Ministry For The Future

I knew going in that one of the risks of starting an aggressive new posting schedule right as I was moving was that there was a good chance of it collapsing in under the weight of Necessary Tasks—as did in fact happen—but sometimes you just have to accept being your own Cassandra and dust yourself off afterward as best you can. I’ve arrived in Houston largely intact with my primary goods unpacked and a workspace established, and now it feels possible to think and plan again.

Any such planning will, of course, have to account for the Delta Variant which has taken on a new sense of urgency in the public consciousness. Cynically, one might imagine people finally recognized the dangers posed by having a novel virus spread across hundreds of millions of hosts, but we’re still deep in the trenches of the Information Wars and a growing contingent of people are now abandoning the germ theory of disease thanks to some highly compelling YouTube videos.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe that modernity isn’t some absurd psych experiment left running from the days back before medical review boards.

Ministry For The Future

I finally picked up Ministry For The Future after hearing lavish praise heaped on it for the last year and it’s an engaging, if depressing, combination of didactic sci-fi and world-building with the occasional man-on-the-street snapshot of the human toll of climate change and a splash of eco-terrorism.

The Ministry was established by the Paris Agreement with the mission of pushing policies that account for the impact on unborn future generations. The idea is that creating incentives to behave in ways that regenerate and pay back ecosystem services could help direct the market to ends that are human-centered and less likely to result in the destruction of the biosphere upon which—and I can’t emphasize this enough—we are all dependent for our survival. It’s an idea so practical and sane that it feels impossible to argue with but of course the Ministry does not exist and few among the Leviathan feel much driven to action.

It’s August on the Gulf Coast so the air is supersaturated and it’s been weeks since l could wear a shirt outside without soaking in sweat. This is also the week the UN’s IPCC released its sixth report on the possible directions that climate change might go depending on the actions we collectively take. It has some surprisingly positive points—apparently nobody expected the sharp drop in the cost of renewable energy!—but the best case scenario still sees warming continuing through mid-century.

I’ve felt for a while like the gulf summer is getting longer and hotter but, having never bothered to take thermometer readings back in grade school, it’s hard to do more than grumble about how "it ne’er used to be this hot when I was a kid.” After the release of the IPCC report, I poked around for some numbers and the warming trend is pretty clear with the latest thirty-year average showing an extra week at 90+ degree heat. That’s a rolling average so the trends and currents are likely worse than suggested. It’s not a great direction for a region that routinely enters black flag territory and especially not for one sitting next to a giant liquid heat sink that likes to vomit up catastrophic squalls as a way of venting heat.

Jonathan Strahansuggested—and I agree—that we’ve entered a point in history where all science-fiction set from now into tomorrow must at least acknowledge climate change in order to be relevant. Perhaps it doesn’t affect the events of a story enough to come into play but it has to be lurking somewhere in the background shaping the sociopolitical calculus. Ministry tackles this challenge head-on and I see why it’s being called an Important Book but it makes for fantastically depressing reading. It also occupies one of those strange niches in literature that seem designed to convince the reader to stop reading. I want to read the book. It’s a relevant book. It’s an important book. And yet the very act of recognizing its importance pushes me to turn away from it. I don’t think I’ll finish it and I can’t help but wonder what other projects I’ll set aside.