Kim Stanley Robinson - What I’ve Learned since The Ministry for the Future Came Out in 2020

In our opinion, Kim Stanley Robinson is our greatest living science fiction writer. His more than 20 award-winning books over four decades, translated into some 26 languages, have included many highly influential, international bestselling tomes that brilliantly explore in a wide range of ways the great eco, economic and socio-political crises facing our species, yet nothing had prepared him for the global explosion of interest in his visionary 2020 novel, Ministry for the Future, which projects how a possible climate-disrupted future might unfold and how the world might respond meaningfully. It’s also chock full of brilliant science and wildy imaginative ways humanity steps up. Among other results, he was invited by the UN to speak at COP-26 in Glasgow. Stan offers us his overview of where we currently stand in relation to the climate crisis.
Kim Stanley Robinson is the author of about twenty books, including the internationally bestselling Mars trilogy, and more recently Red Moon, New York 2140, and The Ministry for the Future. He was part of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers’ Program in 1995 and 2016, and a featured speaker at COP-26 in Glasgow as a guest of the UK government and the UN. His work has been translated into 26 languages and won many awards including the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards. In 2016 asteroid 72432 was named “Kimrobinson.”
Learn more at www.bioneers.org

[@silvialazzaris4868]

One of the greatest thinkers and writers of our time.

[@mattrobson2385]

I agree

[@buckmanriver]

Stanley is so well-spoken. His ability to intelligently articulate a positive pathway forward for humanity against the threat of climate change is inspiring.

[@kheireddinekadri8451]

May he live long I love this guy

[@nts713]

That is what will save us regenerating soil is where it is at😊

[@mahalie23]

Needed to hear this!

[@Adam-Flint]

I have mixed feelings about the book. Many qualities: I like the dispersed format of the story, some aspects of the style, some useful reminders such as "climate change is real and caused by humans," or "we are in the sixth mass extinction," or "this is the Jevons paradox." But too many things are plain wrong. Chapter 56 in the book: "The US and several other big countries had withdrawn from the court’s jurisdiction (The Intertnational Criminal Court of The Hague) after negative rulings against their citizens." whereas in our real world: "The General Assembly (of the UN) convened a conference in Rome in June 1998, with the aim of finalizing the treaty to serve as the Court's statute. On 17 July 1998, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was adopted by a vote of 120 to seven, with 21 countries abstaining. The seven countries that voted against the treaty were China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar, the U.S., and Yemen." Quite another reality... Chapter 55 in the book, writing about France: ...the Commune of 1848... No. The Revolution of 1848 (the third one) from February 22 to February 24, 1848, led to the abdication of King Louis Philippe and to the foundation of the Second Republic. The Commune was in France a Parisian insurrection against the Third Republic, from March 18 to May 28, 1871. The two are never confused, neither in French nor in English. When you know Switzerland, it is kind of hilarious to see it portrayed as a welcoming country for refugees, and in Chapter 47, you might be led to believe that the Swiss banking industry is an old thing of the past that has little to do with Swiss prosperity (LOL). And about Germany and France, chapter 50: "...the rest of the world was irrelevant, or at most instruments to be used." What should one say, then, maybe, about the USA? About China? etc. But the worst thing is the substance of the book. The reader might be led to believe that, yes, the climate situation is very, very bad (it starts like that in Chapter 1), but don't you worry too much, "clean energy", geoengineering and human goodwill will save us... in some decades, when many scientists today estimate we may have already crossed irreversible tipping points, when James Hansen writes "Eventual global warming due to today's GHG forcing alone - after slow feedbacks operate - is about 10°C." An increase of 5°C is generally considered beyond the point of extinction for humans. So false hope not based in reality is noxious, an anesthesic against action. Really, this is the only kind of book our contemporary fiction literature has to offer other than apocalyptic/survivalist, Rambo type, or stupid zombie series? At the most defining time in human history, maybe the end of humanity, I'd like to give this excerpt of "Where is the fiction about climate change" by Amitav Ghosh, in The Guardian (the whole article is online and worth reading). "In a substantially altered world, when sea-level rise has swallowed the Sundarbans and made cities such as Kolkata, New York and Bangkok uninhabitable, when readers and museum-goers turn to the art and literature of our time, will they not look, first and most urgently, for traces and portents of the altered world of their inheritance? And when they fail to find them, what can they do other than to conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognising the realities of their plight? Quite possibly, then, this era, which so congratulates itself on its self-awareness, will come to be known as the time of the Great Derangement." As global warming and overshoot don't happen in a vacuum but are descending on our society with politics, here is an excerpt from "Parable of the Talents" by Octavia Butler (1998): Jarret was inaugurated today. We listened to his speech-short and rousing. Plenty of “America, America, God shed his grace on thee,” and “God bless America,” and “One nation, indivisible, under God,” and patriotism, law, order, sacred honor, flags everywhere, Bibles everywhere, people waving one of each. His sermon-because that’s what it was-was from Isaiah, Chapter One. “Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate as overthrown by strangers.” Adam Flint, author of "Mona," on Amazon.

