Life goes on

         Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future is a dense novel confronting the issue of climate change, its effect on our world, and what possible steps could be taken to potentially curb its devastation. Though skillfully done, it often left me pondering not just the plausibility of the events and solutions proposed by Robinson but also what this novel reveals about humanity and the human condition. 

Though written from the perspective of a plethora of characters, not all of them human, Robinson’s novel portrays a wide range of human reaction to some of the most traumatic, life-altering events brought on by the drastic scale of climate change present at the start of the novel in 2025. Frank is the sole survivor of a heat wave in India that killed 20 million people, and he suffers from the trauma of that event for the rest of his life. Mary, the appointed minister of the Ministry of the Future, begins her attempt to mitigate the effects of climate change in the most democratic way possible, but quickly learns that savage events beget necessarily savage reactions. The Children of Kali, a group of individuals seeking revenge on “the guilty” (Robinson, 137), enact a kind of folk justice on the global corporate elite for their role in the greater climate crisis. Across the novel, humans act and react to the environmental disaster scenario playing out in real time in a variety of ways, revealing the spectrum of human behavior that proves essential to both exacerbating and ameliorating the climate crisis of the mid-21st century. Whether centered on the mantra “they killed us so we killed them” (133), reacting out of “narcissistic rage” (298), or “trying to avoid violence” (97), the characters in The Ministry of the Future successfully reveal the deep nuance, complexity, and contradiction inherent to the human condition.

Most of all, Robinson’s The Ministry of the Future presents the propensity for humanity to continue in the face of adversity. Even in the face of a “mass-extinction event,” (97), people like Mary, Frank, Badim, the world leaders, the “seven-headed president of Switzerland,” (314), etc., find ways to continue on, often overthrowing the status quo in sometimes blind attempts to save humanity from itself. “Life lives, life is living” (502), and the characters in Robinson’s novel reflect this. Even as the world literally melts and all seems bleak, life continues. Humans band together to solve the climate crisis in their own ways, whether through terrorism, legislatures, the carbon coin, revolution, greed, or out of pure self-preservation. At the end of the novel, Mary reflects on her past as the minister of the Ministry and her future in retirement and promises “all those people so tangled inside her, living or dead,” that “we,” humanity, “will keep going” (563). However that perseverance plays out, for good or ill, Robinson’s novel demonstrates that “life is living” (502), that while there is human life, human thought, human feeling, there is still hope, even in the face of the seemingly insurmountable task of slowing climate change before it further threatens human life. “All things remain in something or other” (499), and what remains of the human condition in The Ministry of the Future is a perpetual struggle for continuity, a human desire to “keep going” (563) in spite of the odds.