Abstract
In this article I consider the ways in which Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate-change-focused The Ministry for the Future (2020) conceives of possible avenues for historical change. I begin by arguing that Robinson’s novel has to be read in the context of “conventional” utopian and ecological sf, which largely ignore or repress the question of historical change, preferring to simply critique the present by contrasting it with imagined worlds. Ministry, by contrast, is explicitly written about the historical “gap” between our present and an already-accomplished future. I focus on disasters, technocratic politics, structures of feeling, and terrorism as vectors of historical change, arguing that the novel produces competing notions of how historical change can be enacted: one is found “within” the novel directly, on the level of plot and narrative, while the second can only properly be understood by considering what kind of readers the book might be addressed to, namely, real-world political and economic elites.
Introduction
In October 2020, Kim Stanley Robinson published The Ministry for the Future, his most recent title in a bibliography suffused by a concern with climate change and ecology. What differentiates the novel from most of Robinson’s previously published ecological sf is that its plot commences a mere five or so years in the future. Stretching from the mid-2020s into the middle of the century, the novel follows the titular Ministry for the Future, a creation of the United Nations, in its mission to advance decarbonisation and other necessary measures to prevent the catastrophic effects of unchecked climate change. Alongside this central plot-strand — largely focalized through the eyes of Mary Murphy, head of the ministry — the novel presents frequent asides: chapters written from the perspective of other important climate actors (e.g. a group of scientists in Antarctica) or of eye-witnesses to certain climate-related events (the flooding of Los Angeles, but also the freeing of enslaved people in rare earth mines), anonymous dialogues, unfocalized narration, as well as chapters which provide sf’s most ambivalent stylistic contribution to literature, the info-dump, on various topics related to climate change, often economic in nature.
The intended effect of this multiplicity of voices seems to be to provide a comprehensive model of what might have to happen in the next few decades in order to retain a planet earth that is livable for all in the face of climate change and ecological collapse. The fact that the narration begins in 2025 or thereabouts (clear dates are rarely given) points towards an obvious fact for us today: the climate catastrophe is not merely looming but already in progress, and it forecloses upon evermore future scenarios. With the 1.5 °C target of the 2015 Paris Agreement perhaps only years away from being breached, commencing the plot any later would in some sense already consign the novel to fantasy or dystopia. Consider Robinson’s earlier novel Forty Signs of Rain (2004): while no date as such is given, that novel is set at a time when atmospheric CO2 levels have reached 440 parts per million (the value as of 2022 is about 415-420ppm) and the Earth has already warmed by six degrees Fahrenheit, or more than than three degrees Celsius (159). In the decade and a half between the publication of Forty Signs of Rain and Ministry, increasingly detailed scientific assessments of climate tipping points and of the potential damages from climate change have made it clear that three degrees Celsius of warming are simply beyond the pale, constituting something close to the end of modern civilization.
A sf text in which climate change is to be addressed (rather than simply ignored, or realized as dystopia) written in 2020 quite simply cannot afford such a gap between present and future; it would read like alternate history, or fantasy, or, at any rate, escapism.[1] Any reckoning with climate change must happen in this decade. With every year in which not enough is being done, the space of potential futures — the core of an sf literature committed to possible futures — becomes smaller, breaking away from our imagination like ice calving from a glacier. And, as Andreas Malm has put it laconically: “There have already been many years of that kind” (7, emphasis mine).
Ministry is thus concerned not with a determinate future point but rather with the historical passage from our present to that future; it presents a future-history of the next few decades. This sets the novel apart from the majority of contemporary climate-sf, which largely ignores the question of historical change in favor of simply critiquing the present through a contrast with imagined future-worlds. Ministry’s concern with the “process” of history finds its correlate not in other sf but rather in contemporary climate activists debating different “theories of change”, different notions of what constitutes effective pressure points for climate politics. I will delineate which of these pressure points, or political arenas, the novel seems to focus on: technocratic politics, protests and demonstrations, and sabotage and terrorism. The novel veers uneasily between these different political spheres, and seems to imply the necessity of the latter two on the level of plot while at the same time often minimizing its role on the level of narration. Finally, I will move from a relatively immanent close reading of the text itself to the question of Ministry’s readers: whatever theories of change the novel espouses within its fictional world, the book as an object in our world obviously adheres to the same theory of change as conventional sf or ecological non-fiction: by being read, the text is to influence its readers. Taking stock of the fact that Ministry has been well-received not only by the sf community but also specifically by political elites, I consider whether the fact of terrorism on the level of plot can be read as an implied threat of terrorism in the real world.
2. The Future as Contrast, Utopia as Process
The history of environmental sf has largely been a history of imagined futures which are already different from our present, in which history has already changed in some major way. Ecological U- and dystopias alike gain critical purchase from creating such futures, whose differences from the present of the reader may render visible critical aspects of that present world, and thus exhort the reader to change that present. “The fantasy of apocalypse”, Gerry Canavan notes with regard to the dystopian strand of such fiction specifically (but which can easily be generalized), “is here unveiled as itself a mode of critique” (13). Sf worlds are constituted by a difference from our present, and that difference, or gap, by itself produces an implicit critique of the present. From Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009) to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) or even Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017), this is the mode in which climate sf has largely been written. And it is not only the dystopian fantasies of apocalypse: Ernest Callenbach’s utopian Ecotopia (1975) works in the same way. The prequel Ecotopia Emerging (1981) does in fact preoccupy itself with the question of how the utopia had come to be historically; not incidentally, the text is far less famous.
