The Ministry For The Future; Kim Stanley Robinson (2020, 576 pgs)
This is hard to give a short review to, because it’s a complex book that doesn’t fall neatly into a “KSR novel” or “a cli-fi [climate fiction] solutions book” or “an explainer about macroeconomics, political violence, and geoengineering that happens to use literary devices”. That also means, to me, that it’s hard to give it a fixed number of stars because I feel differently about different parts of the book. All in all, though, I think that it’s a very worthy piece of fiction and one that hopefully can set a new course for what speculative fiction about the immediate future before us looks like – one that can stimulate conversations about immediate paths for action, regardless of how we feel about the fictional scenarios laid out in the plots of books like Ministry for the Future. Also, as with most KSR books, but ESPECIALLY for this one, I could not recommend more highly to read this alongside the podcast Marooned on Mars! A book should be able to stand on its own, and I think this does, but the reading experience will be very enriched by reading it alongside of this because they get into questions of form, content, and context that help unpack the complex layers of what Robinson is up to here in a very satisfying way.
#ReadWithShred from @chitrans_plant
