In many ways, “Ministry for the Future” “by Kim Stanley Robinson is the opposite of Terra Ignota. Painfully realistic, it is, in many ways, exactly the kind of narrative I wrote previously would be difficult to write — a narrative of political change that avoids great-man politics. The question is, does it work?

“Ministry for the Future” is slow and deeply wonky. It assumes a certain familiarity with things like recent Indian political history and blockchain currency, and a great deal of the rest of the book is explication of more complex ideas. To the extent the book has a main character it is Mary, the former foreign minister of Ireland and the head of the eponymous Ministry for the Future,  which is tasked with preventing environmental collapse in a near future Earth.

Mary’s husband has died, of what it is never entirely clear, and her time as foreign minister is entirely glossed over. In order for some of the explication to work, Mary sometimes seems hopelessly naïve — ignorant of fairly basic concepts and realities that her staff have to explain to her (and thus the reader) step-by-step.

It’s never entirely clear why Mary specifically got the job, and in hyper-realistic fashion most of her narrative is taken up with internal meetings and international conferences, where she is usually frustrated and achieves little (the exception, a terrorist attack that she must flee from over the Alps, proves the rule — the perpetrators of the attack are never found and the incident has almost no bearing on the rest of the book). The only other truly developed character, Frank, lives through a fatal heatwave, becomes a failed eco-terrorist, and kidnaps Mary starting, eventually, an unlikely friendship. Their stilted relationship is the most novelistic part of the whole lengthy book. In the background of these endless meetings and conversations, the world slowly stops unraveling and little victory by little victory claws its way back towards a better, if still imperfect, future

Because so much happens offscreen, the novel mostly consists of scenes summarizing problems and later, what has been done about them; there is much less coverage of the doing itself. The exception is a series of first-person narrations by unnamed residents of the changing earth, and these are often the most interesting and touching chapters. The anonymity, perhaps gesturing at some universality is instead frustratingly vague, but overall these little windows into a world careening towards crisis and away from it again are affecting and effective.

If the book frequently feels less like a novel than meeting minutes, however, the dull normality of it all also makes it all feel real and possible. Solutions are diffuse, scattershot, a mix of disaster-led political shakeups, ground-up organizing, terroristic violence, technological developments, self-interest and creative policy making. A few key solutions led by the Ministry make the economics of societal reform sustainable, but even these are implemented by other, usually reluctant agencies.

So does it work? In a way, yes. The novel does work at conveying the sheer depth and breadth of any movement to reshape the world, although I feel like a collection of the interludes without an attempt at novelistic plot, a pastiche pseudo-history (which half the novel is already) might have worked better. Is it the answer to how to write a fictional story of political change? It is one answer, certainly. Still, I remain convinced there is a better balance that can be struck.