This is indeed the conventional way in which sf tout court is assumed to be political, ecological or not. Frederik Pohl has argued that the imagined alternative worlds of sf allow the reader to “compare his or her invented world with the real one around them” (200); Ursula K. LeGuin has called the genre a kind of “thought experiment” (xiv). sf, it is assumed, does political work by producing imaginary (future-)worlds that will cause the reader to change their politics in the present, thus getting us closer to that future-world (if the future is utopian) or removing us further from it (if it is dystopian). Such texts, however, often elide the question of how historical change happened within the novel; the future is already given.
From the perspective of this genealogy of environmental or political sf, Ministry is an attempt to write the “historical gap” that exists between our present and the already-changed future of something like Ecotopia. Indeed, it is to Robinson’s credit that he has been interested in the question of historical process throughout much of his career, as Derrick King (2015) among others has shown. Yet the historical gap in Robinson’s previous major climate-sf effort – the Science in the Capital trilogy – is, as noted, markedly larger than that of Ministry. Written in the midst of the climate emergency, it is all but necessary for Ministry to begin right now, in the present. Robinson has noted the problem of the historical gap in a keynote at the 2015 Bioneers conference: an already changed future — a utopian world in which things are better — one “can imagine rather easily”, he argues; but how does one imagine the historical change which moves the world towards that future? Similarly, in interviews concurrent with the release of the novel, Robinson positions his novel thus:
Famously, from Thomas More (Utopia) on, there’s been a gap in the history — the utopia is separated by space or time, by a disjunction. […] There’s almost always a break that allows the utopian society to be implemented and to run successfully. [… The] story of getting to a new and better social system, that’s almost an empty niche in our mental ecology. (Jacobin, no page)
Note that the word “our” here may refer to political thought as well as to sf as a genre; in either case, a better society may be easier to imagine than the historical process that moves the world towards that better society. Indeed, climate activists, when discussing the question of tactics and strategy, are ultimately concerned with the same problem: what causes a change in the world? In debating the relative efficacy of volunteering for political campaigns, organizing public demonstrations, performing civil disobedience, or committing sabotage, activists bring forward different implied theories of change, different models of causality.[3] Political disagreement about climate change, to be sure, is not only disagreement about how to get to a better world; there are also radically disparate notions of what that future ought to look like in the first place. But even those who agree on what a better future society may look like — and almost the entire political spectrum agrees, after all, that a future will have to be one without carbon emissions — may still disagree as to how one “gets there”, what the path to that future looks like.
With Ministry, Robinson attempts to show the possibility of writing a text concerned with this process towards a better future rather than with the mere imagination of an already-accomplished future. I want to emphasize here the difference between this sense of „utopia as process“ and the sense in which Tom Moylan established that some notion in his critical works on utopia (e.g. 2014). Moylan wrote his initial analysis of critical utopias with a focus on novels that, he argues, bring back the sense of „process“ on the level of personal narratives (what he calls, following Juri Lotman, the level of the „discrete“) rather than on the level of setting (the „iconic“) (xiv-xv, xvii, 10). Consider his examples: one of the four worlds presented in Russ’ The Female Man (1970) is set ten centuries in the future, while a second one consists of an alternate history entirely. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed (1974), part of the Hainish cycle, is set centuries in the future or perhaps in a different world; the visions of a utopian future that Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) receives come from the 22nd century. In the context of climate change in the 2020s, these scenarios are still too utopian, too far away from the present. The sense of “process” between our present and a changed future that Robinson wishes to tease out must be on the level of Lotman’s iconic, not the discrete: setting and plot, not personal narrative.
Where much climate-sf takes place in the aftermath of climate catastrophe (or its avoidance), Ministry, then, is quite consciously about the time in between our present and a future in which the crisis has been resolved. At the outset, nothing is being done and for much of the novel, no political action seems to be enough. The 2030s, halfway through the novel, still feel like “zombie years” in which “Everyone alive knew that not enough was being done, and everyone kept doing too little” (227). Only in the last third of the novel does the cumulative effect of what has been accomplished increasingly makes a difference. Larger habitat corridors are established to protect wildlife; carbon sequestration on a massive scale is financed by a new global currency; diesel-enginedcontainer ships are replaced by ultra-modern sailing ships; CO2 figures go, finally, down, “not just growing more slowly, or leveling off, which itself had been a hugely celebrated achievement seven years before, but actually dropping, and even dropping fast” (445). Describing the happenings of the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP 58 (which would be in about 2053), the narrator notes:
The 58th COP meeting of the Paris Agreement signatories, which included the sixth mandated global stocktake, concluded with a special supplementary two-day summing up of the previous decade and indeed the entire period of the Agreement’s existence, which was looking more and more like a break point in the history of both humans and the Earth itself, the start of something new. Indeed it can never be emphasized enough how important the Paris Agreement had been; weak though it might have been at its start, it was perhaps like the moment the tide turns: first barely perceptible, then unstoppable. The greatest turning point in human history, what some called the first big spark of planetary mind. The birth of a good Anthropocene. (475)
The Paris Agreement is identified as a “break” or “turning point” — something that has changed history, produced the gap — but this identification can only occur retrospectively, from the vantage point of the future; it has become a turning point only due of the accumulated actions detailed in the preceding 400 plus pages of the novel. Without these pages on the time between times, there would be no point to the concluding chapters set in a definite afterwards. The novel exhibits an interest in historical process, not outcome.
