The Ministry for the Future

Todella monen asian pitää muuttua, jos aiomme elää tällä planeetalla vielä tulevinakin vuosisatoina. Valtaosa kirjojen ja elokuvien tulevaisuusvisioista tuntuu kuitenkin olevan dystopioita, kuvauksia siitä millaista helvettiä elämä Maa-planeetalla on, kun kaikki on mennyt pieleen. Muutamalla seuraaville vuosikymmenille lähitulevaisuuteen sijoittuva Kim Stanley Robinsonin The Ministry for the Future kuitenkin esittää uskottavan, vaikkakin monelta osin silmiinpistävän optimistisen vision siitä, miten kaikenkattava ekokriisi on saatu Maa-planeetalla kuitenkin jonkinlaiseen hallintaan. Robinsonin visiosta kiinnostavan tekee se, että se ei ole vain kaunokirjallista kuvitelmaa, vaan perustuu ihan todellisiin haasteisiin ja ratkaisuihin, ja monet kirjan luvuista ovatkin luonteeltaan pikemminkin tieteellisiä esseitä kuin varsinaista kertomakirjallisuutta.

Kirjan tulevaisuuskuva ei kuitenkaan ole paratiisimainen utopia. Maa siinä vaiheessa, kun ilmakehän hiilidioksidimäärä on saatu laskuun, ei ole enää aivan sama planeetta kuin se oli vielä ennen ilmastokriisiä, ja työn planeetan hengissäpitämiseksi kuvataan jatkuvan vielä tulevillekin vuosisadoille vaikka hiilidioksidiongelma kirjassa on saatukin pois päällimmäisistä huolenaiheista.

Robinson ei pyri hahmottelemaan paluuta meneen ajan tasapainoon, vaan pohtii pikemmin sitä, miten täällä eletään kun on täysimittaisesti siirrytty antroposeenin aikaan, ja ihmiskunta ryhtynyt tosissaan kantamaan vastuuta aiheuttamastaan muutoksesta ja planeetan tulevaisuudesta. Kirja valaa kuitenkin uskoa siihen, että tämä ihmiskunnan massiivisin haaste on selätettävissä, kunhan vaan siihen yhdessä ryhdymme. Robinsonille Maa-planeetan elämänlanka on Parisiin ilmastosopimus: siihen tulee tarttua juuri sellaisena historiallisena käännekohtana, kuin millaisena sitä melkein kymmenen vuotta sitten juhlittiin

Kirja sisältää valtavasti tietoa - siis aivan todellista tietoa, ei vain kuvitelmia tulevaisuudesta. Siihen voi hyvin suhtautua myös eräänlaisena ilmastoratkaisuiden oppikirjana. Mitä kaikkea onkaan otettava huomioon?

Robinson ei anna ihmiskunnalle mitenkään kevyttä tehtävälistaa. Paitsi että Pariisin henki pitää institutionalisoida globaalia muutosta johtavaksi "tulevaisuusministeriöksi", ihmiskunnan henkiseen muutokseen tarvitaan vielä paljon muutakin. Emme varmaankaan herää ennen kuin olemme kokeneet kunnon katastrofin. Eikä varmaankaan tuhoisia tapoja ja toimintamalleja saada loppumaan ilman, että jostain nousee sellaista aktivismia, jonka rinnalla Elonkapinakin vaikuttaa ompelukerholta. Planeetalle aiheutettu vahinko on myös jo niin suurta, että tuskin selviämme ilman massiivista ilmastonmuokkausta: sulaneen Arktiksen värjäämistä auringonvaloa heijastavaksi keltaiseksi ja öljynporausinfran käyttöönottoa sulavien ja mereen luisuvien Antarktiksen jäätiköiden pysäyttämiseksi. Talouskin pitää mullistaa: tulee luoda taloudellinen insentiivi hiilen varastoinnille, tehdä rahajärjestelmän tasolla kestävästä toiminnasta kannattavaa ja kestämättömästä tappiollista.

Robinsonin visioima muutaman vuosikymmenen päässä oleva Maa-planeetta on kuitenkin yllättävän samankaltainen kuin nykyinenkin maailma, ehkä vain vähän verkkaisempi, reilumpi - ja varmaankin mukavampi. Mantereiden välillä ei enää liikuta lentokoneilla, vaan ilmalaivoilla, ja rahtilaivojenkin vauhti on hidastunut, kun ne on automatisoitu ja konvertoitu aurinko- ja tuulivoimalla liikkuviksi. Kyllä tällaista tulevaisuutta kannattaa tavoitella.

Ja kyllä Robinsonin kuvaus tähän tulevaisuuteen tarvittavista toimistakin on uskottava. Jotain tämän kaltaista, vaikkakaan ei varmasti juuri tätä, taatusti tarvitaan. Työtä on monella rintamalla: talouden, lakien ja instituutioiden tasolla täytyy tehdä muutoksia, mutta tarvitaan myös aktivismia - ja voi olla, että osa siitä on sellaista mikä tapahtuu varjoissa, hämärässä ja lain nurjalla puolella. Koko sivilisaation tulevaisuudesta kuitenkin on kyse.

