The Ministry for the Future
From Reboil
The Ministry for the Future is a 2020 science fiction novel by Kim Stanley Robinson.
Stats
- Author: Kim Stanley Robinson
- Genre: science fiction
- OCLC: 1147927281
Details
People
- Badim
- Ministry employee. (c27) Grew up in Nepal. Reveals to Mary that he founded the black wing of the Ministry to intimidate and kill Ministry obstacles.
- Estevan
- Ministry employee.
- Frank May
- (c1) A US citizen from Jacksonville.[cmt 1] Witnesses mass death in Uttar Pradesh, India, due to inhospitably high ambient temperatures. (c25) Kidnaps Mary Murphy, demanding her Ministry assassinate billionaires causing global warming. Flees. (c26) Frank uses the alias Jacob Salzman from a stolen passport.
- Imeni
- Ministry employee.
- Mary Murphy
- (c4) Head of the Ministry for the Future. (c25) Widow of Martin. Kidnapped by Frank May who demands her Ministry form a covert ops department to assassinate climate criminals. Allows Frank to escape but reports the kidnapping to police.
Places
- Lucknow
- (c1) Captital of Utar Pradesh.
- Uttar Pradesh
- (c1) A place in India where Frank May works.
- Zurich
- (C4) headquarters for the Ministry for the Future.
Things
- Children of Kali
- An organization that combats climate change through assassinations.
Narrative
Chapters 1-20
| Chapter | Description | Characters |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | ||
| 2 | ||
| 3 | ||
| 4 | A phone call with the Ministry. India breaks a treaty to seed the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide to replicate the global temperature increase measured after the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo. | Mary |
| 5 | Frank ia found nearly dead of the Indian heatwave. He receives medical attention. | Frank |
| 6 | India declares economic war to mitigate climate change. | |
| 7 | Frank feels survivor's guilt at surviving the Indian heatwave. | Frank |
| 8 | The temptations of fossil fuel, a description of the largest fossil fuel corporations, and a sympathetic description of their executives. | |
| 9 | Ministry weakness and motherhood as religion. | |
| 10 | A diatribe of an Indian pilot against doubters of India's geoëngineering atmospheric plan | |
| 11 | An invitation to use science to create an ideology for interpreting reality for clarity of information and power. | |
| 12 | The legacy of the anthropocene's extinctions. | |
| 13 | Frank's PTSD over surviving the Indian heatwave and his encounter with the Kali and their request for him to advocate for climate policy change to communicate their threats to the world if the world does not change the climate. | |
| 14 | A dentist is forced to smuggle himself and his family to western Europe due to civil unrest by local rebels killing in the streets. | |
| 15 | Ministry (?) meeting notes on collapse of global economy and ecology and attempts to quantify scope of problem. | |
| 16 | The failure of capitalism due to finite resources and their overallocation to billionaires. The plausibility of wealth redistribution ensuring adequate resource allocation, and thus security, to all individuals. | |
| 17 | An interview about change and the agents of the world economy being a minority yet holding disproportionate power over everyone else. | |
| 18 | Frank goes through therapy for PTSD learns eye movement techniques. He applies for a position and receives a job in Antarctica but suffers a panic attack and has to be medevac'd out. | Frank |
| 19 | Slave fisherman are saved by vigilantes with an ideology to end fishing as a practice in general. | |
| 20 | Failures of economic indices to account for human understanding and purpose. The United Nations's inequality adjusted human development index. The need to step back and ask what is all this index business really for. |
Chapters 21-40
| Chapter | Description | Characters |
|---|---|---|
| 21 | Some ultra wealthy partygoers attempt to intimidate a poor man from a public beach near their celebrity party venue. The man kills one intimidator and flees. | Frank |
| 22 | An introvert glaciologist timid of politics shares a plan to combat rising sea levels by pumping water from beneath glaciers to slow further glacier melt. | |
| 23 | Frank nearly shoots an oil executive with a stolen rifle, but lacks resolve. | Frank |
| 24 | Perceptual illusions. Cognitive errors. Ideology as a necessary cognitive illusion. | N/A |
| 25 | Mary goes out for drinks with her Ministry subordinates. Frank May kidnaps Mary and demands her Ministry form a covert ops section to assassinate climate criminals to fulfill her duty to protect the future people under her jurisdiction. Frank says the Children of Kali are killing climate criminals who the Ministry should be killing. Frank flees; Mary calls police. | Mary, Frank |
| 26 | Frank's strategies for hiding from law enforcement in Zurich within a few kilometers of Mary's apartment. | Frank |
