--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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