I waded 50 or so chapters into this book. Great start, honestly one of the most compelling starts I've every read, some good early chapters with plot and character development and then they just disappeared. I really wanted it to succeed on the basis of it's beginning alone so I got 10 hours of sleep caffeinated myself fully and read three chapters straight that did not include any specific advances in plot or even mention of a single character. I passed out twice. This book goes on my permanent pause shelf. If I'm wide awake and need to be asleep... I'll come find it again. Two stars for the first chapter being fantastic.

The Ministry for the Future follows the history of the eponymous ministry created by the UN in 2025 to represent the interests of future people when addressing #ClimateChange; given that the solutions to climate change will take effect over hundreds of years, so don't immediately benefit the current generations, the ministry would speak for future generations in order to ensure long-term thinking is applied.

The novel has three main characters: Frank, who we meet in the first traumatising chapter, is an American relief worker, and the only survivor of an Indian town struck by a devastating heatwave that wipes out millions. Frank suffers the rest of his ruined life with acute PTSD, which drives him ever more desperately find ways to avoid such a catastrophe from repeating. Early in the novel, it spurs him to actions that introducing us to the second main character:

Mary, an Irish lifetime diplomat, is the Minister for the Future, a role that make her a target for activists from both sides of the climate struggle, and requires her to assemble and coordinate a team to establish legal standing for future generations, and promote solutions that protect them.

The novel interleaves short chapters between Frank and Mary and the third main character: The Situation Itself. This unusual character's chapters are either extremely short whom-am-I riddles that impart a set of disparate but germane concepts, or they are vignettes told from the perspective of unnamed witnesses to some aspect of climate change's effects or solutions.

Appreciating that the story is global, vast, and epic helps to understand that this apparently scattershot narration style is a cleverly devised mechanism (and maybe the only way) to ensure that the novel includes everything needed to grasp the problem and its solutions. Indeed, in parts it's so saturated that it reads like a draft of a #CliFi novel, with long lists and shorthand notes, that was rushed to print before some of the chapters were fleshed out, and maybe before some of the events played out in reality!

The novel is somehow both harrowingly realistic and implausibly optimistic, in that some of the manifold solutions involve changes that just seem impossible to achieve. But Robinson already understands my pessimism and dread:

"... 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…"

On reflection, although it may be naive, it's also possible the exact formula we need in order to confront inexorable, nonfictional climate change that is definitely already arriving.

What would a worldwide, lasting revolution look like? What would be the obstacles and what tactics would be needed to overcome them? How are we going to survive climate change? These are the themes Kim Stanley Robinson tackles in his 570-page cli-fi novel THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE.

The narrative is disjointed, with epistolary chapters placed throughout. If you roll with it, it works well. You get a well-researched, fairly well-rounded picture across class, power, and geography. The format makes for a clever way to introduce details that otherwise might not fit into a traditional narrative. I also appreciate the global perspective of this book. The U.S. is not at the center at all, and is critiqued heavily and fairly.

THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE envisions a world that includes the Half-Earth concept as one of its solutions to combat climate change. Half of the planet would be reserved exclusively for nature; the other half for humans, centered in sustainable cities. It sounds plausible in the novel, but I had this nagging, bad feeling about it. I kept thinking, you're never going to get 100% compliance on that, no matter how many incentives you offer. And we have a terrible history of forcing Indigenous peoples off their land. Nowhere in the book is that addressed and, so far, what I'm reading about Half-Earth doesn't assuage my concerns.

So, I'm feeling meh about this novel. When I was able to believe it, its hopefulness felt inspiring and relieved some of my fears. When cynicism (reality?) got the best of me, I had to set it aside for a bit, which is why it took me so long to finish it. Plus, I have major problems with a top-down approach that is just repackaged state power claiming to be a solution. (Obama loving this book should have been a red flag for me.) But this is science fiction. It doesn't have to actually solve anything. There were plenty of moments where the book imagines creative ways to forge ahead, and for that, I'm glad I read it, even if I'm probably not going to pick up another Kim Stanley Robinson book in the future.

So his answers for both, basically: maximalism. The point he's sort of making is that making the planet safely inhabitable is going to take every tactic and every ideology not necessarily working together but working on some piece of the thing. No one actor gets to be the hero (though I do enjoy that KSR's favorite kind of protagonist remains the middle-aged competent lady technocrat–guy's got a type) and while he's sort of indicating that capitalism as we know it has to die, he's not saying that happens through inevitable worker uprising. Some of it's coercion of central banks and some of it's straight-up guerrilla terrorism. Geoengineering happens at varying scales for better and for worse. Massive economic collapses occur. Millions die. And the point I think from KSR is that's the outcome in his most optimistic take. In general with KSR I don't know if I ever fully agree, but I always feel fully engaged.

This is also probably the most not-novel-y of his novels in that there's a couple of recurring characters running through the book but a ton of it's just first-person unnamed narration of events happening around the world. Someone describing a drought, a refugee describing a camp, a miner describing the nationalization of his mine. One very weird and fun chapter from the point of view of actual carbon.