I agree that the plot repeatedly follows society making choices which I find implausible -- but if one reads that alienation (one's inner critic saying "this is not the world we live in") as part of the experience of the work, then it can function as a kind of compelling tool. Noting all the points where humanity in the book takes necessary and beneficial actions to improve their situation, that are available to but refused by our society, one arrives at a pretty jarring condemnation. Not only is the current disaster entirely of our making, but all the ways in which it will fail to be addressed are also our responsibility.

Is it particularly jarring to realize that central banks issuing a carbon-backed cryptocurrency will probably not save us from climate change?

I'm not familiar enough with international diplomacy or central banking for that to be the most jarring part.

But, when the head of an international organization takes a week and a half to get to a meeting on the other side of the planet, and thinks that it's nicer to take a sequence of trains and sailing ships than it used to be to fly ... that seemed totally alien. When subsistence farmers were surprised by the large amount of money they were paid for getting more carbon into their soil, that seemed really implausible. When KSM glosses by how easy and quick it was to make giant wildlife corridors across North America, and talks about whole communities packing up and voluntarily abandoning towns to ceded those areas to nature ... that seemed wildly implausible.

There were a lot of these moments for me, and while I get the people that use these as a criticism against the realism of the book, I also think that gap is a criticism against all of us.

As much as the story centered around central banking machinations, the buried narrative was that a lot of people in power probably have to die. This realization and it's impossibility make the story a tragedy when compared to the real world.

Sorry, why is it an impossibility for people in power to die?

I'm not advocating for violence, to be clear, and in the novel KSM seems to take the stance that at some point violence is really counter-productive. But certainly there have been places and periods in which e.g. targeted kidnappings of rich people, assassination attempts on politicians, and terrorist attacks against high-profile targets have all been around -- why do you think is it impossible for those to be directed at people in power in the future? Especially if there are progressively more climate victims, it seems like we're setting the stage for a generation of people to be ripe for radicalization.

TMftF heavily hints and at times outright describes the existence of secretly funded UN blackops missions that target and assassinate people in power with strategic importance. It's been a few months since I read it, but if I can recall, it also described it's connection with ostensibly grassroots eco-activist/terrorists.

Submarine accidents not withstanding, I'm not convinced the UN in our current timeline could be transformed into one that engages in this behavior.

The ways in which we fail to address societal issues are not in fact our responsibility, they're a systemic issue that is a function of human nature - or political nature/societal nature - that will not be solved by morose feelings of condemnation. "Why can't people not be the way they are" is just as useless a sentiment as "Why can't mathematics not be the way it is", and will be just as ineffective at causing 2 and 2 to add to 5.

I'm going to go back to my comparatively easy computer engineering tasks after writing this comment, and have the greatest respect for those willing to confront coordination problems in the political sphere. That's playing the game on hard mode.

The whole thing reminds me of this thread [1] from a few weeks ago referencing Orwell's critique of Dickens:

>> The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work. ... His whole ‘message’ is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent.

> I can't help but feel like TS Eliot's "public-spirited pigs" are the same thing as Dickens' "good rich men".

The good news is that we've developed systems of governance and economics that are not exclusively worse than uneducated tribalistic hunter-gatherer anarchy - a very large number of people live in significant comfort in relatively ordered, mostly polite societies, generally free to do what they want, and for the most part those societies build things like roads, landfills, electric grids, and fire departments together that make the community better. It's not perfect, for sure, and we're really missing the ball on this particular externality of global warming, but I have some hope that we'll figure out a way to address the problem that doesn't rely exclusively on weak moral appeals.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37130896

To me this response just seems incoherent.

> The ways in which we fail to address societal issues are not in fact our responsibility, they're a systemic issue that is a function of human nature ... - that will not be solved by morose feelings of condemnation.

