The Ministry for the Future

“I am a god and I am not a god. Either way, you are my creatures. I keep you alive. Inside I am hot beyond all telling, and yet my outside is even hotter. At my touch you burn, though I spin outside the sky. As I breathe my big slow breaths, you freeze and burn, freeze and burn. Someday I will eat you. For now, I feed you. Beware my regard. Never look at me.”

Chapter 2 is one of several riddles; this one comes after Chapter 1, in which the sun does indeed burn nearly everyone to death except Frank. Robinson’s use of the first-person riddle form allows him to anthropomorphize the sun to emphasize the impact nature still has on humans, even though technology has alienated humans from nature.

“Humans are burning about 40 gigatons (a gigaton is a billion tons) of fossil carbon per year. Scientists have calculated that we can burn about 500 more gigatons of fossil carbon before we push the average global temperature over 2 degrees Celsius higher than it was when the industrial revolution began; this is as high as we can push it, they calculate, before really dangerous effects will follow for most of Earth’s bioregions, meaning also food production for people.”

Ministry for the Future is hard science fiction set in the near future, meaning that actual science serves as an important context for understanding the literary elements of the novel. Here, the third-person narrator explains what climate change is and its causes. Sections like these increase the reader’s scientific literacy on an issue that Robinson cares about, but this information also helps the reader to understand the plot points that follow—specifically, India’s decision to perform the Pinatubo.

“Executive decisions for these organizations’ actions will be made by about five hundred people. They will be good people. Patriotic politicians, concerned for the fate of their beloved nation’s citizens; conscientious hard-working corporate executives, fulfilling their obligations to their board and their shareholders. Men, for the most part; family men for the most part: well-educated, well-meaning. Pillars of the community. Givers to charity. When they go to the concert hall of an evening, their hearts will stir at the somber majesty of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. They will want the best for their children.”

Much of the traditional plot of the novel focuses on how characters, such as Mary and Badim, work to unravel inequality and end ecologically destructive practices that stem directly from activities that are central to global capitalism. In this quote, Robinson uses irony—the mismatch between how capitalist decision-makers see themselves as good people and their responsibility for ecological and human disasters—to advance the idea that the world can only survive if capitalism dies.

“[W]e are in a biosphere catastrophe that will be obvious in the fossil record for as long as the Earth lasts. Also the mass extinction is one of the most obvious examples of things done by humans that cannot be undone, despite all the experimental de-extinction efforts, and the general robustness of life on Earth. Ocean acidification and deoxygenation are other examples of things done by humans that we can’t undo, and the relation between this ocean acidification/ deoxygenation and the extinction event might soon become profound, in that the former might stupendously accelerate the latter. Evolution itself will of course eventually refill all these emptied ecological niches with new species. The pre-existing plenitude of speciation will be restored in less than twenty million years.”

This passage defines the concept of the Anthropocene, and it comes in one of the chapters narrated by an unnamed scientist. The bomb hidden in the elevated diction of this chapter is that the new species that will come when the Anthropocene ends does not include humans. The narrator is telling the reader that all of humanity will die. This abstract diction, characteristic of the chapters on economic and political theory, allows Robinson to subtly critique the disconnect between such theories and lives of ordinary people. Economic theory is one of the main targets of this critique.

“To be clear, concluding in brief: there is enough for all. So there should be no more people living in poverty. And there should be no more billionaires. Enough should be a human right, a floor below which no one can fall; also a ceiling above which no one can rise. Enough is as good as a feast—or better. Arranging this situation is left as an exercise for the reader.”

This chapter expands the critique of capitalism by zeroing in on inequality and arguing for the end of capitalism because it allows for misery on such a mass scale. The proposition that there should be no such thing as a billionaire is radical in traditional economics, but over the course of the novel, the ministry pushes for a Modern Monetary Theory built on the principles outlined here. The last sentence is a refrain in most of this category of chapters and signals that economics talks about inequality but seems incapable of imagining what to do about it in practice. The quote is thus an excellent illustration of the difference between words and action, an important theme in the novel.

“Do like Saint Francis. Help people[....]But he wanted more. He could feel it burning him up: he wanted to kill. Well, he wanted to punish. People had caused the heat wave, and not all people—the prosperous nations, sure, the old empires, sure; they all deserved to be punished. But then also there were particular people, many still alive, who had worked all their lives to deny climate change, to keep burning carbon, to keep wrecking biomes, to keep driving other species extinct. [….] He wanted to kill all those people. In the absence of that, some of them would do.”