3. Historical Actors and Narrators: Technocrats, Protesters, Terrorists
What, then, happens between the initial and the concluding chapters, between the 2020s of the first page and the 2050s of the final page? I would argue that we can identify at least the following relevant spheres in which “change” happens: first, natural disasters and crises occur, which themselves constitute a kind of historical change; second, there is technocratic governance at the hand of the ministry for the future and various national governments, writing new legislation, creating initiatives, and producing economic incentives; third, citizens engage in protests and demonstrations; fourth, saboteurs and terrorists take direct, sometimes violent action, bringing down fossil fuel infrastructure of all sorts; finally, and connected to all of the others (in being a more ideal rather than material change), on the level of human thoughts and emotions, a new “structure of feeling” emerges. These five spheres, of course, interact with one another, and the newly emergent structure of feeling especially comes about through changes in the other spheres. Still, for the sake of analytical clarity, I will mostly go through these spheres one by one. In the interest of space, I can only briefly sketch each of these spheres; more textual examples than I provide could be found for each of them.
Disasters and Crises
The “mechanism” through which change occurs which we can most easily identify is that of disasters themselves. The novel pointedly opens with an account of a heatwave in a city in India in 2025, as experienced by Western aid worker Frank May. “It was getting hotter”, the first sentence reads, referring to the temperature fluctuations of a single day (“Ordinary town in Uttar Pradesh, 6 AM”, 2) as well as the trajectory of global temperatures in the last few decades (“A few years ago it would have been among the hottest wet-bulb temperatures ever recorded. Now just a Wednesday morning”, 2). Across two days, Frank does what little he can to help people on the street, shepherding them into the clinic at which he works while it has a functioning air conditioning system, and, when the AC generator is stolen at gunpoint on the second day, towards a lake. The chapter ends, on the morning of the third day, in enormous death; “There was no coolness to be had. All the children were dead, all the old people were dead […] Everyone was dead” (12). All told, as many as twenty million people may have died (19). While the Ministry for the Future is established before this heatwave in the timeline of the novel, it is made clear (16) that the horrific heatwave is what gives the political impetus to turn the ministry into an agency with actual power rather than something merely symbolic. Read pessimistically, the reader is invited to consider that climate change will have to result in massive, easily attributable death for it to become a truly serious political issue. In a sense, a global catastrophic event is assumed to be a regrettable sine qua non without which change will be insufficient in all of the other spheres of historical change. In this way, the opening chapter of Ministry reads similarly to Robinson’s earlier Science in the Capital trilogy, in which the entire first volume presents a mere prelude to climate change being taken seriously. With seemingly less pessimism, we can conceive of this heatwave as the orthodox kind of ecological sf: by producing in fiction an enormous catastrophe, it is hoped that we as readers of this fiction will take climate change more seriously before it results in such an enormous catastrophe in reality. Even so, the effects of this catastrophe seem limited: “for a while, therefore, it looked like the great heat wave would be like mass shootings in the United States — mourned by all, deplored by all, and then immediately forgotten or superseded by the next one, until they came in a daily drumbeat and became the new normal” (25). The novel, here, seems to lay bare the problem of hoping for catastrophes to truly alter climate politics: the power to shock seems to lie in uniqueness, in singular events, yet climate-caused disasters tend be have the quality of being statistical, repetitive; they quickly turn into something normal rather than a (news-)event. With this, our sense of pessimism is also doubly restored: the fictional climate catastrophes that climate fiction now produces in mass quantities too have become a daily drumbeat whose impact seems negligible.
Later in the novel — no time period is given, but assumedly in the 2030s or 2040s — Los Angeles is destroyed by a vast flood. Where the first-person account of the heatwave of the first chapter functions like a miniature horror story, the primary account of Los Angeles’ destruction, through the eyes of an young kayaker, reads more comedic, almost like a farce, written perhaps for disenchanted young people living in cities like Los Angeles today, renters with unfulfilling jobs: “I shouted to my landlord but he had already left without informing me, very typical” (276). The city, one of the most famously car-centric metropolises of the world, turns into a system of rivers; “Sepulveda [boulevard] was scary fast, I was told, the other kayakers all said Stay off Sepulveda, it’s like class 8!” (277). The chapter ends with a re-affirmation that this disaster is not so bad after all: “The entire city of Los Angeles is going to have to be replaced. Which was great. Maybe we could do it right this time. And I myself am going to find a different job” (279). The demise of Los Angeles seems orders of magnitude less serious than the heatwave that opens the novel, leaving, somewhat improbably, “only” seven thousand people dead (286). Yet, gesturing perhaps towards the colonial underpinnings of the global attention economy, or at least the American hegemony of it, the destruction of the “dream factory” of globalized American culture seems to alter the world’s feelings towards climate change more immediately than the heatwave: “Many people all over the world felt they knew the place, and were transfixed by the images of it suddenly inundated. If it could happen to LA, rich as it was, dreamy as it was, it could happen anywhere […] Some deep flip in the global unconscious was making people queasy” (286). As these two examples show, the disasters caused by unchecked climate change within the novel seem to operate mostly on the level of effecting what Robinson calls, both in the novel and outside of it, the “structure of feeling”. A financial crash, “the deepest in over a century” — a different kind of crisis or disaster —, occurs shortly after the destruction of LA, its effect primarily described as a change of consciousness, “a different time, a new structure of feeling, a new material situation” (287). Let me turn to this notion next.
Structures of Feeling
One of the interesting oddities of Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent writing is that his fiction can be most profitably interpreted in parallel with his considerable non-fiction output in the form of keynote speeches at conferences as well as editorials and articles for newspapers and magazines. To mention just a few of the latter, in 2020 and 2021, Robinson has published an essay in The New Yorker on the then freshly-developing Covid-19 pandemic (May 2020), an article in the Financial Times detailing “a climate plan for a world in flames” (August 2021), and regular articles for a column of his on Bloomberg Green, in which he has explained things such as the value of quantitative easing, a jobs guarantee, or direct air capture in the fight against climate change (April, June and September 2020, respectively). These Bloomberg columns would not be out of place as info-dump chapters in the novel; the essay in The New Yorker, meanwhile, focuses on how the coronavirus has “rewritten our imaginations”. Referencing Raymond Williams, Robinson argues in the essay that because of the pandemic, “[what] felt impossible has become thinkable. We’re getting a different sense of our place in history. We know we’re entering a new world, a new era. We seem to be learning our way into a new structure of feeling” (no page). A zoonotic virus that initially spread across the world in large part via air travel, Corona has indeed turned out to be just another facet of the so-called anthropocene, a catastrophe not entirely unrelated to climate change (Shutdown 22-23).
