The Book I’ve Been Waiting For

8-5-21 Update: Just watched this YouTube interview of the author by the Post Carbon Institute program, What Can Possible Go Right?

Kim Stanley Robinson’s new speculative fiction novel, The Ministry for the Future, is revelatory. The breadth of imagination, depth of scholarship on climate change science, and international movements to organize nations to respond to it–plus a complex plot and range of characters–I finish reading each chapter with renewed awe. That includes the one-page, sometimes one paragraph, chapters with a voice for the market, history, and even a carbon atom. With each of these unique stopping points, the author offers us an invitation to rethink our place in the whole huge planetary system, or how we make history, or the long, long arm of time in which we are but a flash.

Robinson has written at least 26 other books. Yes prolific. And successful. He has won numerous…