32 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022
have launched campaigns of climate re-
venge. The controversial practice of geo-
engineering—including the spraying of
chemicals into the atmosphere to reflect
sunlight—has bought us time to decar-
bonize our way of life, and “carbon quan-
titative easing,” undertaken on a vast scale,
has paid for the redesign of our infra-
structure. But it’s all haphazard. We just
barely escape the worst climate catastro-
phes, through grudging ad-
justments that we are forced
to make. The rushed, nec-
essary work of responding
to the climate crisis defines
and, for some, elevates, the
twenty-first century.
I’m a longtime reader of
Robinson’s, but “The Min-
istry for the Future” struck
me with special force. For
decades, I’d worried about
climate change in the usual abstract
way. Then I had a son, and read David
Wallace-Wells’s “The Uninhabitable
Earth”—a terrifying survey of worst-
case climate scenarios—and grew so
alarmed that thinking about the prob-
lem became almost unbearable. I live on
the North Shore of Long Island, close
to the beach, in a village that already
seems to be flooding. What did the fu-
ture hold for my town, and my family?
What would my son live through? We
have put a lot of carbon into the atmo-
sphere, and so a great deal of what is
coming to us is now inevitable; as a spe-
cies, we are moving into a prefab house.
And yet its parts lie scattered, unassem-
bled—we can’t quite picture the home
in which we’ll live.
“The Ministry for the Future” gave
me a sense of the space. It shows our
prospects to be both imaginable and
variable: we can still redraw the plans.
Perhaps because the novel fills a vital
narrative gap, it achieved an unusually
wide readership. Barack Obama in-
cluded it on his list of the best books
of the year; the Times columnist Ezra
Klein said that all policymakers should
read it. Christiana Figueres, the U.N.
diplomat who led the effort to create
the Paris agreement, listened to the
novel in her garden and wept. Robin-
son was invited to meet with govern-
ment officials from around the world,
including planners at the Pentagon. He
became a featured speaker at COP26—
the twenty-sixth Conference of the
Parties to the Paris Agreement, held
this past fall in Glasgow.
After reading the novel, I contacted
Robinson to propose writing about
him. He immediately suggested that
we go backpacking in the Sierras—his
“heart’s home.” I’m in good shape but
not outdoorsy; I was a little intimi-
dated by what he had in mind, an ul-
tralight off-trail jaunt near
twelve thousand feet. But
I also liked the idea of en-
trusting myself to the ex-
perience and judgment of
the only writer who had
offered me some hope
about our collective future.
He outlined a simple plan:
over Bishop Pass into Dusy
Basin; over Knapsack Pass
into Palisade Basin; then
over Thunderbolt Pass—the highest
and most difficult of the trip—and back
to Dusy, then out. “Youth and fitness
will see you through,” he wrote, in an
e-mail. I started training by carrying
my toddler in a backpack for miles
along the shore.
As the car headed east, the sky
seemed to be getting darker. Every-
thing was bathed in an orange Koda-
chrome light.
“We’ve definitely dropped into the
smoke,” Robinson said, looking out the
window. The fields were blanketed in
dun-colored fog.
“Not good,” Biagioli said, remov-
ing his sunglasses and turning on the
recirculation.
Robinson looked at his phone.
“This is terrible,” he said. “Now the
air quality is three-ninety-four.” Once,
he’d been in Beijing when it had hit
four hundred and ninety. “But Davis
has reached that a couple of times in
these big fires,” he noted. “Hopefully
it will be clear in the mountains.” I
looked ahead, as though I could see
them, toward hills that were sugges-
tions in the haze.R
obinson was born in 1952, and grew
up in Orange County, among groves
being paved over for suburbs. An ath-
lete by inclination, he recalls his child-
hood in terms of the sports he played
with friends—dodgeball, high jump,
volleyball, bodysurfing—and the bookshe borrowed from his local libraries.
His life is characterized by wholesome
continuities. He and his gang of “hip-
pie jocks” first ventured into the moun-
tains in college, woefully unprepared,
and he still hikes with many of them
today. He has lived in Davis for forty
years, and, on a walking tour, he showed
me the bookstore where he’d worked
in his late twenties and the pool where
he’d met his wife, Lisa, an environmen-
tal chemist who outpaced him at their
gruelling evening swim class. Boyish
with an edge, he nurtures routines in
part to optimize them—he has played
Frisbee golf with friends at the same
Davis park for so many years that he
can now make par blindfolded.
One of Robinson’s first Sierra excur-
sions was over Bishop Pass. We retraced
the route on our first day. At ten thou-
sand feet, the air was clear. The seven-mile
hike to the pass was easy. A groomed
path ascended gently along a series of
lakes; the terrain was desktop-background
beautiful, with sky shining in the water
and morning sun in the pines. Our packs
were surreally light. We had no tents, no
water, no stoves—I’d carried more with
me to work. Our trekking poles tapped
rhythmically as we climbed.
Biagioli and I were quiet, adjusting
to the altitude. Robinson, who com-
pleted a Ph.D. in English, writing a dis-
sertation on Philip K. Dick under the
eminent Marxist scholar Fredric Jame-
son, cheerfully filled the silence by ex-
plaining science fiction from a theoret-
ical point of view. He sometimes likens
the genre to a pair of old-fashioned 3-D
glasses, in which one lens is red, the
other blue. Through one lens, sci-fi of-
fers predictions about the future, which
we judge on their plausibility; through
the other, we see metaphors for our own
time, which we judge on how well they
capture the feeling of living now.
“The two perspectives combine to
create a sense of time stretching out be-
tween now and then,” Robinson called,
over his shoulder. “It’s a feeling of par-
ticipating in history.” He set a quick
pace: we wanted to get over the pass by
noon. As we climbed, the sun grew
stronger, and I tucked a bandanna under
my hat and collar, covering my neck.
“The Ministry for the Future” be-
gins with a “wet-bulb” heat wave—a
deadly coincidence of heat and hu-