The Financial Times article on climate change once again mentions Raymond Williams, here noting its direct relevance for his fiction: “Each moment in history has its own “structure of feeling”, as the cultural theorist Raymond Williams put it […] When I write stories set in the next few decades, I try to imagine that shift in feeling, but it’s very hard to do because the present structure shapes even those kinds of speculations.” And indeed, the narrative voice of Ministry similarly wonders whether the deadly heatwave of the opening chapter caused a shift in imagination, ushered in a new structure of feeling. The erstwhile conclusion is far bleaker than in Robinson’s non-fiction, as we have seen above, with disasters merely becoming “the new normal” (25). Similarly, the narrative voice in another early chapter assesses —directly mentioning Williams’ term — the ideological situation of the near present as one in which thought remains trapped by a structure of feeling no longer fit for the task (of combating climate change): “This is what our thinking has been reduced to: essentially a neoliberal analysis and judgment of the neoliberal situation. It’s the structure of feeling in our time” (74-75). Only some 280 pages into the novel, in chapter 60 — detailing the aftermath of the Los Angeles flood mentioned above — has the structure of feeling suddenly altered. In chapter 71, written in the style of meeting notes taken at a meeting of the titular ministry, the term is used once more, now detailing the way in which its causality — its underlying “theory of change” — is theorized by the novel:
Main sense of patriotism now directed to the planet itself.
Matriotism, Dick jokes.
JA nods. Support growing fast. Could cross a tipping point and become what everyone thinks. A new structure of feeling, underlying politics as such. (358)
The notion of a tipping point originates in physics, denoting a point in which a complex system rapidly shifts from one state to another; it had been adopted from physics by sociologists in the late 1960s, and has since been massively popularized for social phenomena by pop-science journalist Malcom Gladwell. In the context of climate change, however, it has largely remained a term of the physical sciences, where climate change is assumed to be a highly nonlinear phenomenon with numerous tipping points or thresholds at which irreversible processes occur, such as ice sheets in the polar regions melting or the jet stream slowing down. These events in turn would further increase global warming, creating cascade effects, until the warming process becomes catastrophically self-sustaining (Steffen et al 2018; Rocha et al 2018). In the novel, Robinson uses this concept to provide a rationale for a potential rapid adoption of a new “structure of feeling” or zeitgeist: ideological change is expected to happen suddenly, all at once, a self-reinforcing social phenomenon. As such, the underlying “theory of change” we are looking for remains somewhat opaque: sometimes, the novel seems to say, social facts simply come into existence spontaneously. This notion of a new “structure of feeling” emerging suddenly speaks to the ultimately unpredictable fact of human free choice, but it frustrates our desire to understand what kind of force has made the difference in the history of the novel: a structure of feeling seems to be both cause and effect simultaneously. In that sense, the novel perhaps simply asks the reader to keep their faith: change will come, suddenly and quickly; when it rains, it pours.
Technocratic Rule
Much of the novel, however, focuses on the governmental, technocratic work of the titular Ministry for the Future: crafting policy and convincing other political actors like central banks to adopt such policy. While the novel has, in Mary Murphy and Frank May, two characters that could be designated protagonists by virtue of their prominence as focalizers, only one of these gets to act throughout the novel. Frank, an aid worker traumatized by his direct experience of the Indian heatwave, eventually briefly kidnaps Mary, the head of the ministry, arguing with her that her ministry is not doing enough to safeguard future generations, and that it should engage in covert but direct violence against powerful elites (89-103). Putting this seed of a thought into Mary’s head proves to be his last action of great consequence, however; eventually captured by the police, Frank spends the majority of the novel in prison, reduced to a passive observer of events rather than an active shaper of them. Meanwhile, his intervention — partially convincing Mary of the need of violence — turns out to have been somewhat unnecessary, as Mary’s chief of staff had already come to the same conclusion (see the section on terrorism below).
With Frank as mere observer, the majority of “meaningful” climate action is focalized through the eyes of Mary and the ministry. Multiple chapters detail meetings of the ministry in which policy is discussed or formed, echoing policies that have been suggested in the real world, from nature corridors to payment plans for carbon sequestration projects. The novel also details the efforts of the government in convincing national governments to actually enact these policies (including through lawsuits). This seems to imply a certain degree of technocraticism; the ministry appears to be an institution outside of democratic politics, and some the most significant “stakeholders” which Mary convinces of her policies are the world’s central banks, another set of institutions which are not under the direct control of representative democracy, as the narration itself makes clear (291).
