NEW YORK (AP) — Kim Stanley Robinson, author of one of the most famous novels on climate change, says he has done more than 600 speaking events since “The Ministry for the Future” was published in 2020 — but he won't read the first chapter out loud.
In those opening pages, a prolonged heat wave grips a large swath of northern India. Told from the perspective of an aid worker named Frank, the book starts with a breakdown of the electrical grid, generators
that run out of fuel and high temperatures combined with high humidity that lead to death everywhere. Unable to get relief, people die on rooftops, on the streets and in a lake. In the end, the heat kills 20 million people.
“I just have this instinctive sense, no, this is too harsh,” said Robinson during an interview with The Associated Press last month. “This is too … I’m not willing to read this one aloud.”
The first chapter struck a nerve with many readers because it brought to the forefront the very real fear of unchecked climate change, caused mainly by the release of greenhouse gases from the burning of fuels like oil, gas and coal. Greenhouse gases build up heat in the atmosphere, which manifests on Earth as both higher temperatures and an intensifying of extreme weather events.
“The Ministry for the Future does a better job than any other book I’ve read of playing out, in a dramatic but realistic way, how high temperatures can literally kill people,” wrote Bill Gates, philanthropist and climate expert, in his Gates Notes blog in 2022.
For Robinson, an American science-fiction writer, the environment, and how humans interact with it, have been consistent themes in many of his novels. “2312” and “New York 2140,” both published before “The Ministry for the Future,” show how the devastating effects of climate change have altered life on Earth. Some of his terms and concepts — like “the Dithering” in “2312,” referring to the time period between 2005 and 2060 with little climate action — have been adopted by journalists, environmentalists and climate scientists.
The opening scene of “The Ministry for the Future” has also uniquely captured the imagination of people concerned about climate change. That may be because, while Robinson's cataclysm is clearly fiction and an extreme weather event beyond anything we have seen in modern history, the scale and frequency of extreme weather disasters makes an unprecedented extreme event feel possible one day.
After the book published, Robinson says he faced criticism in India, with some calling it “disaster porn” and arguing he should have set it in his own country. Robinson says he believes a similar heat wave could happen in the U.S., which has recorded very high wet bulb temperatures, or a combination of air temperature and humidity, a key factor in the lethality of the book's heat wave. However, he also wanted to explore the combined factor of a weakened electrical grid and thought northern India was a good setting because of its population density, humid subtropical climate and vulnerability to extreme weather.
“I intended it to be a kind of a brutal shock,” he said.
Indeed, that collective shock is a lead-in to the rest of the book, which explores an international effort to combat climate change, a process that proves to be messy, complicated and, for readers hoping to see a major response, inspiring. Measures include paying people to store carbon, so-called geoengineering efforts like releasing sulfate particulates into the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight and lower temperatures and creating a ministry — yes, the titular Ministry for the Future — to advocate for future generations.
Whether a mega extreme weather event would lead to a major effort to combat climate change is an open question. There have been numerous major floods, heat waves, wildfires and droughts in recent years, yet the world feels very far away from the kind of effort described in Robinson's book.
It wasn't until 2023 that the annual U.N. summit to address climate change, the Conference of the Parties, even directly named the culprit driving up global temperatures — the burning of fossil fuels — and called for a tepid “transition” away from such fuels.
Since President Donald Trump was reelected in 2024, America, historically the No. 1 emitter of greenhouse gases, has stopped participating in climate diplomacy and has even been hostile to such efforts by other countries. Trump has called climate change a “con job,” characterized green energy transition as the “Green Scam” and rolled back U.S. government subsidies for green energies while directing investment in fossil fuels, including the revamping of coal plants that had been shuttered.
Robinson, a self-described leftist and environmentalist, says he believes the administration's actions on climate amount to a “death cult response.”
“It's a kind of glorying in their badness,” said Robinson, adding that it's as if they were saying: “‘It’s hilarious we can get away with this stuff. We can wreck the world and nobody can stop us. How powerful we are.’”
The administration has repeatedly said its environmental policies are practical and aimed at reducing red tape and promoting energy independence.
Robinson says he believes the pendulum will swing back toward climate action and this year's El Niño could be a catalyst. The natural and periodic climate pattern leads to warmer waters in parts of the Pacific Ocean, which raises temperatures and scrambles weather patterns around the world. Many scientists believe this cycle, which goes into next year, will be the strongest ever recorded and will juice extreme weather events worldwide.
As America celebrates its 250th anniversary, Robinson says he has been invoking the American Revolution in discussions about climate change. Despite declaring independence from Britain in 1776, it wasn't until 1783 — when a peace treaty was signed after years of brutal battles — that the country truly became a nation.
“The story of the American Revolution is lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, win,” said Robinson. “So where did the win come from? It came from keeping to fighting despite the losses.”
Robinson says he doesn't plan to write a sequel to “The Ministry for the Future” because the book is still “doing its work” of highlighting the dangers of climate change and the need for a unified global response. However, his next novel will also be on climate change and set in the Arctic, though he declined to share more.
At 74, after many successful novels and numerous accolades, Robinson says he doesn't feel like he has anything to prove.
“I feel like I’ve got a body of work that I’m pleased with and I don’t have to continue to write novels just to write,” he said. “But I’ve found that I want to, and now I’ve got this idea, it’ll be interesting to see what comes out.”
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Peter Prengaman is The Associated Press’ global director of climate news and can be followed on LinkedIn.
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