The Ministry for the Future

 The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, 577 pages.

In 2025 The Paris Agreement founded an organization to argue for the as yet unborn people of the future; this organization quickly became known as The Ministry for the Future. This novel covers about forty years of mostly the Ministry's attempts to handle climate change, but also the playing out of other world conditions over those decades. 

I think I would have liked this book better if the synopsis was more accurate. It was described as "told entirely through fictional eye-witness accounts, The Ministry For The Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, the story of how climate change will affect us all over the decades to come." While it does contain some fictional primary documents (such as meeting minutes or journal entries), the vast majority of the book is more standard third-person limited novel-style chapters from two protagonists, and even the chapters that are told in a more first-hand lack any sort of identifying information about what kind of format it is supposed to be or who is speaking. It's also marketed as Science Fiction, which I suppose it sort of is, although most of it I would call barely speculative.

This novel feels ambitious. It's a big beast of a book, and sometimes that gives it a needed sense of scale and gravity, and sometimes it means long, dry chapters about economics. I do have to say I think it's a little strange that I think there was more of this book dedicated to economics than any sort of science. I don't think this is a bad book, but I did personally find it a bit of a slog to get through, probably at least partially due to a mix-match of expectations.