This passage captures how Frank self-radicalizes. The contrast between using a saint’s model of right action and deciding to kill to help the objects of his good works—people suffering the effects of inequality and climate change—reflects the impact of his PTSD on his mental health. These dual responses are present in most of the characters in the novel, and they reflect an ongoing tension between how best to prosecute and win the war for Earth.

“‘Violence begets violence,’ Mary said. ‘It cycles forever. So here we are.’

‘Having lost the battle. But look, the violence of carbon burning kills many more people than any punishment for capital crimes ever would. So really your morality is just a kind of surrender.’”

Frank here articulates the moral argument for using any means—including violence—to win the battle for Earth, while Mary seems content to stick to the rule of law, the foundation for her practice of diplomacy. Although she pushes back against Frank’s sense that extinction justifies any means to avoid it, this encounter with Frank marks a turning point in her character arc. Frank’s arguments leave such an impression that she authorizes Badim to create a black wing capable of working outside the rule of law.

“What’s cost? I said. Postdocs can be so stovepiped, it would be funny if it weren’t so alarming. I clarified reality for them: Look, if you have to do something, you have to do it. Don’t keep talking about cost as if that’s a real thing. Money isn’t real. Work is real.”

One approach to combatting climate change is through applied science. In this passage, glaciologist Griffen brusquely tells his students that they should ignore realities, such as cost, because the survival of people and habitats is at stake. His rejection of money as the measure of what should and should not be done is utopian, certainly, but it is also a critique of science if it is co-opted by capitalist values.

“Say the order of your time feels unjust and unsustainable and yet massively entrenched, but also falling apart before your eyes. The obvious contradictions in this list might yet still describe the feeling of your time quite accurately, if we are not mistaken. Or put it this way; it feels that way to us. But a little contemplation of history will reveal that this feeling too will not last for long. Unless of course the feeling of things falling apart is itself massively entrenched, to the point of being the eternal or eternally recurrent individual human’s reaction to history. Which may just mean the reinscription of the biological onto the historical, for we are all definitely always falling apart, and not massively entrenched in anything at all.”

This passage is one of the “structure of feeling” chapters in which the narrator describes the spirit of the times during each decade covered in the novel. Such chapters are a nod to the difficulties readers might have in synthesizing the many plot lines, voices, and genres in each section of the novel. They also help articulate the mood in each section as the characters and world confront climate change. The mood in the 2020s and early 2030s is that the world is headed for catastrophe.

“They killed us, so we killed them.”

The narrator in this passage is a Child of Kali, an ecoterrorist group that initially used nonlethal interventions to change decision-making around climate change. This bald statement about their actions in the 2030s shows that they now embrace lethal violence. Their approach shows one side of the debate on how to respond to climate change, namely, that killing is justified because decision-making that leads to carbon emissions is a kind of violence. They do not, in other words, believe in the rule of law.

“The educational materials we were exposed to got universally bad reviews. So many clichés! First films of hungry people in poor places. It wasn’t quite like looking at concentration camp footage, but the resemblances were there, and these images were of living people, often children. It was like looking at the longest charity advertisement ever made. We booed and made critical comments, but really the 2,500 most successful people in the world did not get to that status by being stupidly offensive. Often some diplomatic skill had been required and acquired. Also we were pretty sure we were being filmed in order to be later packaged into some kind of reeducative reality TV. So most of us just sat and watched the show and muttered to each other like you do in movie theaters.”

This passage captures the thought process of an attendee at Captured Davos, where privileged people at the economic summit are finally forced to confront the direct result of free-market economic policies. The scorn the narrator heaps on the production quality—as opposed to the suffering on the screen—shows that people currently winning in the free-market capitalist system are not amenable to reason or even nonviolent interventions. Robinson uses the chapter to advance the theme of the necessity of the death of capitalism to end inequality and save the biosphere.

“Persisted with arguments for carbon coin. Noted that some environmental economists now discussing the Chen plan and its ramifications, as an aspect of commons theory and sustainability theory. Having debunked the tragedy of the commons, they now were trying to direct our attention to what they called the tragedy of the time horizon. Meaning we can’t imagine the suffering of the people of the future, so nothing much gets done on their behalf. What we do now creates damage that hits decades later, so we don’t charge ourselves for it, and the standard approach has been that future generations will be richer and stronger than us, and they’ll find solutions to their problems. But by the time they get here, these problems will have become too big to solved.”

