"The Ministry for the Future" by Kim Stanley Robinson (2020)

"If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future."

--Ezra Klein, Vox

But why?  What are these policymakers and citizens supposed to get out of this book?  Does it offer any realistic solutions to the problem of climate change?  None that I could see...

"Masterly."

--New Yorker

Agree to disagree?  I think that in terms of story and characterization this book is an abysmal failure.

"Robinson is the SF writer of my lifetime, and this stands as some of his best work.  It's my book of the year."

--Locus

Nope.  There are much better SF writers out there.  This also isn't even close to Robinson's best work.  2312 was much better, and even Green Mars, which I also read a while back, was more interesting.

"A breathtaking look at the challenges that face our planet in all their sprawling magnitude and also in their intimate, individual moments of humanity."

--Booklist

If you ask me, "humanity" is exactly what's missing from large swathes of this book.  The chapters near the beginning and end have some dramatic impact, but everything between them consists of a long, tiresome lecture on climate change which adjoins a series of impractical solutions to this problem, none of which are explained to anyone's satisfaction.  Given the time scale involved, this novel is even more fantastical than books dealing with the terraforming of Mars, human reactions to a "first contact," or any number of other science fiction tropes.

"The Ministry for the Future serves as a blueprint for how we can throw climate change into reverse and actually reverse the amount of carbon in the atmosphere over the next three decades."

--Mashable

Really?  I'm not seeing much of a "blueprint" here.  What I'm seeing instead is a series of increasingly impractical ideas that are never explained in full.  If you'll excuse the pun, the author is on firmer ground when it comes to "geoengineering," but some of the chapters offering economic solutions to the climate change problem are downright laughable.  

Most galling of all is the author's dismissal of the online architecture in which many of us function.  It's like he's never heard of Google and the other corporations who hold so much sway over modern life, not to mention the ease with which this "Ministry for the Future" renders something like Facebook obsolete.  Does he really think that the rest of us haven't heard of blockchain?  Or end-to-end encryption?

... anyway, by now you're well aware that I didn't like this book.  It's long-winded, it's extremely pretentious (in particular the "riddle" chapters), and in narrative terms it's a mess.  Perhaps most infuriating of all is the fact that the workings of the Ministry of the Future itself are never described in any detail, to the point that we're left with only the understanding that they somehow "do things," without ever knowing how.

Some of the other blurbs on or inside this book go on to color The Ministry for the Future as "utopian."  This description is, to some extent, accurate, but I think that doing so does a disservice to other utopian novels, many of which were much better executed.

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"Green Mars" by Kim Stanley Robinson (1993)

"Nirgal had first seen the city on a brief visit with Coyote.  He had found it too big, too crowded, too many strangers.  But months later, tired of wandering the south with Coyote, so solitary for so much of the time, he had recalled the place as if it were the only destination possible.  Sabishii!"

Kim Stanley Robinson is an American science fiction writer.  I've also read his 2312, which was reviewed here recently.  Green Mars is the second book in his Mars Trilogy, coming after Red Mars and preceding Blue Mars.

In the wake of human settlement, the terraforming of Mars begins, altering the Martian landscape beyond recognition.  At the same time the First Hundred, a group representing the initial wave of Martian settlers, is forced into hiding as the result of a failed revolution.  While the First Hundred and their progeny argue the ins and outs of terraforming, the transnationals, enormous companies dictating events on Earth, attempt to seize power from a Transitional Authority on Mars.

All in all a good premise.  For one thing we haven't seen it a thousand times already, and for another thing it seems to anticipate recent developments in space exploration.  But aside from that premise there isn't a lot of character development in this book, and between the book's beginning and end lie lengthy (on might say oceanic) discussions of Martian geography, all framed around a number of people we never get to know that well.

I was really close to giving up on Green Mars.  It's really long, it doesn't have much of a story, and a lot of the scientific discussions don't serve the plot.  The only thing that kept me going was the price I paid for it.  I bought it in an airport bookstore, and quitting halfway through just seemed like a waste of money.

I liked 2312 much more, and I might just be finished with Kim Stanley Robinson after this novel.  I think I know what he's about now, and I doubt that his best is as good as other authors that I genuinely enjoy.

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"2312" by Kim Stanley Robinson (2013)

"2312" by Kim Stanley Robinson (2013)

"She turned away, face scrunched in a knot.  In their final transmissions, cameras and AIs left behind in... had recorded the city igniting in the sunlight -- burning, melting, exploding, and so forth, until the recording instruments had failed.  It had not been a general inferno but rather a patchwork of smaller fires, starting at different times.  Some heat-resistant AIs were still transmitting data, documenting what happened as everything heated to seven hundred K.  A collage of all those images gave a good impression of the incineration, though it seemed pretty clear that Swan would not want to see it."

Kim Stanley Robinson is an American writer of science fiction living in California.  He's won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards, and has written over twenty books.  While not writing science fiction, he champions various environmental causes.  His most famous works are The Mars Trilogy, which form a kind of prequel to 2312.