What does this, then, mean for our question of what “theory of change” is represented by the novel? Clearly, change here seems to be driven from the top-down, by governments and intergovernmental bodies which enact the necessary policies to bring down carbon emissions and increase carbon sequestration, chipping away at the problem until it is solved. Most significantly, I think, the focus on the ministry to some degree minimizes the importance of political conflict. The novel has been noted for largely focusing on the political rather than technological questions raised by climate change (or perhaps, focusing on politics as a kind of technology), which would seem to align it ideologically with Green New Deal literature (e.g. Kate Aronoff et al 2019 or Naomi Klein 2019) rather than with overtly depoliticized technocratic texts like Bill Gates’ How To Avoid A Climate Disaster (2021). Yet the novel throughout also seems to assume that those opposed to climate change action can ultimately be rationally convinced of the folly of their position. Thus one reads in an info-dump chapter that the wealthy and powerful defending their wealth and power is simply not rational behavior:
“There was scientifically supported evidence to show that if the Earth’s available resources were divided up equally among all eight billion humans, everyone would be fine […] the scientific evidence very robustly supported the contention that people living at adequacy […] were healthier and thus happier than rich people […] Rich people would often snort at this last study, then go off and lose sleep over their bodyguards, tax lawyers, legal risks — children crazy with arrogance, love not at all fungible — over-eating and over-indulgence generally, resulting health problems, ennui and existential angst — in short, an insomniac faceplant into the realization that science was once again right, that money couldn’t buy health or love or happiness” (57-58).
It is worth considering this from the point of view of sf style: in some sense, this kind of scientific info-dump would not be out of place in the unabashedly science-focused pulp stories favored by Hugo Gernsback. The science in question, however, is not rocket science or electrical engineering; it is, rather, the social sciences that get to speak. This is true throughout most of the novel; the info-dumps are courtesy of insight from political science, economics (especially Modern Monetary Theory), and the like. This seemingly gives the novel the political edge that it has been read for. The claim to true knowledge of these disciplines, however, is taken to be almost as uncontested as that of physics. The fact that wealthy people might disagree stridently with the notion that their happiness would improve if their wealth were to decrease is, in the quote above, taken up but immediately defused. All sorts of counter-arguments could be brought to bear on this notion that rich people would be happier if they were no longer rich — to begin with, that happiness might not be the ultimate ends in life in the first place —, but crucial to me here is that the novel appears to believe that politics can be resolved with everyone better off, “an improvement for all”, rich and poor alike, and that the necessity of political decision can be defused by rational argument. The ultimate technology, science itself as a whole, “was once again right”. Robinson’s novels often focus on science as a kind of socialist utopian pursuit, in which true knowledge of the world is accumulated by the cooperative practice of scientists. One can read here, I think, more than a trace of Rawlsian liberalism, where strong political enmity is mentioned but ultimately elided through recourse to the “reasonable” (see Rawls passim, e.g. xvi-xvii, 48-50). If the rich disagree with redistribution, this is not so much genuine political conflict as it is, we infer, simply unreasonable on their part; science has said so.
In a similar fashion, multiple narrative chapters in which Mary travels by sea on futuristic sailing ships seem to be written from the perspective that abandoning flying would not only be good for the climate (which is clearly and undoubtedly true) but also better, more enjoyable in itself; the “experience struck Mary as marvelous […] She had a cabin of her own, tiny, shipshape, with a comfortable bed”, and in an extended passage we learn that Mary gets to watch dolphins, that the “air was salty and cool, the clouds tall and articulated, the sunsets big and gorgeous”, concluding: “It was beautiful! And she was getting her work done. So — where had this obsession with speed come from, why had everyone caved to it so completely?” (418-19). A similarly opulent description of sea travel occurs towards the end of the novel, contrasting it with the supposed tedium of air travel, whose far greater speed she makes no note of. (509)
In these late passages the novel again comes close to the long history of orthodox eco-utopian literature that Ministry otherwise largely eschews: with a focus on the supposed beauty of nature, an already enacted utopia is shown to be superior to our reality, implying that we ought to change our society in the direction of such a utopia. It is also reminiscent of Green New Deal discourses, which work in part by wishing us to imagine a more beautiful future brought as a side benefit of solving climate change. We may think here of congresswoman’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ GND poster campaign (Ocasio-Cortez, no date), which visually re-imagines American cityscapes with high-speed rail and wind energy in the background, or texts like Kate Aronoff et al’s A Planet To Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal, the conclusion of which asks its readers to imagine, among other things, “vacationers slipping out of cities on sleek electric buses and trains to camp by lakes and lounge on beaches” (135). While both the larger GND discourse and Ministry are aware of potential political disagreement, these visions of the future are largely written in a way that accentuates improvement for everyone.
While the novel thus — to its immense credit — explicates in detail, both in narrative chapters and info-dumps, what some of the necessary steps to fight climate change would look like, the underlying “theory of change” seems to be reliant on rational thought ultimately prevailing: people, especially powerful people, will simply come to their senses. Those in government will enact what is necessary in time. The world at the end of the novel indeed seems to have become strikingly socialist — unabashedly the political ideology which Robinson believes in — through gradual shifts in policy, no revolution as such needed.
The Specter of Violence: Terrorism and Protests
The answer to the question of how and why change comes about in the course of the narrative has, thus far, been strikingly concordant — free of disagreement, let alone violence (aside from natural disasters, i.e. violence not directly caused by other humans against other humans). The people of the planet, and especially powerful people leading governments and companies, ultimately steer the socio-ecological earth system towards a state in which the climate catastrophe is averted — and, incidentally, something like global socialism is established. If I ended the analysis here, however, I would be fairly accused of reading Ministry selectively. Notably, besides a lot of technocratic policy being enacted by the ministry for seemingly everyone’s benefit, another large driver of historical change in the novel appears to be protests, demonstrations, and indeed violent eco-terrorism that targets those most in the way of combating climate change. Seemingly emphasizing the necessity of violence, we could thus read the novel as representing irreducible political disagreement through terrorism. Terrorism re-occurs throughout the text: early on, Frank May kidnaps Mary Murphy and tells her that the Ministry for the Future needs to do more, including commit direct violence; later, her chief of staff Badim Bahadur tells her that he has in fact established a “black wing” within the Ministry for precisely this purpose. Perhaps most directly, we read — in an unfocalized chapter — that at some point (roughly in the 2030s), “sixty passenger jets crashed in a matter of hours. […] Later it was shown that clouds of small drones had been directed into the flight paths of the planes involved, fouling their engines. The drones had mostly been destroyed, and their manufacturers and fliers have never been conclusively tracked.” Similarly untraceable, the “Children of Kali”, an Indian terrorist group formed in the wake of the heat wave that opens the novel, destroy diesel-run container ships and claim to be infecting cows across the world with mad cow disease, and warn people to stop flying, and to stop eating beef (227-230).