This passage comes in the form of rough meeting minutes compiled by economist Janus Athena. The discussion of the tragedy of the time horizon explains why the ministry and Mary in particular commit to ending capitalism. The point of Janus Athena’s argument here is that capitalism has baked in values that make it incapable of dealing with the catastrophe of climate change because it would require ignoring short-term profit. The carbon coin project Janus Athena and other team members work on is designed to address this problem.

“Globalization was many things—including a reality, in that they all lived on one shared planet in which borders were historical fantasies—but it was also a form of Americanization, of soft power imperialism combined with economic dominance, in that the US still had seventy percent of the capital assets of the world secured in its banks and companies, even though it had only five percent of the world’s population. So the globalization determined by physical reality could never be escaped, and would only become more prevalent as the biosphere problems got worse, while the globalization of American imperialism could not possibly last, as it was one of the main causes of the biosphere’s problems.”

The gist of this passage is that the economic power of the United States has given it an outsized influence on the political fortunes of the world, and those American values are ones that are so captured by free-market capitalism that it makes it virtually impossible to save the physical world without destroying that influence. The overlap between politics and economics explains why, despite Ministry for the Future belonging to the genre of science fiction, there are so many chapters devoted to monetary policy and the critique of capitalism.

“If it was war, they were outgunned and on the defensive; but really it was mostly just discursive struggle, a war of words and ideas and laws, which only had brutal death-dealing consequences as a derivative effect that could be denied by aggressors on both sides. It was a civil war, perhaps, a body politic punching itself over and over. In any case, war or not, it had that same besieged awful feeling of existential danger, of stark emergency that never went away.”

Mary contemplates the language she uses to describe what is happening when she goes into bureaucratic meetings to work on climate change. The tension at work here comes from the difference between words and actions when it comes to the war for Earth. Although these meetings are mostly about words, their real-world consequences are violent ones. Halfway through the novel, then, the difference between words and actions is collapsing.

“No plan, nothing good, no parks, no organization, no plan of any kind. Just buy some orange grove and subdivide it and tear out the trees and build a bunch of plywood houses, and then do it again, over and over. It happened in a snap of the fingers, and it was never anything but stupid. And that’s what we’ve been living in ever since! And more than a few of us trying to live out a remake of the movie La La Land. It was double stupid. So as we were paddling around in our kayaks, people were saying to each other, This whole fucking place is gone! Everything is going to have to be torn out! 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.”

Robinson includes many first-person, unnamed narrators who are forced to deal with the consequences of climate change. The young woman in this chapter is an aspiring actress who recognizes the flooding of Los Angeles as a tragedy created by an overemphasis on profit and ignoring of biosphere. Rescuing people in the flood with others is her first opportunity to strike a blow against this mindless system. Her experience and choices in the chapter allow Robinson to represent collective action as an adequate response to climate change.

“Words are gossamer in a world of granite [….] The world runs by laws and treaties, or so it sometimes seems; so one can hope; the granite of the careening world, held in gossamer nets. And if one were to argue that the world actually runs by way of guns in your face, as Mao so trenchantly pointed out, still, the guns often get aimed by way of laws and treaties. If you give up on sentences you end up in a world of gangsters and thieves and naked force, hauled into the street at night to be clubbed or shot or jailed. So the people who fought for sentences, for the precise wording to be included in treaties, were doing the best they could think of to avoid that world of bare force and murder in the night. They were doing the best they could with what they had.”

Robinson uses metaphor (and the consonance with the “g” sounds in that first sentence) to express in figurative and lyrical language the difference between the rule of law and violence. His point here is that the rule of law seems to be a relatively delicate thing to stave off violence when confronted with a crisis like climate change. However, the paraphrase of the quote from Mao shows that the contrast between words and actions, rule of law and force, might well be a false one because words and politics are meaningless without force to back them up. This passage also anticipates the big reveal several chapters later that Badim has actually used the violence to give the words of the Ministry for the Future weight.

“He said, I am Kali. Suddenly he felt the enormous weight of that, the truth of it. They stared at him and saw it crushing him. The War for the Earth had lasted years, his hands were bloody to the elbows. For a moment he couldn’t speak; and there was nothing more to say.”

This passage reveals that mere words have not been enough to address climate change after all, but the personal cost to Badim of engaging in that violence is a moral injury from which he has not recovered at the end of the novel. His frantic argument to convince the Children of Kali also seem to fail, with the implication that there is no end to violence once it is unleashed, even if the goal is a worthy one.

