Aidan's Reviews > The Ministry For the Future

Tl;dr: I want to believe. But I find KSR’s answers to the challenge of global warming vague and unconvincing, so much so that this attempt at a hopeful, needle-threading future has left me more worried about the next century than when I started reading it.
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It is a truth universally acknowledged that a sci-fi writer in possession of a utopian plotline must be in want of that quote about the end of the world being easier to imagine than the end of capitalism. I think KSR gets a good 5% of the way in before he paraphrases it here. And sure, a bit of a cliche, but it could be a great declaration of intent, a signpost that this novel won’t just indulge in apocalyptic visions (which he summons to terrifying and moving effect in the opening chapter) but try to chart a course between Scylla and Charybdis towards a better future.

The problem is that KSR doesn’t actually have a very good idea for how we get there, so he cheats. Repeatedly. Relentlessly. Remorselessly. Scylla actually has an allergy to ships, you see, and Charybdis is definitely super-scary but needs to wash its hair when the protagonists come by so we’re all good. It’s the equivalent of reading a right-on but fundamentally incoherent editorial in The Guardian — I really sympathise with the author’s politics and aspirations, but this isn’t the argument to be made for them.

Now, before I lean in to technical nitpicking and complaining about heavy-handed authorial shenanigans, a quick word about The Ministry for the Future’s literary quality. Which is often good, sometimes great, but wildly, spectacularly uneven. There are moments — the harrowing opening chapter “somewhere near Lucknow”, a majestic description of the sun as godlike creator-destroyer, a fraught late-night traverse across an Alpine glacier — that are compelling and even transcendent. And there's a solid if slightly less spectacular novel buried in there about a traumatised disaster survivor trying to cope with a chaotic new century without losing his humanity. But these elements stand tall above a sea of infodumps barely disguised as lectures or bureaucratic notes, a lightly-sketched-in protagonist with inexplicable persuasive abilities (more on that later), and frankly jarring interludes where we hear from the personifications of photons, blockchain, history, the economy, and a carbon atom, amongst others. Some are OK. Some are not. It turns out carbon atoms are hyperactive, ditzy, and into molecular threesomes! Who knew? You do now, reader.

But on to the plausibility issues. In the style of the infodumps above, I’m just going to list some of them out here. There’s a new global carbon e-currency which is guaranteed to increase in value but doesn’t create deflation or liquidity issues because, I dunno, blockchain? (At some point the monetary trilemma and all other macroeconomic concerns are memorably hand-waved away as [Žižek sniff] pure ideology, even if we end up majoring on MMT which I guess is fine). Unstoppable Mach 2 swarm missiles with seemingly unlimited range are used by shadowy extra-state actors but don’t problematically destabilise geopolitics in a way we need to hear about. An open-source replacement for all social media immediately overcomes the network effects of incumbents in about a week, effortlessly circumvents most of the Great Firewall, and doesn’t seemingly require armies of half-traumatised mods and admins to police its content. A UN agency undertaking a weeklong abduction of every single person in Davos isn’t discovered by national intelligence agencies even years later. Wholly unspecified carbon air capture technologies are ready and scalable in the next twenty years. Microwave power transmission is happening from space by the 2030s, which likely means those satellites are being designed and funded…about now?

There’s a case study to be had in one of KSR’s coolest ideas, pumping meltwater out from under glaciers to re-ground them. Just drill a hole, and then pump the water out with minimal energy input because the weight of the glaciers means the water rises up almost all the way to the surface! But would it? Well, a) even contained reservoirs don’t bear all the pressure of their overburdens, so probably no, and b) if the meltwater is venting to the sea what pressure there is should be largely relieved by the flow, so double nope. And that’s just the surface-level problem with the idea. For instance, are meltwater pools even connected on a useful scale? What about channelisation under the ice? Is runoff even all that important in affecting glacial velocities? What’s the relative impact of (effectively unpumpable) warm sea water in driving changes in ice shelf pinning lines in Antartica versus (pumpable) surface meltwater runoff? It seems our current state of knowledge about all those questions isn't promising. At best, this seemingly nifty and concrete idea floats on a raft of best-case assumptions. And it’s one of the most superficially plausible and carefully discussed things in the book.

Beyond the technological nitpicks, however, there’s just a seeming desire to wish away the less pleasant realities of the last twenty years. Unprecedented floods of refugees and global depression, fine, very plausible, but the political backlash is contained to, uh, some right wing tough guys making trouble in a park, not, say, even more brutal versions of the Lega, Vox, BNP, and FN rising politically? We’re repeatedly told nationalism is back in a big way, but it’s strangely impotent on the page. Seven thousand travellers die in a single day in an ecoterrorist strike against airlines and states do absolutely nothing of relevance to the plot in response except meekly draw down airplane travel? (Though to be scrupulously fair, huge but ineffective counterterrorist operations are mentioned at one point and then utterly dropped from the narrative). Never mind when the same thing happens with micro-drones threatening swathes of the world population with BSE infection if they continue to eat beef, or power plants being systematically attacked around the world without apparent consequence or backlash. Libertarian ranchers in the US leap at the chance to abandon farms and rewild the prairies, except for unpopular militias easily defeated by a Wild West calvacade. China/US or China/India geopolitical rivalry don’t even get a look in. You get the idea.

What planet is this? Apparently one where the entire politics of reaction, cultural grievance and zero-sum realpolitik that have led to this moment no longer exist. One where the revolutions of 1848 weren’t crushed and replaced by 66 years of revanchism and brutal inequality ending in a catastrophic war. A better place, surely. One I’d like to live in. Just not, you know, the real world.

Instead of wrestling with why global warming is hard to solve, Green Lanternism is left to run riot here, from central bankers being convinced to upend the global monetary system by a Paddington-style Hard Stare to the Swiss government being convinced to try and buck the global power structure by a Hard Stare to a showdown with ecoterrorists who have Stepped Over The Line that is resolved by...you get the idea. All you have to have to save the planet is willpower, and apparently the psychic mojo of the Hypnotoad.

So where does this leave us? This is a painfully earnest, occasionally graceful book that will hopefully inspire like-minded people to action. Maybe even useful action! I suspect it'll be loved by many. And those are all good things. Just pray civilisation doesn’t need anything like the sequence of improbable coincidences, spectacular breakthroughs and authorial meddling KSR seems to think we do.