It is significant that this terrorism is carried out through massive fleets of entirely untraceable drones and cluster-missiles, which make — in a work otherwise deeply committed to not inventing futuristic technology as an “easy fix” to climate change — for the most science-fictional technology encountered in the novel. If, as the science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke once quipped, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, it is here that the novel perhaps engages in magical thinking most strongly. Eco-terrorism of the future, we are led to assume, will simply have the ability to stop global transoceanic shipping, air travel, and meat production, and no nation-state, no matter their counter-intelligence and anti-terror budgets, will be able to do anything about it. In that sense, the novel in fact once again comes strikingly close to a technocratic vision of the climate crisis, already represented in the novel by the ministry, and advanced in our reality by liberal climate politics in the vein of Bill Gates: futuristic technology will resolve difficult political problems; only here the futuristic technology resolves the “problem” of how to terrorize without endangering oneself. The novel has little to say about the kind of state repression that eco-terrorists would in all likelihood experience.[4]
Beyond the elision of potential logistical (if not moral) limitations of terrorism through an uncharacteristic recourse to (science-)fictional technology, terrorism itself is hidden from the narrative almost as soon as it is introduced. While the novel clearly seems to indicate that terrorism, and with it, political violence — political disagreement not amenable to rational discussion or compromise — is necessary on the level of plot (that is, the text cannot imagine a future-history in which the climate catastrophe is resolved without it), it resolutely refuses to narrate and focalize this terrorism. Mary is eventually briefed by Badim on the existence of the “black wing” of the Ministry (107-115), but the actions of this black wing remain almost entirely un-narrated. Indeed, it seems notable that terroristic activities in the novel are largely carried out by characters of color (Badim and the Children of Kali, who are Nepali and Indian respectively) while the white characters are largely shielded from having to commit or be responsible for violence. Mary, we only read, receives cryptic handwritten notes by Badim, referencing fictional poets: “These phrases, as gnomic as Nostradamus, were only meant to tell her that things were happening, it was time to meet again. Or so she assumed. If there were specific messages encoded in them, she wasn’t getting them” (284). Focalized through Mary, the activities of the Ministry’s black wing remain pointedly hidden from the reader of the novel, mediated through fictional literature whose meaning is obscure to Mary as well as the reader of the novel.
The chapter in which Mary learns of the existence of the Ministry’s black wing under Badim is immediately followed by a single-page info-dump chapter on the Tzadikim Nistarim, or Lamed-Vav Tzadikim, a “Hebrew tradition [which] speaks of those hidden good people who keep the world from falling apart […] the hidden righteous ones” (117; it would perhaps be more accurate to speak of a kabbalistic or mystical Jewish tradition, not a Hebrew tradition as such). The juxtaposition of hidden “anonymous good actors […] ordinary people, who emerge and act when needed to save their people, then sink back into anonymity” with a secret wing of the ministry engaging in illegal warfare puts the latter into the category of mysticism; “If there are other secret actors influencing human history”, the chapter closes, “we don’t know about them. We very seldom get glimpses of them. If they exist. They may just be stories we tell ourselves, hoping that things might make sense, have an explanation, and so on. But no. Things don’t make sense like that. The stories of secret actors are the secret action” (117). Despite its claim to being many-voiced, polyphonic, the novel essentially refuses to tell these secret stories; they are secret not only to characters in the novel, but also to the reader, as though the otherwise panoptic gaze of the novel could not penetrate into such spheres. And indeed, the last sentence alleges, the stories created constitute the only relevant action of terrorism, and the terrorist acts themselves may as well not have happened. Terrorism in Ministry is made invisible even as it is mentioned.
Mary herself ultimately minimizes the role of terrorism, sabotage, and (civil) warfare in enacting historical change towards the end of the novel:
“She had heard things recently, not to her face but around the internet, rumors to the effects that the Ministry for the Future had been thousands strong and had waged a savage war against the carbon oligarchy, murdering hundreds and tipping the balance of history in a new direction. Bollocks, no doubt, but people dearly loved such stories. The idea that it all happened in the light of day was too frightening, history being as obviously out of control as it was — better to have secret plots ordering things, in a realm without witnesses. Not that she completely disbelieved this particular tale.” (546)
Once again, the importance of terrorism that is strongly implied on the level of plot — no other vectors of historical change for reducing the levels of transoceanic shipping, global meat consumption, or aviation are presented in the novel — is reduced to mere narrative, to “stories”, indeed to a kind of conspiracy theory. In reality, so Mary, all had “happened in the light of day”, but such radical open visibility of events is “too frightening”, consistent with contemporary accounts of conspiracy theories as being about (real or perceived) loss of control (Slate, no page). Little wonder that people would engage in conspiracies around the ministry, then, “history being as obviously out of control as it was”. Conspiracy and terrorism both circulate mostly as fictions within the novel, not as material political activity. Political agency seems to be in the hands of humanity as a whole in the form of an abstract “history”. Note, too, the opposition between “secret plots” and “witnesses”; as Robinson himself has argued in interviews, the side-narratives of the novel constitute “eye-witness accounts” of events across the world. The novel ultimately seems less interested in mapping the potential levers of enacting historical change than it is in merely witnessing things happening in a public realm, an uncontrollable history.
