The Ministry for the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson is a polymath, a renaissance man with an encyclopedic knowledge of not just climate change, but economics, history, and many other topics. Who else could have written this book? It is a tour de force of science, culture and speculation that feels grounded in reality. For the most part it is a narrative of humanity's attempts to control climate change in the next few decades. We are taken to various places in the world where we see the devastating effects of climate change, the most moving being the death of over 20 million citizens of India during a climate change caused heat wave. We are told stories of refugees and of the scientists trying to understand and mitigate climate change. We follow Mary, the head of the Ministry of the Future, the UN agency charged with the world's response. and along the way we are shown how, potentially, we can survive this disaster.

This book is like Robinson's Mars Trilogy, but the subject is the terraforming of Earth to overcome climate change. It is a masterpiece of organization and complexity management and is perhaps the crowning achievement of Robinson's career. And that is saying something.

This is an important book, read it.