midity in which, despite high temper-
atures, sweat ceases to evaporate. In
such conditions, even a healthy per-
son in the shade will cook and die. In
recent years, such heat waves have oc-
curred in Australia, India, Mexico, Pa-
kistan, Saudi Arabia, and other places;
climate models suggest that, by the
end of this century, they could become
regular events in the tropical parts of
the world. Robinson imagines a big
wave, in the year 2025, in the Indian
state of Uttar Pradesh. Frank, an Amer-
ican aid worker at a clinic, wakes up
to find that the temperature is a hun-
dred and three, with humidity of thirty-
five per cent—close to the wet-bulb
threshold. The sun “blazed like an
atomic bomb, which of course it was,”
Robinson writes. As the day wears on,
inhaling the hot air becomes difficult.
The only safe places are air-conditioned,
but eventually the power grid buckles
under the strain.
Frank invites people from the neigh-
borhood to take shelter inside his clinic,
where his generator powers a window
A.C. unit. The rooms are soon packed
with families. But then armed men steal
his generator and air-conditioner. Some-
one suggests taking refuge in a nearby
lake, where crowds have gathered; step-
ping into the sun-blasted water, Frank
can feel that it is hotter than body tem-
perature. He notices that some of the
people are “redder than the rest”; they
soon die. He sees that “all the children
were dead, all the old people were dead.”
He closes his eyes and sinks as deep as
he can, struggling not to drink the fetid
water. In the end, twenty million peo-
ple perish in the heat wave: it is “the
worst week in human history.”
The world is appalled; the U.N.
holds a moment of silence. Still, little
changes. “Everyone knows everything,”
a character complains, but few seem to
act on what they know. “They were
only really doing things to try to ame-
liorate the situation they were falling
into after it was too late,” Mary Mur-
phy, the chief of the Ministry for the
Future, thinks, sometime in the early
twenty-forties. “They kept closing the
barn door after the horses were out, or
after the barn had burned down.” The
question for Mary is whether the world
has crossed the point of no return. If
our collective belatedness entails “some-
thing physical, like the Arctic’s perma-
frost melt, or the ocean’s acidification
past the point of life at the bottom of
the food chain surviving it, or the Ant-
arctic’s ice sheet collapsing fast—then
they were fucked and no denying it.”
On the other hand, “there were still
people fighting tooth and claw.”
A bureau full of experts, balked and
opposed but not giving up—this is the
metaphor that the novel offers for our
own time. We are the Ministry for the
Future. Our job, too, is to act on preëx-
isting knowledge: many of the solu-
tions to the crisis are also prefab. Rob-
inson researches his novels partly by
attending scientific conferences. In 2010,
at a meeting of glaciologists, a researcher
sidled up to him with an idea for ar-
resting Antarctic glaciers that are slid-
ing into the sea by pumping meltwa-
ter out from beneath them at a few
crucial locations, settling them back
onto the bedrock. In Robinson’s book,
the idea is put into practice. It’s specu-
lative, but a paper outlining the proce-
dure was published in Nature, in 2018;
the proposal was further analyzed in a
climate journal in 2020. “The Ministry
for the Future” may be sci-fi, but its
science isn’t fictional.
Global finance is an unsexy but im-
portant part of the book. Corporations
and governments, Robinson writes, havealready located vast amounts of fossil
fuel that has yet to be extracted; these
untapped deposits are “listed as assets
by the corporations that have located
them,” and are worth hundreds of tril-
lions of dollars. If even a sixth of this
carbon hoard is burned, we’ll burn, too.
Robinson provides a real-life list of
the nineteen largest owners of the de-
posits (“Saudi Aramco, Chevron, Gaz-
prom, ExxonMobil, National Iranian
Oil Company, BP, Royal Dutch Shell,
Pemex, Petroleos de Venezuela, Petro-
China, Peabody Energy, ConocoPhillips,
Abu Dhabi National Oil Company,
Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, Iraq
National Oil Company, Total SA, Sona-
trach, BHP Billiton, and Petrobras”)
and narrates a series of meetings at
which the world’s central banks find a
way to pay them off. The scheme re-
volves around a new kind of digital cur-
rency designed to reward companies
and governments for reducing emis-
sions. A version of this idea, known as
the Global Carbon Reward, is advo-
cated by a real nonprofit.
The map on the inside of your hotel-
room door becomes suddenly riveting
once the alarm goes off. This is one
reason “The Ministry for the Future”
can wring suspense out of financial ne-
gotiations. But the novel’s concreteness
is also compelling because it puts into“Hi, yeah, I actually have more of a comment than an inquisition.”