This returns us to the notion of a “structure of feeling” that I have outlined above; climate change will ultimately be averted, the novel seems to imply, simply because enough people will have come to the correct conclusions regarding unsustainable consumption levels and necessary investments in clean energy, in a kind of cascade of heightened awareness. A late chapter reports of an essentially religious global celebratory moment for earth itself, celebrated by at least three billion people, the organization of which is simply hand-waved away; “I don’t think anyone ever figured out who organized it” (538). We can add to this the mild forms of civil resistance, protests and demonstrations, mentioned in the novel. These too figure in the narrative, but again only as strangely concordant events. Protests and demonstrations seemingly do not need organizing, but simply come about through historical necessity. As an interviewed protester argues (in another eye-witness account), “You have to be part of a wave in history. You can’t get it just by wanting it, you can’t call for it and make it come. You can’t choose it — it chooses you! […] Mass action, yes, but the mass is suddenly family, they are all on the same side […]” (515). Mass movements are imagined here as a wave that captures everyone in its wake, “all on the same side”, all political antagonism washed away. Popular movements and massive changes in the structure of feeling figure into the narrative, one could almost say, as a highly fortuitous weather event, not as the result of difficult political work.
4. Justice is an Option: Terrorism and Elite Readers
The search for where in the novel historical change is enacted — where political agency exists, is most powerful — thus seems to end in something of an aporia. Who has the power to steer humanity on a course towards sustaining life on earth? Politicians, administrators, citizens, terrorists, saboteurs? Ultimately, people of whatever capacity need to be convinced of what needs to be done, and this conviction is created in part through the very acts of doing them. We thus return to the notion of tipping points: for the world to not catastrophically warm, ideological change needs to happen, and it is expected to happen suddenly, unpredictably, a self-reinforcing social phenomenon.
As I have argued, orthodox ecological or otherwise political sf, if it has any notions of itself influencing the world, is assumed to do so by attempting to convince its reader that another world is more desirable. On a meta-level, then, the theory of change is that reading fiction may influence the ideas and political positions held by the reader, thus changing the way in which these readers act. This is implicitly a democratic, liberal conception of historical or political change: change occurs because a majority of people have been convinced of something to be right, and the very fact of majority belief will bring about that change (e.g. through elections). Alternatively — and this seems to be rather rare in ecological sf — the theory of change can be non-democratic if the idea of which the reader is to be convinced is precisely that some people cannot be convinced, that certain other people are an enemy to be overcome violently. This would be a mode in which sf works as a kind of propaganda. The “theory of change” would still be that books change the political and ideological positions of readers, but it would be addressed to specific readers as an exhortation that certain other people will never change their political and ideological positions.
But what if the readers which Robinson perhaps most directly addresses with Ministry are precisely the political and economic elites which we would assume to be least susceptible to have their political positions on inequality and climate change to be changed? Assuming that these elites cannot be convinced by the orthodox mode of ecological sf, whether dystopian or utopian, what would an ecological sf novel addressed to such readers look like instead?
I suggest entertaining this reading for two reasons. The first is a chapter in the novel in which participants of the global political and economic elite event par excellence — the World Economic Forum, usually metonymically referred to as “Davos” — are peacefully held against their will and “re-educated” by a group of leftist activists. Narrated by a Davos participant, the chapter is seemingly clear on the uselessness of such a move: the Davos elite find the propaganda material to be laughable and naive; they cannot be made to change their minds with PowerPoint presentations, “graph after graph, repeated in ways that were not even close to compelling” (162). When the situation is resolved, the former hostages at once boast that none of the re-education had an effect on them. The chapter ends with the narrator recuperating from the experience by immediately going on an international holiday, assumedly via an emissions-intensive flight on a plane:
Back home we found ourselves minor celebrities, and opportunities to tell our story would last forever. Some of us took that opportunity, others slipped back into comfortable anonymity. I myself decided to decompress in Tahiti.
So, effect of this event on the real world: zero! So fuck you! (p. 164)
The second reason is the degree to which we factually know that at least some elites have been interested in the novel. Barack Obama, for one, has included Ministry on his list of favorite books from 2020 (no page). Furthermore, as mentioned above, Kim Stanley Robinson’s other most noteworthy publications in recent years have not been fiction at all, but rather lengthy articles on climate change and the coronavirus for Bloomberg and the Financial Times, publications whose readership is largely composed of economic elites.[5] Meaningfully, one of Robinson’s most recent articles for Bloomberg is about the very fact that he had been invited to COP26, the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference. He notes:
In November, if all goes well, I will take part in the most important climate talks in six years as a speaker in some associated activities—as, in fact, a science fiction writer. Probably I’m not the only person who finds this a little bizarre. Probably it’s happening because actual delegates to the high-stakes deliberations over warming temperatures will have read my novel The Ministry for the Future, which depicts high-stakes deliberations over warming temperatures. If the biggest United Nations climate meetings are, as someone once described them to me, a combination of diplomacy, trade show, and circus, then presumably I’ll be part of the circus at COP26. Like one of the clowns, which sounds about right. The court jester often says things people need to hear, from angles no one else would think of. Those in power listen for amusement and crazy insight. This is one way of describing the role science fiction performs in our culture” (Why COP26, no page)
Robinson here not only references his own readership — he assumes that his invitation stems from the fact that some of the organizers and delegates of the conference have read his work — but also his purpose at this conference as an sf author. The topos of writers and artists as court-jesters who are able to truth-tell by dint of their seeming powerlessness is, of course, not a new one.
