Magnus Andersen, Agrication, Tranen, 2021. Photo: David Stjernholm.
Continued from Part 1
Toke Lykkeberg: There is another topic I want to raise: ecoterrorism. In The Ministry for the Future, there is a direct-action group, The Black Wing, within the UN. One of the activists says: “There are about a hundred people walking this earth, who if you judge from the angle of the future like you’re supposed to do, they are mass murderers. If they started to die, if a number of them were killed, the others might get nervous and change their ways.” And actually, this sort of terrorism plays a role in the novel, in moving towards a brighter future. I’ve been amazed that Obama, as well as Bill Gates and the like, have embraced the book. The former Danish minister of climate, Dan Jørgensen, whom you’ve also talked to, gave Ministry to his successor. I’m not saying that you nor said politicians subscribe to the activism in your fiction, but aren’t you surprised that such “well-thinking” politicians embrace your work when it’s so thorny?
Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, I am surprised, and I’ve had to think about how The Ministry for the Future has been read, including by these figures. Take, for example, Obama. He was the president of the United States and as such he authorized extrajudicial killings. He didn’t go through lawful means. These people did not get judged by a jury, nor were they captured and put in prison. They were killed from the sky. He did that. This is an immediate argument for never becoming the president of any country, especially the United States. The moral dilemma is severe. That he still liked my book was an interesting sign that I had got something right, perhaps. It makes me uneasy, as it should anybody.
I wrote the book before Andreas Malm published How to Blow Up a Pipeline. If I’d had the opportunity to read that book before I wrote Ministry, I would have added a couple chapters to make what I’d call Malm’s distinction: there is a fundamental distinction between sabotage and murder. The sabotage of machinery that is harming the biosphere irreparably is a moral good, maybe even an imperative, whereas murder is always bad, counterproductive, wrong to begin with, and should never be done. You don’t hurt people, you break things. This distinction is crucial, especially for young people who want to do more than vote and yet wrestle with the moral dilemma of right action.
If I had made a chapter in Ministry where what I said just now was expressed in a scene of action rather than an essay chapter—although, who knows, Ministry is filled with essay chapters—it would have made for a clearer novel. If you think of the novel as a Lehrstücke, as Brecht called it, a learning piece, it would have been a stronger novel in terms of education. On the other hand, as a novel, it’s descriptive of the real world, and the real world is messy and violent. The novel looks more realistic because it has that messy violence in it. Now, I was thinking hard about this when I wrote the book and I have to say, we don’t know what The Black Wing did. Badim, Mary’s head of The Black Wing, is a reticent person and we only have one scene from his point of view. When he’s trying to tell the Children of Kali to stand down in a trip back to India—this is one of the most important scenes in the book for me. But I did this deliberately to make the reader be the head of The Black Wing. What would you authorize? What would you say is too much? I wanted to put the moral dilemma on the reader. And people obviously have responded sometimes with the idea of that speaker you quoted. But the novel has many voices in it, and it has many opinions in it. The person who says that there’s a hundred people on this planet who are mass murderers—that’s true. Does that mean that it’s okay to kill them, or ought they be thrown in prison as criminals against the future? This is hopefully an open question that the book brings up rather than making a statement about it one way or the other.
TL: It is an open question, and I felt the moral dilemma while reading it, definitely. So it works. Another controversial topic that the novel deals with is geoengineering. You lay out a scenario where Indian scientists start releasing sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to block the sun’s rays from heating India. And then you also consider various engineering schemes, like pumping up seawater through the ice so that it will refreeze. Many scientists, as you know, are opposed to geoengineering, considering it dangerous and a distraction from real preventive efforts. Do you think that geoengineering is becoming somewhat inevitable?
KSR: Well, nothing’s inevitable, but it is now on the table. The British government has started a program called ARIA, I think, in which they’re giving millions of pounds to fund studies of various geoengineering methods. So the idea is mainstream as never before.
I want to say a couple of things here. First, “geoengineering” is not the right word to use anymore. People talk now about “climate interventions,” but it’s not that easy to intervene in the climate and alter things. There’s only a few small things that humans are capable of doing, and that’s what is being discussed.
Geoengineering is often conflated with solar radiation management, whereas there are other methods that you brought up, ice preservation methods, and also various schemes for drawing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and putting it into forests or the ground. Geoengineering needs to be de-stranded into three or four of its basic ideas and each considered separately, because they’re very different in their costs, benefits, and dangers.
With solar radiation management, some sunlight is deflected back into space, cooling the earth. This imitates the Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption or any big volcanic eruption, and it’s something we might be able to do. If we did it, it would cool the planet down for a few years and then those particulates would fall back to the ground and we’d be back to where we were before. Therefore, it is not a terminal experiment. You could ramp it up and ramp it back down on purpose. It’s not as scary as some people are pretending, but it is global. It’s not just India covering India. Any nation that did it would be changing the whole world. And it’s precisely India that might have its monsoons impacted, which seemed to happen after Pinatubo. But because the monsoon is so variable, for other reasons, it’s not certain whether putting particulates in the high stratosphere would impact anything in earth’s weather systems, but it might. So it’s global. It’s not that it’s irreversible, but it is wide-ranging in its impacts and dangers, and it’s the most famous.