[@pardue50]

He has a stated lifelong commitment as an artist to utopian science fiction and has said the project collided with this reality. Jokes that he’s lowered the bar to “if we survive the century it’s utopia.” Artists are gonna art.

[@le-ore]

✊🏽✊🏿✊🏻✊🏾✊🏼

[@JeremyLeJyBy]

10:10 's comment about AI 😂😅😂❤

[@tonermitchell7705]

30 by 30 is a meaningless shiny object to enable environmentalists to congratulate ourselves. Much of IRA is being sucked up by grifters. Regen ag is wonderful, mainly because it emphasizes action over talk, which is mostly what the climate movement is at this point.

[@Ayat-qh1op]

is there any novel similar to it?

[@nts713]

Only possible with a much lower population

[@cosmicprison9819]

19:32 "Do the la la la..."

[@georgepotter1820]

Evolution or extinction? Are we able to learn to live in harmony with each other, nature and technology including AI? Sustainability not profitability. Mindfulness and self love, respect not exploitation. Our species faces a major die off, the population is passing the peak, passing a tipping point where our population goes from exponential growth to a transition to a new sustainable relationship with the ecosystem that has sustained us up until now. That downward curve can be as steep as a cliff which falls to zero, extinction, or it can begin steeply and recover as it returns to historic levels of sustainability, pre-technology levels such as pre-Columbian America. This could lead to a selection pressure that would produce a new species of hominid, speciation. The curve could be more gentle and could include technological solutions that would level off at a population that could both live more harmoniously with nature and each other and incorporate technology that would represent an evolution into a new species of technologically enhanced humanity, cyborgs. Taking life to other planets, terraforming and evolving new species of humans who could survive other planetary ecologies is another path that will require technologies including genetic engineering to reach for the stars. Managing these changes in a moral and humane way brings hope to a future that appears very scary from our selfish and ethnocentric perspectives. Keep up the good work or as John Perkins says "Dream True" instead of living like the hero of his book "Confessions of an Economic Hitman." Be blessed, you are a blessing. Aboriginal cultures have much to teach us.

[@laggardly6201]

Joke.....JG Ballard warned us about this 60 years ago in "The Drought" and " The Drowned World" . J.G.'s prose is exquisite, can we say the same for Robinson ? I think not... WE WERE WARNED, we did nothing

[@Twisted_Cabage]

They really dont want me to post the link to the collapse subreddit.

[@maia_key]

you cannot and will not solve climate change where the value of a good is it’s embodied labour rather than it’s physical utility, where the common worker has not true control and say over their individual destiny when they are not provided for according to their needs and not their ability.

[@PANGLOSSMUSIC]

KSR for World President

[@radman1136]

To listen to this you'd think things were going well and that we were actually doing things to mitigate our peril rather than just breaking promises to do so. Californian, must be high.

[@Twisted_Cabage]

Trying to discuss other issues like overshoot, tipping points, etc. Seems to be riling up the mods....gatekeepers of hopium right here.

[@vola5793]

I've never seen anyone more clueless

[@climatedeniersbelonginasyl4191]

Are you looking in the mirror?

[@johnsmith5139]

@@climatedeniersbelonginasyl4191 hahaha

[@husniya12345]

You actually read his book?

[@Twisted_Cabage]

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[@namnack]

Jesus. I can only imagine the content of his book, but the cognitive dissonance in this guy is just painful to watch. You can 'decarbonise' all you like on paper, in other words cooking the books, but every extra molecule of CO₂ extra is just that. We're going over 1,5 degrees of extra warming in 2024 and we'll continue to increase them CO₂ levels until the global economic systems collapse, which will happen fairly soon. The CO₂e levels are already far beyond 500 PPM. The issue at hand has no solution. You need fossil energy to build wind and solar; you can't build a wind farm with the energy generated by solar. Simple physics would tell you that. He and most others are in complete denial.

[@PiCheZvara]

What will people like you do if nothing as apocalyptic as you suggest happens?

[@Rnankn]

They did declare victory too soon. Except it is worse than you suggest. An imminent collapse would cut emissions and make a fresh start possible. More likely a collapse will be highly uneven, and will take centuries in some regions. Which means some people could continue to prosper, literally at the expense of everyone else. But there is a solution that avoids both those scenarios, which is simply a managed wind-down and reorganization. Collective, coordinated, and equal, these should things we can do.

[@Twisted_Cabage]

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[@Twisted_Cabage]

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[@Twisted_Cabage]

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[@Twisted_Cabage]

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