It warns of actual disasters. The legislation bureaucracies enact in it are laws some people actually want to enact. People write reviews about it summarizing it as "how to solve the climate crisis" and "advise policymakers" to read it. It was one of Obama's favorite books for 2020. So it's reasonable to examine it for accuracy in a way you probably wouldn't many other works of fiction.
Here's a quick, two-paragraph summary of the plot.
In the mid 2020s, the titular "Ministry for the Future" is founded as a UN-adjacent body, intended to advocate for future generations and specifically to combat climate change. Shortly afterward, a heat wave strikes India; the wet-bulb temperature exceeds the temperature at which humans can live, and 20 million people die from the heat.
This disaster motivates both the Ministry and the Indian government to attempt change. The Indian government builds solar energy plants to replace coal and attempts atmospheric sulfur geoengineering projects to temporarily halt the rise of the temperature. The Ministry for the Future tries to persuade people to change their laws to decrease carbon output and to sequester carbon; the black wing of the Ministry also performs terrorist attacks upon coal power plants, airplanes, cargo ships, owners of businesses, and so on, to decrease the attractiveness of carbon-causing activities. Both climate disasters and economic depression cause refugees to migrate in huge waves across the globe. Eventually, various central banks across the globe agree to create a "Carbon Coin" which is paid out quantitative-easing style to organizations that sequester or cease producing carbon. Oil companies abandon oil; guaranteed housing, food, and jobs help the impoverished masses; and eventually the carbon in the atmosphere begins to decrease. Everyone celebrates and the book fades out.
You'll note that the plot summary here doesn't mention any characters. There are two main characters, but they are mostly a sidenote to the actual meat of the novel, which is the world-historical events of the time.
The first character is Mary Murphy, an Irish bureaucrat who is in charge of the Ministry for the Future -- she's our point-of-view character for wrangling over public policy changes. The second is Frank May, an aid worker who barely survives the Indian heatwave, gets bad PTSD, tries out terrorism briefly, and eventually works with refugees -- he's one of the point-of-view characters for the situation on the ground. They intersect when Frank kidnaps May and says she needs to do more, and again when they become friends towards the end of Frank's life.
Stylistically, the book consists of short and often non-narrative chapters. These chapters include many various things: the perspective of scientists or refugees, sometimes recurring and sometimes not; very brief overviews of wildly various topics such as bias, Keynsian economics, the Tzadikim Nistarim, the Bretton Woods agreement and so on; or personifications of non-personal entities such as the market, the sun, a carbon atom, a photon, and so on; and in-world historical summaries not covered elsewhere.
The diversity creates a feeling of depth, but means that you're unlikely to enjoy the novel if you're interested in interesting personal portraits. There definitely aren't any.
(I don't read Neal Stephenson for his vibrant characters, but I started his latest Termination Shock after this book and was astonished at how much more alive everyone seemed. I don't think I would have gotten through Ministry if I had tried reading it after Termination Shock.)
I'm gonna start with the problem of violence in the book, both because I expect people who otherwise enjoyed the book might feel most uneasy about this.
The pattern of violence in the book goes like this:
My problem, just to be clear, isn't all because of deontological concerns about whether violence is justified. I want to leave that issue to the side. It's because the violence is always effective and predictable.
Violence is attractive because the outcome appears predictable. But the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan; America invades Iraq; unexpected things occur. Violence isn't predictable in reality; it's predictable in the speeches you give before you invade a country, or before you do a terrorist bombings. It is afterwards that you find yourself caught in an interminable civil war.
In this book, this violence never:
Violence in the real world tends to do all these things, frequently.
In a certain mood, you could say this seems optimistic. I don't want to say it's optimistic, though -- describing a wonderful, cheap bridge that you can build without a foundation isn't optimistic. It's systematically blind.
This blindness as regards violence is a subpart of how the book generally assumes the most-convenient possible world as regards politics, capitalism, and environmentalism.
For instance, saving the environment always goes hand in hand with various left-flavored political goals.
After the disaster in India, for instance, the "nationalist nativist" party gets voted out immediately, and a new party composed of a beautiful melting pot of all interests takes over. It nationalizes the electrical power companies, shuts down coal-fired power plants, builds wind and solar plants and "free-river hydro" and also shuts down all vestiges of caste. It's an immediate victory by the "does good things" party, in other words, at least for a particular perspective on good.
In particular, it's a victory by a party which is a purist about good, and which demands no tradeoffs. Free-river hydro -- hydro with minimal storage -- is less reliable than damned hydro, which you'd think would be a concern in a country where lack of air conditioning just killed 20 million people. But the environmental impact is lower for free-river hydro, so of course that's what they develop. And of course the same party wants to eliminate the caste system, beacuse that's a good thing, and they're in favor of good things, generally.
By itself this is just a single point, but the entire book is like this. Politics and economics is the art of tradeoffs, but never in this book is there a serious tradeoffs. Abolishing right wing political movements always help the environment; never does a country become more democratic, decide they want more electrical power, and build a coal power plant. Dropping coal power never destroys the electrical grid for a country and results in further deaths. Distributing trillions of carbon credits through a vast bureaucracy has no unintended consequences as people shift labor from food production to carbon sequestration (which we literally see onscreen), nor is there any corruption in the distribution of these trillions of dollars. Assassinating billionaires and nationalizing their property has no influence on the productivity of capital. Etc etc etc.
