Author: Kim Stanley Robinson
Publisher: Orbit
Paperback
Staff Pick: Sam Says…
Kim Stanley Robinson has a reputation for being the great utopian of American science fiction. The vivid and shocking sequence that opens his new book, Ministry For The Future, would seem to suggest that he has lost some hope. A horrific heat wave scorches India, killing many millions. The book follows one of the survivors, a young American, as well as the head of a new climate organisation (named in the title) set up by the UN in response and a whole host of other scientists, engineers and activists, as they confront the next few decades of accelerating climate change. It is a book absolutely stuffed with ideas – of how things could go further wrong, and how they might be set right. Stanley Robinson has still got the eye of the needle in sight, and the thread between his teeth. Read this, and take up the slack!