So much has happened since I last wrote here, but I have the impulse again, so here I am. No explanations, no apologies, I was writing, stopped, and now I’m back.
The latest spark came from reading the incredible Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest book “Ministry for the Future“. TLDR of this post is: just read it. It’s inspiring and hopeful.
I’ve been a long time fan of Robinson, starting with his Mars trilogy in which he puts forward a beautiful and hopeful geologically-paced saga of the terraforming of Mars and the formation of an egalitarian, science lead new society there. It’s meditative, humane and a wonderful place to spend three long books. If you’re someone who prefers their SF with lots of gunfights and explosions rather than careful descriptions of rocks and tectonic forces you may get bored, but I adored it.
The new book, I hesitate to say novel, is a predictive / prescriptive fictionalized account for how we survive and overcome climate change. In it, a fictional ministry tasked with giving legal representation to unborn future generations, biospheres and animal populations is formed by the UN. They set to work upending the petro-capitalist world order with a host of non-magical near future technologies and tactics including the blockchainization of money, carbon capture, restorative agriculture and a healthy dose of eco-terrorism.
It’s probably the most hopeful future prescription I’ve seen come out of what we can loosely term the “solarpunk” science fiction movement and I’ve immensely enjoyed reading it and thinking about it’s ideas. In our catastrophic age it’s easy to be paralyzed by the on-rushing train of what can seem like a hopeless future. Robinson injects a feeling of hope and possibility that I know I needed deeply, especially this year.
