11.17.24 - Book Review: The Ministry for the Future
Like many Gen Z-ers, I have a difficult relationship with long books. Used to read them a lot when I was younger. The internet ruined my brain. Still read a lot. But I have an especially hard time with very long novels. Non-fiction I do pretty good with, because I can jump around non-linearly and "surf" them the way my brain has been trained to surf the web. I read non-fiction in a constant and undisciplined way. Dozens of books where I've read chapters non-contiguosly, long ass history books I have as reference and occasionally look at for a quick read before bed (looking at the Churchill books).
This is all to say, I don't finish novels very often, especially long ones (although that's beginning to change with my increasingly luddite lifesytle). This is the first fiction book I've finished since I completed Fellowship of the Ring earlier this year (I've been slowly working through Lord of the Rings, and will write a review once I'm done with it). Here are my thoughts. ---
Style
Often I'd be reading this book and think, this is an NPR-ass book. Just very very much written for that kind of person. I'm pretty sure I heard the author on the Ezra Klein podcast some years back, and put this on my reading list, so that makes sense (listening to the Ezra Klein show is my most lib-tarded habit, because that man is one of the best political commentators alive today).
Anyways, that isn't an insult, but I really don't read books of this vibe very often. What do I mean that it's an NPR-ass book? I mean its intellectual, but in a very contemporary, non-fussy way. It has a fundamentally cosmopolitan, liberal, science-y, intellectually curious, orientation to the world. It has a bit of a flat (but pleasing) affect, which I think is characteristic of things I'd characterize as NPR-coded.
The prose is very very contemporary. Very terse in some places, almost how people write an email. Almost how I write here occasionally. Plenty of very complex ideas punctuated by sentence fragments. It was a bit off at first for me, but I ended up enjoying it. Again, he writes how people (at least in my experience) often write emails. It's very breezy, digestible, and pleasing. It makes for relatively easy reading. Again, I liked it.
As an aside, I'll say that I think that the declining complexity of writing——as a general trend——is something that sort of bothers me. I'm against the axios-ificiation of writing. I don't like that they teach kids to make sentences really short and concise from middle school onward. The best writing takes detours, lets ideas breathe, feels like thoughts. Old journal articles and academic style writing was wayyy more indulgent and is far more memorable than its modern counterpart——they would anticipate countearguments, address potential critics, and generally feel like they had license to take up space in this way. Now we live in an efficiency culture and there is less of this. Across mediums. Bad!
Anyways, my point is that I don't generally like the simplificiation of writing, but when Robinson here chose very terse prose for some chapters I liked it. So, it was cool. And to be fair, he also has plenty of places with very beautiful and descriptive language. But honestly, I think he was absolutely the best in how he described moments between people. The characters were all very compelling and very textured, and you had a really good sense of the energy between them. The Mary-Frank relationship was cinematic in its portrayal.
But really, there was a multiplicity of styles he jumps around between. The book sort of jumps between the main narrative and these little side stories or dialogues, which I enjoyed. It felt like interludes on an album. It was always nice to get back to the main thing, but the asides were fun and memorable, and built out the main themes.
In total, on style, this book is just very interesting, experimental, and contemporary. If you're like me, and read mostly old shit, and basically never read novels written in the past fifteen years, it is a bit of a jolt at first.
Content
This book had some absolutely fascinating ideas about the future of our civilization, and I think that is its greatest gift. It just opens up the mind to possibilities on how to deal with the climate crisis, and what the world could look like. The thing I found most compelling was the carbon coin idea, because I generally share the skepticism that something like that ISN'T possible. It totally is (I think, and if you use the word possible in a very limited sense). Regardless of practicality, it's a wonderful thought experiment on how we could use our institutions to align with ecological goals.
While I think the carbon coin idea was probably the most novel and compelling thing from the book, a lot of the little vignettes on geo-engineering were also fun reads, and opened up my mind to a possible future where a great deal of the work/employment on earth is just taking care of the planet, protecting our civilization, etc.
Building on that, I like how thinking about the climate crisis allows you to think about post-commercial ways of social organization, in a lot of ways. Why wouldn't we just put a lot of people to work doing geoengineering projects, if the need arose? Why wouldn't that be assigned some status, why wouldn't that be a legitimate way to participate? Is there a future where a lot of people are engaged in the work of care-taking, restoration, and preservation? How big could that sector get? It's just very cool to think about.
I think the book's name sake, however, ends up being something of a plot vehicle more than anything. I don't think the book is terribly interested in the bureaucracy of the whole thing or how it really deals with different segements of civil society. There'a a lot of interesting ideas here, esepcially with how the story uses Badim and his "extra-legal" secret methods, but they're not really the focus, funnily enough.
Well, to conclude, it's a novel, not a non-fiction book, so I don't want to summarize it too much, or spoil it, suffices to say, it was good. It's a worthwhile read. Good for the summer. Makes me want to read more sci-fi.
knxnts