The Ministry For the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson

I am coming to this book later than most. As a work of fiction I would give it a weak three stars, but I read many of the reviews, and any book that can generate that much interesting discussion deserves better than that.

Even though it's kind of a flawed book in a lot of ways. Many of Robinson's books feature compelling central characters, and the story is told through and around them. This is not one of them, even though it features two interesting protagonists (Mary Murphy, head of the titular Ministry, and Frank May, climate disaster survivor). We are subjected to long philosophical discourses and chapters told from the perspective of a species, or a concept, or something. Some of these work really well and made people think. Others were just windy. Toward the end of the book it's pretty much all not real necessary--the book kind of peters out.

I'm with a lot of other reviewers in finding the plot both too easy and insanely hard. As we speak, fossil fuel interests are striking back with fierceness and precision at climate activists, and appear to be ready to take the risks of aligning themselves with authoritarian parties and regimes. After all, oil companies are very familiar with how to work with dysfunctional and downright evil authorities. Robinson either left out a lot of potential tension around how fossil fuel interests would react to having top executives killed in terrorist attacks (I have to think KSR is on multiple watch lists. Take care, sir...) or he didn't think it would actually happen. The terrorist drone swarms are interesting, but I would have to think there'd be countermeasures, or ways to use them against the terrorists as well.

The opening sequence is one of the best graphic descriptions of a heat disaster that I have ever read. Took days to get over it. Consider that a trigger warning. And incredibly plausible at that. Wet bulb temperatures above body temperature are very real and happening increasingly in populated areas (part of what cleared out Syria).

Overall I am more depressed after reading this than hopeful. KSR is an incredibly imaginative writer, and I think he meant to write a difficult but hopeful book. But the path to survival involves a generous dollop of murder along with some pretty incredible changes of direction by world elites, in particular bankers. He may be onto something in thinking that legislative bodies in both democratic and authoritarian countries become less relevant due to their inability to act. So the conspiracy theorists end up being sort of correct. Yikes. I am sleeping even worse now.

All that said, it's a book that should be read, as I believe KSR properly gauges the threat of climate change and gives a good idea of the scope of changes that would be necessary for the bulk of the population to survive. Will we actually do this, or something like it? I don't like the odds. I personally cannot take or defend this path on moral grounds. Would we manage something like it with more justice? It would be irresponsible to give up.

My Goodreads Review

Agency, by William Gibson

I actually liked this book better than The Peripheral, though it has some of the same weaknesses. We have kind of moved past how the stubs (alternate futures not connected to the "main" line) get generated, and that's a good thing because there's nothing in either book that pretends to explain them beyond the fact that they are Chinese. Several logical things are happening--Ainsley Lowbeer, whose title is Metropolitan Police but that's about a toenail worth of what she does, is getting ever more powerful. It's more clear how the stubs connect to the main, since by using peripherals they can exchange information. And the AI feels like it could have happened already. If it has, would we know? Only if it decided to announce itself...

That said, it doesn't live up to the visionary fire of The Sprawl trilogy, though that's setting the bar awfully high. The extrapolations feel less like a whole new world, and more like a good anticipation of the very sad current one we're dealing with. The characters in Agency have grown, relative to Peripheral--Netherington has stopped drinking, though he is now very boring (perhaps deliberately so, he's a very familiar family man now), and protagonist Verity Jane is a more worldly wise ingenue than the one in The Peripheral.
Throughout the book it becomes clear that Lowbeer has gone beyond the point where anyone can control her, and the end of the book makes that perfectly clear. That sets up a turn in Book three--absolute power corrupts absolutely. We shall see.

My Goodreads Review