Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.
Five years on from the publication of the climate fiction book, The Ministry for the Future, author Kim Stanley Robinson finds little he would change in his sweeping speculative novel —aside from a regrettable mention of blockchain.
“What I really meant was simply digital money,” he says, dismissing the term’s cryptocurrency baggage.
But the core of the book remains intact: a “cognitive map,” in the author’s words, for navigating the climate crisis and economic upheaval of the 21st century.
In an interview with Mongabay’s podcast host Mike DiGirolamo, Robinson reflects on the story’s enduring relevance. The book, which opens with a catastrophic heat wave in India, has gained renewed resonance as real-world temperatures rise and political volatility deepens. “We are in a science fiction novel that we’re all co-writing together,” he says. “Things are changing so fast.”
A lifelong utopian, Robinson is less concerned with idealized outcomes than with the practical, often fraught process of “getting there.” His work imagines a slow evolution toward “post-capitalism,” a term he uses to describe a more equitable and sustainable political economy. Rather than advocating “degrowth” — which he considers a “spiky, negative, counterproductive name” — Robinson envisions a “growth of goodness,” particularly for the world’s poorest.
His perspective, however, is far from rosy. The book confronts the likelihood of “reversals” — from political backlash to social unrest — and examines how righteous anger can devolve into unproductive violence. Its protagonists, Mary and Frank, represent the uneasy alliance between institutional reform and grassroots resistance. Both are drawn from recognizable archetypes: Mary from real-world figures like Christiana Figueres and Mary Robinson; Frank from the wounded idealists Robinson observes attempting to do good in a broken world.
For Robinson, storytelling is a key battleground in what he calls a “war of ideas.” And books alone won’t win it. He praises platforms like Mongabay for amplifying underreported stories of environmental progress and resilience. “If there were more of those kinds of stories,” he says, “it would be a sign that things were getting better in world history.”
His next project, a nonfiction book on Antarctica, extends Ministry’s influence even further. It explores real-world efforts to preserve ice sheets using methods first imagined in fiction. “We have not lost this fight yet,” Robinson insists. If anything, the enduring interest in his novel suggests the opposite: Stories of change, however imperfect, can help shape a better future.
Banner image: White rhyolite spires on the shores of Jodogahama Beach in Miyako, Japan. These spires are estimated to be around 45 million years old and form a natural version of a Japanese garden. This beach is part of Sanriku Fukkō National Park. It was incorporated into this national park as a reconstruction effort following the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011. Image by Mike DiGirolamo for Mongabay.
