34 | New Scientist | 30 October 2021
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“EVERYTHING is happening
way faster than it happens in
The Ministry for the Future,” says
Kim Stanley Robinson of his latest
novel, set in a world where an
international agency is tasked with
fighting for future generations on
climate change. That vision was
imagined mostly in 2018, which the
US science fiction writer says now
feels like “another geological age”
because so much has happened,
from Donald Trump’s election
defeat to the covid-19 pandemic.
“Climate change seems to be
the main topic on the table now,
with all the storms, droughts, fires,
freezings – the climate weirdness
that has begun and looks like it
will never cease in our lifetimes,” he
says. Stanley Robinson – or Stan as
he is often known – has repeatedly
tackled climate change in his work,
which is studded with heroic
scientists and nods to scientific
papers. His focus has increasingly
moved beyond the problem of a
rapidly warming world to what
we should do about it. New York
2140 , his 2017 novel, is a salutary
warning of the risk of a drowned
world if free market economics
keep trumping the environment.
The Ministry for the Future
hops from Switzerland to India
and Antarctica as it mulls every
climate fix imaginable, from
the titular agency to legal and
financial incentives, all the way
to activists who are so desperate
that they resort to extremism.
Real-world versions of the
ministry, such as Wales’s future
generations commissioner,
have suffered from a lack of clout.
Does Stanley Robinson think his
fictional one would work in reality?
“It would be a great thing, but it
wouldn’t be simple or in any way
easy to incorporate, because we’re
so present-orientated,” he says.
Moreover, it would be no panacea.
“People would love to have theidea of a single fix, one thing will
make everything right,” he says.
“That’s just not going to happen.”
Nor is he comfortable with the
answer being violent extremism
and illegal “black ops”, which some
of the book’s characters resort to.
“I’m sure that there’s going to be
people around the world who are
really angry in coming decades
and they will commit violence
hoping to make a better situation,
calling it resistance,” he says.
“I think it would be better if we
managed to forestall that with
legal reforms that are really fast.”“You can only push a novel so far.
I don’t even believe in futurism
or futurology – I’m a novelist.”
Yet he follows new science
more closely than most novelists.
The Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change’s recent report on
the state of climate change science
was “the ultimate in alarms
going off ”, he says. “The scientific
community has been ringing that
alarm since the late 90s. And the
response has been slow and the
resistance has been high.” But
he fears the warning is being
drowned by the noise of others,
from pandemic disruption to “so-
called political divides”, he says.
One of Stanley Robinson’s
worries is a real-world equivalent of
the deadly heatwave that opens his
latest novel. “I fear that something
like that is going to happen,” he
says. He suspects such an event
might topple a government but
fail to affect global action. “The
rest of the world will say, ‘oh, that’s
what happens in the tropics’. We’reSo where does hope lie? In top-
down efforts such as international
diplomacy, in grassroots local
efforts by citizens and everything
in between, says Stanley Robinson.
“It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation.
The idea of either/or, or one’s
better, one’s worse, all that needs
to be thrown over the side,” he says.
It is for this reason that Stanley
Robinson thinks research into
geoengineering methods, such as
temporarily reducing the amount
of the sun’s energy reaching Earth,
is worth pursuing. All that matters
is what works and is fast, he says.
He is also clear that our
economic systems need reform.
“It’s one of the reasons we aren’t
reacting faster [on climate] than
we are, because we’re locked into
an ineffective system,” he says.
Stanley Robinson thinks the
“capacious” nature of novels makes
the form good at tackling the
subject of climate change. He says
its two strengths are giving readers
time travel – “you are suddenly
in a different time and space and
really living it” – and telepathy.
“You are in someone else’s head,”
he says. But there are limits.ONEINCHPUNC
H/ALA
MYThe world of tomorrow
Sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson discusses his latest novel’s
powerful vision of our climate future with Adam VaughanThe fightback against
climate change is an all-
hands-on-deck situationKim Stanley Robinson
uses climate science as
inspiration for his novelsSE
AN
CURTIN