Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Ministry for the Future" is the most important book I read this year. It's near-future fiction about the world climate change is creating, and how it will change us, and we will change it.
There's more to say about the book than I possibly can here, but it's key virtue is it takes our present more seriously than we do. and then it asks questions many are afraid to ask — about capitalism, about the morality of violence, about how we ignore what we already know.
It's not just dystopia, to be clear. It's utopic, in a way. Robinson is imagining a world where we change course. But this is a grim kind of success. It's success with a body count. It's a warning to those reinforcing the status quo of what the eventual snapback might look like.
I wish every policymaker, and everyone, would read the book. Not because I agree with everything in it, but because it clarifies the present so sharply.
I just had him on the podcast to discuss it, and it's one of my favorite conversations ever: vox.com/2020/11/30/217…
I just had him on the podcast to discuss it, and it's one of my favorite conversations ever: vox.com/2020/11/30/217…
But don't just listen to the podcast. Buy the book! (But, you know, also listen to the podcast, which is good on it's own terms, and includes way more discussion about eco-marxism): hachettebookgroup.com/titles/kim-sta…
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