The Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
July 12, 2022
Author #
Originally I’d found Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR) from an interesting talk at The Long Now Foundation. His talk was engaging and it turns out that he’d fictionalized these concepts into a novel titled The Ministry of the Future. The Mars trilogy has been on my list for a while. The talk at Long Now highlighted a near future focus on impending/realistic problems that humanity faces, which drew me in to selecting a more recent text.
Background #
This was my first KSR read, where I wasn’t familair with his major themes and how much he’s contributed to the cli-fi genera. The novel focuses primarily on a subsidiary body, established under the Paris Agreement, where their mission is to advocate for future generations rights as citizens of the planet. KSR had previous works in the cli-fi genera (2312, and New York 2140) where this novel is reported to have a more positive outlook about humanities ability to address the problems presented.
Concepts & Motifs #
In searching for some discussion of the novel I found an interview with KSR that I heavily quote below.
Spoilers Ahead!
“Stepwise Progression” to “better systems”: KSR plays the story out over a “lifetime of contribution” for some of the characters, spending time modeling proposed changes to systems and then reviewing their effects in the future (for good or for bad). The tempo takes form as a sort of “stepwise progression” that he then mentions specifically in the interview:
I don’t think it’s possible to postulate a breakdown, or a revolution, to an entirely different system that would work without mass disruption and perhaps blowback failures, so it’s better to try to imagine a stepwise progression from what we’ve got now to a better system. 1
The problem set that KSR outlines initially is dire, as well as surprisingly relevant today. Rather than being specifically dystopian or utopian the book utilizes this “stepwise progression” approach to move incrementally towards a better state. Often in utopian fiction there is some drastic plot mechanism used, or even a MacGuffin, to address the challenging now with where the more utopian future. KSR acknowledges this better than I in the same interview:
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. They call it the Great Trench. In Utopia, they dug a great trench across the peninsula so that their peninsula became an island. And the Great Trench is endemic in utopian literature. There’s almost always a break that allows the utopian society to be implemented and to run successfully. I’ve never liked that because one connotation of the word “utopian” is unreality, in the sense that it’s “never going to happen.” 1
Critique of mainstream economics and Monetary Authority: Much of the novel reads as a critical view on mainstream economics, and specifically the outlook of current state monetary authority. At first this was a surprising recurring theme, but in looking at the interview (and learning the term polemic) KSR provides some background for the intent behind this focus:
While his previous climate fiction had approached the topic from an aftermath point of view, with the new novel he sought to write with the near-future as the starting point and with existing real-world technologies, economics, and societies, then to push the narrative further into the future. This approach is reflected in the book’s dedication to Fredric Jameson, Robinson’s doctoral supervisor, who wrote that “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”1
First, I would want to make a distinction between economics and political economy, because by and large, economics as it’s practiced now is the study of capitalism. It takes the axioms of capitalism as givens and then tries to work from those to various ameliorations and tweaks to the system that would make for a better capitalism, but they don’t question the fundamental axioms: everybody’s in it for themselves, everybody pursues their own self-interest, which will produce the best possible outcomes for everybody. These axioms are highly questionable, and they come out of the eighteenth century or are even older, and they don’t match with modern social science or history itself in terms of how we behave, and they don’t value the natural biosphere properly, and they tend to encourage short-term extractive gain and short-term interests. These are philosophical positions that are expressed as though they are fixed or are nature itself, when in reality they are made by culture. 1
Capitalist economics misunderstands and misjudges the world badly, and that’s why we’re in the mess we’re in — caught between biosphere degradation and radical social inequality. These are both natural results of capitalism as such, a result of the economic calculations we make under capitalist axioms. 1
Decentralized Finance: one of the main plot mechanisms is issuance of a complimentary currency which is based on a monetary concept of carbon quantitative easing.
Jumping Off #
During the reading of The Ministry of the Future I noticed that Neal Stephenson released Termination Shock which has a similar cli-fi basis.
From a perspective of commentary on economic systems I think that Stephenson also has other works that should be considered:
- Snow Crash: explores the nationalization of corporate entities as an early theme.
- The Diamond Age: pits different economic and value systems against each other as nation states without borders.
- The System of the World explores the formation of modern science, currency, and computing within speculative and dramatized history.