Le Ministère du futur

Paperback, 552 pages

French language

Published Oct. 24, 2023 by Bragelonne.

ISBN:
979-10-281-2086-3
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(17 reviews)

L'auteur de science-fiction légendaire Kim Stanley Robinson nous propose une vision du changement climatique pareille à nulle autre.

Établi en 2025, l'objectif de la nouvelle organisation était simple : plaider pour les générations à venir du monde et protéger toutes les créatures vivantes, présentes et futures. Il fut vite surnommé « le Ministère du Futur ».

Raconté entièrement sous forme des témoignages directs de ses personnages, Le Ministère du Futur est un chef-d'oeuvre de l'imaginaire, l'histoire de la façon dont le changement climatique nous affectera tous dans les décennies à venir.

Le décor n'est pas un monde postapocalyptique et désolé, mais un avenir qui nous fonce dessus... et où il nous reste une petite chance de surmonter les défis extraordinaires auxquels nous devons faire face.

8 editions

Un roman bienvenu. Réaliste et étayé.

Au début des années 2000, j’avais adoré la Trilogie Martienne de Kim Stanley Robinson qui racontait la colonisation de Mars (et qui, soit dit en passant, a inspiré le jeu Terraforming Mars).

Quelques années plus tard (en 2008 genre), j’avais également beaucoup aimé sa Trilogie Climatique qui relatait, déjà, les impacts du changement climatique. C’est dire si j’attendais avec impatience ce nouveau roman !

L’histoire de The ministry for the future commence au début des années 2020. Une vague de chaleur hors-norme s’abats sur l’Inde, faisant 20 millions de morts en à peine une semaine. Le premier des protagonistes que l’on suivra, Franck May, est un humanitaire américain qui y survit, de justesse et avec de sévères troubles post-traumatiques.

Ce n’est qu’une introduction car le changement climatique est en marche. Le constat à faire sur l’Accord de Paris est sans appel : les objectifs que se sont fixés les États …

L'espoir, malgré tout

J'ai eu des rapports compliqués avec ce livre, qui m'est tombé plusieurs fois des mains depuis qu'on me l'a offert en fin d'année dernière. Un éco-thriller politique (de la climate fiction ?) assez élaboré, qui se veut réaliste, et semble en effet très documenté, parfois vraiment passionnant, mais qui m'a gêné par son approche pour le moins techno-optimiste (géo-ingénierie, monnaie crypto carboncoin...) qui m'a l'air de faire fi de l'état actuel des connaissances. L'auteur se dit post-capitaliste, mais de là à miser sur la bonne entente et la bonne volonté des banques centrales pour sauver 'humanité du désastre...

Turgid

I wanted to like this, but the prose was often awkward, the dialogue unimaginative, and the exposition was too blatant. Grand events are glossed over in single sentences, then nothing happens for whole chapters. Rather than weaving a thrilling narrative of a possible near future, this is really a repetitive and surprisingly dull series of essays that make up an over-optimistic manifesto for solving climate change.

Gets a lot right, but with some painful blind spots

Content warning Spoilers for the whole book; references to disturbing content

Basically no plot, but a panoply of ideas

Actually, the book has no real plot. On the basis of two persons, the book presents psychological trauma caused by climate change and how a high bureaucrat tries to convince other executives to act. Interspersed are short essays. Admittedly, I skipped about a third of the book due to repetition. I would have liked more plot. In the end, there is hope that somehow it will work out, but many sacrifices must be made along the way. What is problematic about the book is that while societies or masses are subjects, they are somehow very manipulated, reactive, history is written by the elite, which takes away a lot agency.

Strong ideas, weak execution

There are a lot of ideas in this novel that do bear thinking about but the narrative, heavily reliant on a series of vignettes from the future, feels disjointed to the point that it keeps stumbling over itself. I do like the eventual optimism of the novel, but did find it a bit too reliant on hand-waving and buzzwords for me to really buy into it.

As a novel, The Ministry for the Future felt a lot like an exercise in wasted potential.

Somehow both harrowingly realistic and implausibly optimistic

The Ministry for the Future follows the history of the eponymous ministry created by the UN in 2025 to represent the interests of future people when addressing #ClimateChange; given that the solutions to climate change will take effect over hundreds of years, so don't immediately benefit the current generations, the ministry would speak for future generations in order to ensure long-term thinking is applied.

The novel has three main characters: Frank, who we meet in the first traumatising chapter, is an American relief worker, and the only survivor of an Indian town struck by a devastating heatwave that wipes out millions. Frank suffers the rest of his ruined life with acute PTSD, which drives him ever more desperately find ways to avoid such a catastrophe from repeating. Early in the novel, it spurs him to actions that introducing us to the second main character:

Mary, an Irish lifetime diplomat, is …

A view of a future that could happen

This isn’t a dystopian story, nor is it a utopian story. It is a reality-based guess of what could happen. In this possible reality, the world struggles to put a cost on the effect that climate damage will have on new generations. The world’s governments are forced to deal with citizen uprisings to address those costs. With a combination of capitalism (including…ugh…a blockchain currency) and climate activism, the levels of carbon in the atmosphere crest and decrease. But that is just the start of untangling the human population’s Gordian knot; it is not (yet?) the utopian future.

This was a 10%-per-day book for me: each day I’d read 10% plus the remainder of the chapter. The book is written in a dense style with a constantly shifting viewpoint, and it takes a while to digest the author’s meaning.

Repackaged state power as a solution to the climate crisis.

What would a worldwide, lasting revolution look like? What would be the obstacles and what tactics would be needed to overcome them? How are we going to survive climate change? These are the themes Kim Stanley Robinson tackles in his 570-page cli-fi novel THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE.

The narrative is disjointed, with epistolary chapters placed throughout. If you roll with it, it works well. You get a well-researched, fairly well-rounded picture across class, power, and geography. The format makes for a clever way to introduce details that otherwise might not fit into a traditional narrative. I also appreciate the global perspective of this book. The U.S. is not at the center at all, and is critiqued heavily and fairly.

THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE envisions a world that includes the Half-Earth concept as one of its solutions to combat climate change. Half of the planet would be reserved exclusively …

Too much blockchain and geoengineering

I thought I would enjoy this book a lot more, and it ended up being a bit of a slog towards the end. A lot of the writing is very "stream of consciousness", and there's not much of a plot to speak of.

In terms of finding ideas for addressing climate change, there's too much focus on blockchain and geoengineering. Not really solarpunk.

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