The Ministry for the Future

Robinson’s central purpose in Ministry for the Future is to speculate on what the coming decades will and can look like as the effects of climate change—rises in global temperatures, increasing sea levels resulting from the melting of glaciers, and the effects of these two trends—become impossible to ignore. His novel belongs to several science fiction genres, namely, climate fiction and speculative fiction.

Robinson’s novel is an example of climate fiction, a genre rooted in the idea that we are living in the geologic age of the Anthropocene, defined in Chapter 12 as a human-effected “biosphere catastrophe that will be obvious in the fossil record for as long as the Earth lasts” (43). Robinson develops this theme through direct representation of catastrophic events and multiple voices to show the concerted effort it will take to escape the consequences of failing to prioritize Earth.

Robinson engages with this theme in Chapter 1 by showing the impact of the heat wave in Uttar Pradesh. He uses vivid, visceral details, as when he describes the town as a “morgue” (8) and the “sudden smell of rotting meat” (9) as the death toll rises. The aid worker who rescues Frank in Chapter 5 describes the aftermath of this extreme weather event by noting the smell of burning bodies, the heat from fires burning surrounding vegetation, and Frank, who has “skin that was all peeling off […] [and] looked like he had been burned, or boiled” (22).