In the year in which this novel takes place, Swan Er Hong, a well known artist in residence on Mercury, discovers that a close acquaintance has died under mysterious circumstances.  This death leads Swan to a mysterious message, and after delivering this message she finds herself involved in a police investigation which spans the solar system.

2312 is, in other words, another detective story set in space.  The author, a man well versed in scientific concepts, punctuates this detective story with discussions of life on different worlds, with meditations on an increasingly gender-fluid society, and with speculations on what it means to be human in the presence of artificial intelligences and life extending technologies.  It's nothing that writers like Asimov and Clarke haven't done before, though 2312 does offer a more modern insight into what the future might hold, both bad and good.

In science fiction there has been a longstanding division between the "hard" and "soft" varieties of the genre.  An example of hard science fiction would be a novel like Permutation City, in which an understanding of virtual reality is essential to both a comprehension of the story and its resolution.  An example of soft science fiction is - I hate to say it - a novel like Dune, in which a scientific understanding of the world isn't necessary to the story.  Both Permutation City and Dune are good books, but in one a scientific understanding of the world is essential, and the other could have been written at any time between its actual date of publication and the Abbasid Caliphate.

This said, 2312 would, I think, fall firmly into the realm of soft science fiction.  You could skip over almost all of the scientific stuff in this book and its plot would still make sense.  This plot also isn't resolved through any technological process, or with an understanding of any scientific concepts.  The authorities clamp down on the perpetrators, some characters go off to brighter futures, and some characters face punishment.  That's it.  Quantum mechanics plays into how the artificial intelligences work, but you need not understand what the author means by "decoherence" to grasp that the thinking machines are a concern for those in power.  The way in which a city meets its end is also dependent on orbital mechanics to some extent, but I'm guessing that more than one reader skimmed over this part of the book.

But the above is far from a damning criticism of 2312.  It is in fact not a criticism at all.  Science fiction doesn't always need to be science-y to be effective, and sometimes a detour into the world of robots and rocketships is enough.  It is fiction after all, and a good story's the most important thing.  2312 definitely has a good story, alongside some excellent characterization to boot.

The part about the artificial intelligences?  Not really resolved or explained to anyone's satisfaction, but the ending is upbeat and it'll put a smile on your face.

I look forward to reading the author's Mars Trilogy this summer.  Hopefully I can track down copies in a local bookstore.

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"The Narrow Corridor" by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson (2019)

"The story of this chapter is that this architecture, though it worked to lever the U.S. into the corridor, was a Faustian bargain.  One of the major things it promoted was the ability of Southern slaveholders to exploit their slaves, making the hands of the state not just tied but also sullied.  These sullied shackles meant that the federal state remained impaired in some important dimensions.  For one, it obviously didn't protect slaves and later its African American citizens from violence, discrimination, poverty, and dominance.  It is emblematic of this pattern too that it was the poor, black citizens of Ferguson who were harassed, fined, imprisoned, and even killed.

"For another, the concessions to the states and the various constraints also meant that the federal state would be hobbled when it came to protecting all of its citizens, not just African Americans, from violence and economic hardship."

Daron Acemoglu is a Professor of Economics teaching at M.I.T., and James A. Robinson is a Professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago.  The two of them authored another book together, Why Nations Fail, which is very influential.

In The Narrow Corridor the authors offer a rather unwieldy model of how free societies come to be, and of how they continue to be (or cease being) free over time.  Many of the authors' arguments are compounded upon Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, a much older work which describes the origin and purposes of government.

Key to their idea of a free society are three models of government, these being the Despotic Leviathan, the Shackled Leviathan and the Absent (or Paper) Leviathan. The first type of government exercises near absolute (despotic) control over its subjects, the second is restrained (shackled) by the power of the people, and the third is absent (or ineffectual), unable to change the social medium in which it exists.  Alongside all three models the authors posit a "Red Queen Effect" in which society and government attempt to keep pace with one another in terms of how they affect individual choices. It probably goes without saying that the authors regard the Shackled Leviathan as an ideal government, existing as it does in a "narrow corridor" between the Despotic and Absent Leviathans.

As you might expect, this book begins its lengthy arguments in the ancient world and from there slowly progresses toward the present day.  This approach is, I think, a mistake, in that we have so few sources for the societies under discussion, and using them as examples of anything feels like cherrypicking. As the authors move into the Industrial Age they're on more solid ground, and their evidence is more convincing.

This book is, in my opinion, very lopsided. Part of the reason for this is the authors' awkward model of a "narrow corridor," complete with diagrams that mean almost nothing.  Another reason is the time scale over which they stretch their survey.  This time scale is really too big, and too many cultures are ignored in an effort to apply the authors' ideas over several centuries of human history.

I will say, however, that the last few chapters of this book are quite good.  They don't require an understanding of "leviathans," "red queens" or "corridors," and are instead a common sense look at the world we live in today.

Their ideas on labor coercion, by the way, could have easily been expanded into a book better than this one.

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