| 27 | Mary chafes at police constantly guarding her after her kidnapping. Mary floats the idea of a black wing of the Ministry. Badim shocks Mary by telling her it already exists and he founded it. Mary demands details but Badim says operational security requires the Ministry head not know details. Mary insists and Badim agrees to share some information. | Mary, Badim |
| 28 | The Hebrew story of the Tzadikim Nistarim, or “hidden righteous ones”: ordinary individuals among the population who, at key moments, effect great change for their people, then return to anonymity and never take credit for their momentous acts. Such stories are themselves the momentous acts. | |
| 29 | Geoengineers establish a base in Antarctica to drill a water well to slow the Thwaite Glacier's melting into the sea by removing the water lubricating its slide along the bedrock. | Mr. G. |
| 30 | How people subdivide history into periods. How a feeling of chaotic despair eventually stabilizes and is categorized as a period. How feelings of things simultaneously falling apart may simply reflect how living beings are constantly falling apart. | |
| 31 | The fall of the BJP and Congress party in India and rise of a Coalition party that nationalizes all energy companies, decomissions coal-fired power stations and constructs solar power arrays. | |
| 32 | Mary and Dick discuss how discount rates cause future generations to be negligibly valued. Dick highlights India using a seven-generation discount rate to justify economics of otherwise costly climate-friendly policies. | Mary, Dick |
| 33 | A Children of Kali assassin's account of killing a weapons manufacturer while they slept in their fortified and monitored home. | an assassin |
| 34 | Mary and Badim tour India to review their work to combat climate change. India will further violate the Paris Agreement with more sulfur dioxide geoëngineering. Badim notes eminent domain by government and assassinations of plutocrats by Children of Kali are defacto parts of India's integrated pest control. | Badim, Chandra, Indra, Mary, Vikram |
| 35 | Refugees traveling westward from Austria are processed by Switzerland. Fear caused by a misunderstanding that they were being sent on a train eastward results in a riot and arson. Several travelers are killed. After an inquiry, the travelers are permitted to continue onward to France. | refugees |
| 36 | A description of efforts to ameliorate the thawing of each winter's Arctic ice pack after the ice completely melted during a summer in 2036. A description of the runaway process of albedo loss and methane release. | Author |
| 37 | A girl from Libya, her sister, and their mother become refugees in Switzerland following the riot in Chapter 35. She and her family learn English alongside other refugees from Jake[cmt 2]. Jake marries the mother and the daughters move in with Jake. The girl describes Jake as a person with high spin while her mother is very low spin with much charm. Eventually, Jake and the mother break up, forcing the mother and daughters to move again. | refugee girl |
| 38 | Another talkshow interview between an inquisitive pessimistic host and a laconic pessimistic host about the impossibility to replace neoliberalism due to all non-violent mechanisms for political change being rigged by the rich against the poor. | interviewer, interviewee |
| 39 | ||
| 40 |
Chapters 41-60
| Chapter | Description | Characters |
|---|---|---|
| 41 | ||
| 42 | ||
| 43 | ||
| 44 | ||
| 45 | ||
| 46 | ||
| 47 | ||
| 48 | ||
| 49 | ||
| 50 | ||
| 51 | ||
| 52 | ||
| 53 | ||
| 54 | ||
| 55 | ||
| 56 | ||
| 57 | ||
| 58 | ||
| 59 | ||
| 60 |
Chapters 61-80
| Chapter | Description | Characters |
|---|---|---|
| 61 | ||
| 62 | ||
| 63 | ||
| 64 | ||
| 65 | ||
| 66 | ||
| 67 | ||
| 68 | ||
| 69 | ||
| 70 | ||
| 71 | ||
| 72 | ||
| 73 | ||
| 74 | ||
| 75 | ||
| 76 | ||
| 77 | ||
| 78 | ||
| 79 | ||
| 80 |
Chapters 81-100
| Chapter | Description | Characters |
|---|---|---|
| 81 | ||
| 82 | ||
| 83 | ||
| 84 | ||
| 85 | ||
| 86 | ||
| 87 | ||
| 88 | ||
| 89 | ||
| 90 | ||
| 91 | ||
| 92 | ||
| 93 | ||
| 94 | ||
| 95 | ||
| 96 | ||
| 97 | ||
| 98 | ||
| 99 | ||
| 100 |
Chapters 101-106
| Chapter | Description | Characters |
|---|---|---|
| 101 | ||
| 102 | ||
| 103 | ||
| 104 | ||
| 105 | ||
| 106 |
Quotes
Chapter 25:
“Political science is a fake thing, if you ask me.[cmt 1] Or at least it has a fake name. I mean, where’s the science in it?”
“Statistics, maybe?”
“No. They just want to sound solid. They’re history at best, economics at worst.”
Chapter 29:
Look, if you have to do something, you have to do it. Don’t keep talking about cost as if that’s a real thing. Money isn’t real. Work is real.
If at first you don’t succeed—
You’ll never get funded again.
History
- 2020-10: Published.
See also
External links
References
Foonotes
Comments
- ↑ Baltakatei: 2024-12-17: Possibly Jacksonville, Florida?
- ↑ Baltakatei: 2024-12-26: Jake is actually Frank, as evidenced by his eye movements and PTSD panic attacks.
