I am interested in development issues and climate change, and I enjoy reading science fiction. So when I saw ‘The Ministry for the Future’ by Kim Stanley Robinson on multiple ‘must read’ lists described as a book on how we might overcome climate change in the future, I was interested. Many reviews mentioned that the book presented a hopeful future rather than a dystopia and that some of the story was set in India (which hardly any science fiction writing includes), so it was inevitable that sooner or later I would read this book.
Spoiler alert: If you are planning to read the book, stop here.
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The first chapter describes a terrible heat wave which hits some part of UP a couple of years from now. All Indians in the neighbourhood (of course, all of them poor, without any resources or social networks to seek help from, or any ideas/ ingenuity of their own) die trying to stay cool in a lake and only the White NGO worker survives. Alas, we all know this white saviour trope too well. He takes years to recover, with a type of PTSD, when we meet him again several chapters later.
Meanwhile, India is so horrified by the terrible toll of the heatwave that almost overnight (in a handful of years) it fixes its industrial system, its economic system and even the caste system! Yes, we fix the caste system in just a few years and all it takes is some strong legislation!
“All kinds of things began to change. Efforts were renewed to dismantle the worst effects of the caste system – these efforts had been made before, but now it was made a national priority, the new reality, and enough Indians were now ready to work for it. All over India, governments at all levels began to implement these changes.”[1]
The Indian story continues a few chapters later:
“Next day in Karnataka after short flight. Green. Hills to the east, also green. Terraces on slopes, but much land flat… Local tenure rights for local farmers, no absent landlords anymore than India herself, the Indian people, as represented by Karnataka state, also the district and village. Stewards of land… No pesticides at all. Sikkim model now applied to ag all over India. Communist organic farmers, B notes. … Also these changes mean end of caste’s worst impacts, they claim. Dalits now involved, women always half of every panchayat, an old India law now applied for real. Now there are farm tenure rights, full ownership of one’s work, its surplus value. Women and all castes equal, Hindu and Muslim, Sikh and Jain and Christian, all together in New India. Communist organic farmers just the tip of the iceberg.”[2]
Wait, what??
“No more cheap Indian labor, no more sell-out deals; no deals of any kind, unless changes were made… Time for the long post-colonial subalternity to end.”[3]
It is not only India which sees changes taking place at breakneck speed. A new global currency ‘carbon coin’ (a mashup of carbon credits and bitcoin) is introduced, controlled by ordinary people and takes off. Facebook gets replaced by a single account (digital profile locker). And so on…
Groups of unidentified people take over governments and govt. functioning, usually killing those currently in power. Those currently with economic and political power are irredeemable. So the solution is to get them out of the way. How? Kill them, of course!
“A just civilization of eight billion, in balance with the biosphere’s production of the things we need … And how can we get there fast enough to avoid a mass extinction event? The rentier class will not help in that project. Indeed that project will be forwarded in the face of their vigorous resistance. Over their dead bodies, some of them will say. In which case, euthanasia may be just the thing.[4]”
“A private jet owned by a rich man – boom.
A coal-fired power plant in China – boom.
A cement factory in Turkey, boom. A mine in Angola, boom. A yacht in th eaegean, boom. A police station in Egypt, boom. The Hotel Belvedere in Davos, boom. An oil executive walking down the street, boom. The Ministry for the Future’s offices – boom.[5]”
“All the militaries of the world were focused on counter-terrorism. There weren’t any state-on-state clashes serious enough to distract the militaries from trying to discover and root out terrorists. But with limited success, it seemed. A hydra-headed foe, someone called it. And to Frank it seemed different than it had when he was a child, when terrorists were universally abhorred. Now it felt different. Many attacks now were on carbon burners, especially those rich enough to burn it conspicuously. Car races and private jets. Yachts and container ships. So now the terrorists involved were perhaps saboteurs, or even resistance warriors, fighting for the Earth itself. Gaia’s Shock Troops, Children of Kali, Defenders of Mother Earth, Earth First, and so on. People read about their violent acts and the frequent resulting deaths, and shrugged. …
Air travel could now also be power generation— so, a jet? No. If a few people got killed for flying, no one felt much sympathy. Fools conspicuously burning carbon, killed from out of the sky somehow? So what. Death from the sky had been the American way ever since Clinton and Bush and Obama, which was to say ever since it became technologically feasible. People were angry, people were scared. People were not fastidious. The world was trembling on the brink, something had to be done. The state monopoly on violence had probably been a good idea while it lasted, but no one could believe it would ever come back. Only in some better time. Meanwhile hunker down. Try to stay lucky. Don’t fly on private jets, or maybe any kind of jet.[6]”
It is surprising that so many reviews state that this is book presents a hopeful view of the future, about how humanity may come together to solve the greatest challenge of our time. But in reality, the book simply presents liberals’ dream wishlist and a fairly bleak imagination where those who refuse to get out of the way are killed in acts of vigilante justice.
In trying to save the human race, we lose our humanity!
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The book presents a mixed salad of ideas about colonialism, neocolonialism, subalternity, economic systems, neoliberalism, markets, currencies, science of climate change, climate refugees, etc., and sprinkles them with jargon like quantitative easing, carbon sequestration, Jevon’s paradox, re-wilding, etc. and throws the whole lot into the narrative. The whole thing feels more a disjointed dream rather than a depiction of a possible future, as claimed by reviews.
The book suffers from poor research. Besides the above, here’s one more example: “… In India, it was traditional to talk about the seven generations before and after you as being your equals. You work for the seven generations.”[7] Unfortunately, this is not an Indian belief, but rather of certain Native American tribes. A simple internet search could have clarified this for the author: There is even an entry on Wikipedia which mentions the Iroquois and Onondaga tribes in North America.
There is no real plot, but that itself is not an issue; many science fiction books do not have a tight plot.
But the writing is monotonous and rather uninviting. I found myself skipping sections pretty early on. The only thing that kept me going was the determination to find out what this book was about.
I had high hopes based on the hype, but that’s all it turned out to be – hype!
****
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Stirring the Pyramid 