There aren't even aesthetic tradeoffs. Nuclear power merits scarcely a mention, and (apart from refurbished US Navy ships) doesn't seem to provide baseload power in the new world. Never mind that it's a reliable source of carbon free power. It doesn't match the mood.
When terrorists destroy fishing vessels, they conveniently also free the slaves who were forced to work there. (You don't see them destroy the livelihoods of fishers who aren't slaves.)
When mines are nationalized, they also conveniently free the slaves there. (You don't see nationalized mines cause flight of talent.)
Eco-terrorism only hurts bad people, you see. Nationalism only hurts bad people. You wouldn't want to oppose these things, then? People might think you're bad.
The book is astonishingly incurious about where new technologies come from, and about the details of the technologies.
KSR likes travelogues, as you can tell from his other books. At some point towards the end of the book, with most of the environmental goals achieved, Mary Murphy needs to travel to California to review various plans. She takes a solar-powered airship back. This kind of airship, we are helpfully informed, travels at a maximum speed of about two-hundred kilometers per hour. (Wikipedia tells me that the maximum practical speed for an airship is 130-160 kph, because of their vast surface area.) It has sufficient battery capability that it can travel at night. (She has romantic discussions with the pilot during the nighttime.) She takes it on a trip that apparently goes over the Arctic and the Antarctic. Cloudy weather never presents a problem.
Why doesn't Tesla cover cars with solar panels, so you can charge it while you drive? Well, because solar power takes an enormous amount of area per unit of energy, so that the charge gained back would be minimal. That's also why solar-powered aircraft, of which there are some currently extant, are meticulously engineered and carry a few to zero humans. A solar powered airship carrying significant cargo makes very little sense -- and KSR doesn't bother to address cloudy days or winter of course.
The entire book is like this -- various technologies are invented as convenient but the actual problems of implementation, invention, and adoption are glossed over completely.
For instance, in another place, the Ministry for the Future invents a new kind of crytocurrency-cum-social-media-platform, except you own your own data and when you spend the currency it is always visible to everyone. (Ignore... um, the potential contradiction between these two things.) It's like Urbit, except designed by people who love surveillance rather than monarchy. Everyone leaps to use it, of course. We never hear whose servers it runs on, or if everyone runs their own servers; it's just not... not a question that occurs to KSR. The new corporatist social-media website comes into being, triumphs over existing network effects effortlessly, and has none of the downsides of the old one, petty details ignored.
Quick universal popularity of a crypto platform put out by a UN-like agency isn't.... quite against the laws of thermodynamics? But the median crypto-lover seems to hate bureaucracy, and the median bureaucracy-lover seems to be technologically indifferent, so the way it becomes makes about as little sense to me as a perpetual motion machine.
I suppose it's obvious by now that I think implementing any of the ideas in the book would be a bad idea, because they're based of convenient stories about reality. That's not the worst thing about this book.
When we talk about dehumanizing language, it's easy to think of Nazi descriptions of Jews as vermin, rats, or so on. This is of course the most obvious example, but it's not necessarily the best, because it's already labeled as bad for us. But clickbait that you know is clickbait is bad clickbait; dehumanizing language that screams "these people are not people" is less dangerous than the language which gradually brings you about to the dehumanizing belief.
The casual indication that it's better to kill business people than other people in this book is, I think, an instance of such dehumanizing language.
Consider the terrorist attack that kills 60 passenger jets: "When the analyses were done, it became clear that... the commerical flights that had good down had been mostly occupied by business travelers."
Which of course makes it better, right?
There are many references to the "island fortresses" of the rich who -- implicitly -- are responsible for most climate change. Terrorist groups try to assassinate the majority shareholders of large companies, or of companies which do bad things. In an assassination we get a first person view for, the eco-assassin climbs through the air ducts to kill the a weapons manufacturer, because they aren't just killing oil executives but also weapons manufacturers because the assassins are Forces for Good.
(Maybe Palmer Lucky doesn't deserve execution without trial? Just my opinion.)
You could criticize my criticism here, of course, by saying the book doesn't endorse this. There's a plethora of viewpoints in it -- I might be making basic interpretive mistakes by acting as if a particular violent viewpoint is beloved of the book.
But books do somewhat endorse things which they depict as working effectively -- they are saying "yes, these techniques are good". And these violent techniques are in some ways the most effective things in the book. Violence is what stops people from flying planes, using diesel cargo ships, from using carbon-powered transport in general, and even from eating cows. (Terrorists infect cows with mad cow disease, of course.)
In conclusion -- KSR is one of those books which I think is so bad that when I hear that someone else likes it, all their other opinions come into question for me. Like Atlas Shrugged is, for many people.
It purports to be about detailed policy proposals for solving climate change. The plethora of documents and viewpoints and styles make it appear to have depth. But the core narrative is of a simple good-versus-evil style conflict, the kind that is the narrative pabulum of political parties, dictatorships, and religions everywhere.