Are we not society? Do we not make up the system? But more importantly, you're refuting a statement of responsibility by saying the underlying problem won't be solved by feelings. Whether a statement of moral responsibility is _true_ and whether concurrent emotions on their own solve anything are fundamentally different propositions, and denying one implies nothing about the other. If I murder someone by stabbing them, perhaps that reflects part of human nature -- but a jury telling me I'm guilty is _correct_, even though their condemnation will not bring back my victim. It would be absurd for me to say "oh your moralizing emotional condemnation won't solve the issue of murder which has always existed in human societies, and certainly won't bring back the person I killed -- therefore I'm not responsible."

But somehow, if a few generations knowingly trash a whole planet, aware that this would cause chaos which results in a large number of deaths, illness, property damage, etc you want to believe that the fact that morose feeling will not suck carbon out of the atmosphere somehow implies that responsibility cannot be assigned.

One can argue about whether moral statements can meaningfully be "true" (I think they can), but one can't jump from "moral condemnation doesn't on its own solve problems" to "therefore moral responsibility can be denied in any instance".

If anything, I think the reluctance to fully face the problem and acknowledge our role in it, and to recognize the ways in which our own lives will need to be different to stop exacerbating the problem, is part of the foot-dragging.

> The whole thing reminds me of this thread [1] from a few weeks ago referencing Orwell's critique of Dickens:

>>> The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work.

But The Ministry for the Future is basically nothing _but_ constructive suggestions put in a nice palatable narrative container. We're not talking about a moral judgement in the absence of specific ideas about how to address climate change, environmental justice, and even wealth inequality. We're talking about acknowledging responsibility when, though opportunities stare us in the face, we do little or nothing to fix the situation we've created.

An individual can be expected to be moral, and should be judged if they are not.

A population or corporation should be expected to be moral. Collective behaviors are a function of incentives and penalties, of pure economics.

If your plan to fix the problems in society relies on every member selflessly cooperating and fails if one member defects, if you create a system that is trivially exploited by rich amoral sociopaths not behaving like rich amoral sociopaths, then the defector is morally to blame when it fails, but that's still the expected outcome.

You might enjoy the monk and robot series from Becky Chambers in case that you’re looking for something more hopeful.

Yes. Thank you. His book Aurora does a much better job at steering us towards action while still showing consequences of environmental disaster and I highly recommend it.

Can't agree more. The wet bulb event chapter is definitely worth a read, though.

The sad reality is that the world's actual response to something like that happening will probably be about as disappointing and anticlimactic as the rest of the book was to read.

If the comment sections on any news story about e.g. the Maui fire or any other natural disaster are an indication - the world's response will be hyperpartisan conspiracy mongering involving random rich people (Oprah, Zuckerberg and Obama in Maui), shady groups of profiteers (developers and clean energy installers), and fictional tech (directed energy weapons and various "lasers) rather than the shortest moment of introspection.

Climate activists simply cannot react with apoplexy that after a generation of messaging about how "weather is not climate" that the new generation responds to catastrophic weather events with "weather is not climate"

But of course, weather isn't climate. https://www.axios.com/2023/08/14/climate-change-heat-wave-ca...

1. I didn't even mention climate change or weather?

b. Your own source is making a different point that the one you're making..

> What they're saying: Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather summarized the volcano's contribution to 2023's record high temperatures this way: "So, not nothing, but only a small part of the story in the exceptional warmth the world is experiencing," he told Axios via email.

> Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, also thinks the significance of the volcano's warming role pales in comparison to human-driven climate change and other influences.

> Dessler likens climate change to a "rising tide" that is elevating the baseline temperatures from which heat waves begin. "This means that our heatwaves become hotter, essentially 'floating' on the 'rising tide' of our warming world," he said via email.

The Maui wildfire was driven by a hurricane, a weather event. Did you not mention that? The Axios article providing context and discussion around a topic -- some of which does argue in the affirmative for climate change -- is not contradictory to my post because I was not arguing against climate change. I'm arguing with your attitude towards the commentators on news stories, who you seem to view as ignorant, when they are parroting exactly the messaging that the climate activists trained them to parrot.