“We are from Belize’s Coral Reef Restoration. I represent Bolivia’s Food Security. I, Borneo’s How to Restore a Rainforest. We are from Brazil’s Centro de Experimentos Forestaisis, also Restoration Through Agroforestry. We come to you from Burkina Faso’s The Forest of Lilengo, and the group Reforesting with Ancient African Farming Practices. Cameroon here: the Bafut Ecovillage.”

This passage comes from one of the first-person chapters. In this case, the first-person is frequently plural. The impact of this dense list of people working on preserving and restoring habitats is to show the power of collective action. Robinson makes this point even more emphatically by using the names of real organizations.

“In all the blooming buzzing confusion of their moment, they would take stock and get some clarity on the situation, and act. And if Badim’s black wing had anything to it, they would act there too. The hidden sheriff; she was ready for that now, that and the hidden prison. The guillotine for that matter. The gun in the night, the drone from nowhere. Whatever it took. Lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, fuck it—win.”

Mary contemplates what she wants to present at the climate conference in the aftermath of the assassination of Tatiana, her friend ad legal counsel to the ministry. Notable here is that she embraces diplomatic and political action but also explicit violence. In fact, just prior to this passage, she tells Badim to kill those responsible for Tatiana’s death. This moment marks a turn in her character; her personal anger over Tatiana’s death and the state of the world are apparent in the profanity she uses and her decision to embrace both words and violent action to achieve an adequate response to climate change.

“But after a while your eyes began to hurt. People broke down and couldn’t finish what they were saying. Their friends helped them off the stage. This was our town. This was who we were. Finally there was nothing left to say. It was midnight and we closed up the town like in a fairy tale. Nothing left to do but go home, feeling hollow, stumbling a little. Go in your house and look around at it. Pack your bags.”

This quote is from a Midwesterner whose town is cleared to make way for a habitat corridor established by people in support of turning half the Earth over to animals. Their mourning and tears show that the drastic actions required to restore habitats damaged by climate change will sometimes cause human suffering. That human suffering could be of benefit to the biosphere, making environmentalism “antihuman” (477) is one of the unresolved problems of how to confront climate change.

“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.”

This passage explains why, in many ways, Robinson’s vision of the future is optimistic. Ministry for the Future appears a mere five years after the signing of the Paris Climate Accords, a real event that marks the start of people taking climate change seriously in the world of the book. Robinson’s book is a speculative fiction that takes the fact of that treaty and imagines what can happen if we make good on the promises in it. The vision of all the good outcomes at the climate conference that year are likely to be bracing and encouraging for an audience of readers committed enough on this issue to have gotten through almost 500 pages of the novel.

“Had we done it right? Had we joined with every sentient being on the planet, brought into existence a new Earth religion that would change everything? Were we all brother and sister now, as they were always telling us we should be? Hard to tell. It felt like a lark. But larks are beautiful. All these bird and animal names we use for our moods and actions, of course they’re always perfectly apt. We are all family, as the new religion was telling us, and as every living thing on Earth shares a crucial 938 base pairs of DNA, I guess it’s really true.”

The narrator describes their feeling on the night of the first Gaia Day, a holiday/rite designed to reinforce the notion that people are a part of the biosphere rather than existing outside of it. The references to moods, actions, and feeling show that this is a different take on the “structure of feeling” chapters spread throughout the book. In this case, Robinson chooses to use mostly “we” pronouns and informal diction to emphasize the importance of collective action in this new world and to contrast with the dry, theoretical discussions of the “structure of feeling” elsewhere. Finally, the play on “lark” and the reference to metaphorical use of animal names for human emotions reinforce the now deep connection between humans/human animals and nonhuman animals. The light, celebratory mood reflects Robinson’s belief that the war for Earth is a winnable one.

“Art regarded it. Naked bronze man, arms outstretched, neatly balanced, one arm back and high, the other forward and low—as if offering something to the bird, as in falconry. But the eagle was almost waist high to him. That’s a really big bird, Art said. And there’s something wrong with its wings. A phoenix, Mary said as it occurred to her. Maybe it’s a phoenix. The man is offering it his life, Art guessed. Mary stared at it. I don’t know, she confessed. I can’t get it. It’s some kind of offering, Art insisted. It’s a gesture of offering. He’s us, right? So he’s us, offering the world back to the animals!”

The statue of Ganymede appears multiple times in the novel as characters contemplate their relationship with the natural world. Art, a man who makes his living by heling others appreciate a renewing planet, imagines that the statue reflects the new, Earth-centric values that predominate in the 2040s, when people are indeed making way for animals to address climate change.