The Ministry for the Future

Hier geht um die großen Themen unserer Zeit geht: Klimawandel, Korruption, politisches Versagen, Demokratieuntergang, Hang zur Gewalt als Ausdrucks- und Gestaltungsmittel. Alles drin, alles dran.

Aber wie. Einen nachvollziehbaren Erzählstrang gibt es nicht. Einen Plot? Gibt es nicht. Statt dessen gibt es viel meinungsschwangeren Info-Dump. Dieser wird so unstrukturiert dargeboten wie ein Manuskriptentwurf. Es fühlt sich beim Umblättern an wie eine Sammlung von Schulaufsätzen.

Dieses Buch wollte mal eine gut erzählte Geschichte in Romanform werden, hat aber leider die entscheidenden Überarbeitungsschritte nicht bekommen.

Das ist kurz vor unlesbar. Leider. Es ist sehr schade um die Themen.

Nothing would play out like in this story. Robinson describes the best world imaginable. We are fucked.

(If you want to read a better take on our extinction read "Venomous Lumpsucker", it is funnier, because it is truer)

After a strong start in the first few chapters I was struggling to get through the rest. The writing was plain and disjointed, the plot and characters thin, and it often read more like journalism, some climate change manifesto or a physics lecture, rather than fiction.

This isn’t a dystopian story, nor is it a utopian story. It is a reality-based guess of what could happen. In this possible reality, the world struggles to put a cost on the effect that climate damage will have on new generations. The world’s governments are forced to deal with citizen uprisings to address those costs. With a combination of capitalism (including…ugh…a blockchain currency) and climate activism, the levels of carbon in the atmosphere crest and decrease. But that is just the start of untangling the human population’s Gordian knot; it is not (yet?) the utopian future.

This was a 10%-per-day book for me: each day I’d read 10% plus the remainder of the chapter. The book is written in a dense style with a constantly shifting viewpoint, and it takes a while to digest the author’s meaning.

4.5. I have a lot more to say about this book but I need to digest. Needless to say, this just sucked me in. I loved the polyvocality.

Ambitious and well-informed, but politically and emotionally implausible in key respects. That, of course would hardly be a criticism in much speculative sci-fi (hell, it defines the genre!) but good world-building invites us to embrace certain implausible (or outright ridiculous) foundations, by drawing us into a compelling story or novel vision, hopefully both. Here, alas, the vision far exceeds the power of the underlying stories to draw the reader in, and so the limits of character development and political-institutional simplicities become increasingly grating. Still, things could be (marginally) worse: he could have written Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock instead! :/

I thought I would enjoy this book a lot more, and it ended up being a bit of a slog towards the end. A lot of the writing is very "stream of consciousness", and there's not much of a plot to speak of.

In terms of finding ideas for addressing climate change, there's too much focus on blockchain and geoengineering. Not really solarpunk.