The commenters on news stories blaming HAARP and Directed Energy Weapons in concert with Oprah and the Biden Administration's clean-energy initiatives are in fact ignorant. And there are tens of thousands of them.

You're really convinced I made some sort of argument blaming the fire on Climate Change when I did nothing of the sort..

Any discussion of conspiracies draws the actual conspiracy mongers like flies. This is a real problem because they are more than capable of drowning out any other discussion.

> Unfortunately, any happy ending feels unearned as the world is essentially saved through magic, as humans/society respond in vanishingly unlikely ways.

Honestly, that just makes the book better in my eyes and I haven't even read it.

Crucially, after it tip goes into the complexity of global diplomacy and consensus building, a special black ops team of super eco-terrorists effect the change that really needs to happen. It’s right at home with right-wing military fantasy, Frederick Forsyth-“to bear the baddies we need to be worse than the worst of em” silliness

Hell if we're calling reactionary politics a reaction to climate change, call me a reactionary.

“All rebels are closet aristocrats. That’s why I can convert them so easily”

Leto II, God Emperor of Dune, Frank Herbert

> we need fiction that confronts the climate crisis and shows people taking positive action to change the world for the better.

Like Termination Shock?

https://www.amazon.com/Termination-Shock-Novel-Neal-Stephens...

I really prefer Ministry to termination shock. I mean, it's a fun book, but it offers no solution (eg sulphur seeding does nothing for ocean acidification, not to mention termination shock). The fact that people read it and thing it offers a solution is puzzling. Now Anathem is another matter! Brilliant! (although again I have quibbles).

Anathem is my favorite too. There is so much there and I keep encountering things it fictionalalized. For example, I wasn’t really familiar with the Everettian many worlds interpretation of quantum physics until after I read it. Likewise it’s treatment of the analemma as something coming before the splitting points of the different worlds and interpretable by all since the axis and orbital elipse would constitute a planetary signature.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/many-worlds_interpretation

I feel similarly, and really love his older books. However his slide towards glorifying terrorism in his recent work is really troubling. The increasing focus in his work on uni-bomber like characters is really off putting.

The omission of the reactionary backlash was especially implausible.

> shows people taking positive action to change the world for the better

You might be interested in the Volts' podcast.

https://www.volts.wtf

The recent interviews with Saul Griffith ("use our sunlight and iron ore and rare minerals to transform Australia into the world's forge"), Tim Latimer (Fervo Energy pioneered advanced geothermal, now scaling up), and Ramez Naam (climate tech investor) were quite uplifting.

Lots of gems in the Volts archive too.

Indeed; terraforming mars is more likely than the end-game of Ministry for the Future.

The Mars Trilogy relies on a number of very idealistic characters to carry the politics specifically past what the earth was capable of, as well as unrealistically effective resolutions when violence does occur. But I really think you've chosen the wrong author if you're hoping for realism.

Have you heard him speak on it? I have, in person, several times, and this aspect of the book (which I am tepid on, as a novel for other reasons myself) is something that's been pulled apart.

I believe you can find recordings from e.g. his interactive discussion of it, in the archives of "SF in SF" which are typically recorded and available, maybe at SomaFM as Rusty usually runs sound. Strongly recommended and it should give you a frame for understanding why the narrative takes the path that it does.

TL;DR it's overdetermined and the opposite of naivety or wishful thinking; it's strategic.

You may disagree with the strategy, of course.

I agree with this assessment. However, the book was never supposed to be realistic, simply a plausible beginning to a story. Idealistic hope, and imagining yet unimagined sci-fi stories that specifically reject the dystopian mindset that can often plague sci-fi, is kind of KSR's thing. All of his books are like this.

MftF is best understood as a best case scenario for successfully resolving the climate crisis.

That is, if we're to successfully address this challenge, with minimal global disruption (and where "minimal disruption" means all aircraft falling from the skies), then something like KSR's path is required.

I've seen your criticism voiced elsewhere (a major publication review that I'm lapsing on presently). This particular critique misses the book's point entirely.