But what I find interesting is precisely the combination of three things: first, Kim Stanley Robinson is aware of the fact that quite a few of his readers are political or economic elites, people who have disproportionate power over the way in which climate change is tackled by society at large. Second, a chapter in his novel is narrativized by a fictional individual of this elite group and seems to argue that convincing (even at gunpoint) these elites through guilt, shame, and rational argument of necessary changes to their own ways would not be successful — “effect of this event on the real world: zero!” This chapter stands in stark contrast to the seeming focus on technocratic rationality of much of the rest of the novel. Third, as I have argued further above, the novel’s plot hinges in part on direct violence, in the form of untraceable terrorism — forcibly stopping global air travel, transoceanic shipping, and massive meat consumption, but these important plot elements are half-submerged on the level of narrative.
The novel is concerned, as I have argued, with the question of how and where historical change occurs, where the “levers of power” lie; on a meta-level, however, any work of fiction, and indeed any book, can only be assumed to effect the world by being read, and by convincing its readers of something. A book can advocate violence or policy, but it cannot itself enact either. What is it that Ministry wishes to convince political elites specifically of? If we take seriously the Davos chapter, the novel must be taken to argue that political elites to some degree cannot be rationally convinced that a socialist-Green-New-Deal program (which the novel is otherwise largely focused on) will benefit all. A non-elite reader might take from this the fact that more than mere rational argument will be needed, such as, for example, political violence. A reader from the politico-economic elite, in turn, may take from this chapter precisely that non-elites are aware of the limitations of non-violent rational argument.
The novel thus does not simply argue that political violence will be needed to advance the changes to society necessary to safeguard the planet. Rather, it seems to say that political violence is an option that can and will increasingly be exercised if climate policy continues to be enacted too slowly. I take the term option from Robert Meister’s (2021) discussion of justice as a kind of financial option, who argues that a political revolution seizing the assets of the wealthy can be understood as a financial option that has value even if it is not exercised; while an actual revolution would assumedly destroy much of the wealth of these assets in the very act of seizing them (10), leaving not only the targets of a revolution, but also the revolutionaries themselves worse off, the threat of a revolution might be enough to extract concessions from the would-be targets of a revolution:
[R]eversing historical injustice due to capital accumulation has the logical character of an option in three distinct senses: that it could happen simply as an automatic effect of capitalist disaccumulation due to revolution; that it doesn’t have to happen, because revolution can be deflected by democratic reform; but that democratic politics can still extract the present value of the revolutionary option of capitalist disaccumulation even when it is not likely that this option will be exercised. In my view the spheres of financial and democratic theory are mediated by the concept of historical justice as a real option on accumulated wealth that becomes more valuable when the wealth becomes less secure under political threat. (12)
Ecological and political sf presents readers with visions of possible futures. If a given future is desirable (utopian), the implicit hope is to exhort the reader to help change the world towards that future, to bring about the future by imagining it. If the future is dystopian, the implicit hope is to prevent that future, to make its arrival less likely precisely by imagining it. sf thus has the structure of a prediction about the future that, precisely by predicting the future, itself effects the future (however minimally). This structure is similar to that of financial theory, which similarly has the potential of being, as Donald MacKenzie terms it, “performative” (making its own predictions more likely by predicting them) or “counter-performative” (making its own predictions less likely by predicting them).
It is in this vein that, I think, the somewhat spectral nature of terrorism and other violence in Ministry can be read more radically. As I argued above, terrorism seems necessary on the level of plot of the novel but is minimized on the level of narrative; both the narrator and Mary find that terrorism ended up only being a kind of myth or story, not something that really happened in significant quantities. I suggest that we read this oscillation of positions precisely as an openness about the future. It is not yet necessary for terrorism to become an actual part of the repertoire of climate justice movements. It is, however, necessary that the would-be targets of such violence are made aware that such violence might be forthcoming if the pace of climate action continues to be too slow. As such, the novel attempts to be, uneasily, both performative and counter-performative. If it wishes to prevent violence, it does so precisely by notifying politico-economic elites that the option of violence will be exercised with an ever-increasing likelihood if their position remains that of the “fuck you!”-Davos narrator. The novel does not advocate against or in favor of violence: it merely puts it on the table, as an option. Violence is reduced to a “mere story” by Mary and the narrative voice because even as a mere story (that is, as an option that has not been exercised) it may have value. The novel thus returns, ultimately, to the structure of orthodox ecological sf, presenting a future different from ours in an effort to change human behavior in the present; but it does so with an uncanny awareness of precisely this narrative structure.
Endnotes and Bibliography
Endnotes
[1] It is not my intention here to narrowly define sf in opposition to these terms, but only to note that, at minimum, a certain type of sf, at least, is based on the temporality of a possible continuity between the present of the author and the future of the text.
[2] An extended discussion of the question of polyphony can be found in my forthcoming dissertation.
[3] For an exemplary discussion of this type (in which the question of “theories of change” is indeed directly brought up), see the discussion between the two academics and activists Andreas Malm and Tadzio Müller on the Dissens podcast: https://podcast.dissenspodcast.de/123-climate
[4] On this issue of how the state would react to eco-terrorism, see also Alyssa Battistoni’s response to Andreas Malm’s How To Blow Up A Pipeline: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/5324-is-sabotage-a-pipe-dream
[5] See e.g. the Financial Times’ own description of its readership (for potential advertisers), in which it claims that 32% of its readers are C-suite executives, 20% are millionaires, and almost half (49%) work in finance or for a government or NGO: https://commercial.ft.com/audience/
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10,000 signs 