What about just growing a bunch of forests? What about giving women their full legal rights, so that the human population begins to drop, which is what happens when women get their full legal rights? Women’s rights as a geoengineering technology. Well, if you think about it that way, the concept begins to fall apart. I’m interested in this ice preservation method, but it’s not seawater. It’s the melted glacial water at the bottom of the big ice sheets in Antarctica. They’re lubricating the slide of those giant ice sheets into the ocean. And truthfully, this is very much a Danish question. I understand there’s a new TV show [Families Like Ours, directed by Thomas Vinterberg] in which the Danish population is leaving Denmark because of rising sea levels. Well, that’s a science fiction story with some real teeth to it. Because I’ve been to Copenhagen and it’s a very flat, low country, as you know. And sea-level rise, if those big ice sheets descend into the ocean and melt—the sea level could rise seven meters. At that point, much of civilization is wrecked. So is it geoengineering to try to keep those ice sheets in place while we cool down the world, which will take centuries? Well, maybe yes. But then the word has become useless, because there’s too many things that fit under it.
Sometimes the notion of moral hazard gets brought up. If you discuss these mitigations of our burning of carbon dioxide, of our methane releases, aren’t you making it less pressing that we reduce emissions? Well, in 1990, that might have been a valid argument. But now, thirty-five years later, we are in an emergency. It’s all hands on deck. We may have to pursue some of these methods if we want civilization to survive. They need to be discussed.
I think the UK government has been remarkably good on climate change and at facing up to climate change. I don’t know why—this has included many Tory governments. This issue hasn’t been politicized the same way it has been in America, as a sign of party loyalty. It’s simply a physical problem. So there’s a lot to admire in the way that the UK, and also the EU, have faced up to climate change as a real problem, with political and technological solutions that we could follow.
TL: My last question: The Ministry for the Future is very experimental. It includes many points of view, many characters. But there are also voices of phenomena, almost like the voices of the objects of scientific study. You have photons of sunlight and herd animals talking, explaining who they are and what they do. And they give reasonable scientific accounts of themselves, but the entire setup doesn’t recall scientific discourse. It’s more reminiscent of the perspectivism or animism you find among Amazonian peoples, where, for example, they try to imagine the world as seen through the eyes of a jaguar. Were you inspired by these other modes of knowledge when you wrote these voices?
KSR: Thank you for that, because it’s so much fun to talk about the novel as literature rather than as politics. I wanted there to be many different voices and many different protagonists and therefore many different genres of literature, because a novel can include anything. An imitation documentary is not at all uncommon in novels. Because the novel is novel, it’s new. It’s not a genre in itself, but a combination of earlier genres. And among them are the “it-narratives” of the eighteenth century, where, as they were beginning to invent fiction in its modern form, people would write a story from the point of view of a coin—people would swallow it, etc., the coin would have a big adventure—or a violin. There’s a movie about a violin and who owned it. The it-narrative never became that popular because objects don’t have agency, so they were simply observers. That is my theory.
Also, riddles. Riddles have always been popular, and Anglo-Saxon literature is just one big fat book, half of which is Beowulf, and the other half is riddles. None of the solutions to the riddles are provided, but it’s a game played around the fire. Usually the riddle would have two answers that would be a pun of sorts, maybe a dirty pun or a sexual pun. And then there are conversations, dialogues, mini-essays, Wikipedia articles, all of these genres. And the one that became the most important to me is the eyewitness account: first-person accounts by people who saw something important, maybe they participated in it, or maybe they just saw it. What was it like in Germany in spring of 1945? What was it like to travel in covered wagons across the United States in the nineteenth century? There’s one about May ’68 in Paris. I love these collections of eyewitness accounts. And what I realized was that these people do not dramatize a scene like a novelist does. They’re eye-witnessing, they’re going fast. And they’re also judging. It’s usually ten years after the events they’re describing, in an interview or something. And they judge themselves and their lives against this moment that happened. They’re judging history itself. “Well, we changed everything, but now everything is still the same.” The judgments are an interesting part of the story. There’s probably twenty of these eyewitness accounts in The Ministry for the Future.
I’ll end by saying this. Ministry takes on a rather grim topic. It could be a CoP report, it could be an IPCC report. These documents are thousands of pages long and they’re depressing. And yet I wanted to make a novel that was only five hundred pages long—a little long, but not very long compared to some of my other novels. And I wanted it to be fun, because reading a novel is for pleasure. So it’s Aristotle, it’s Brecht. Education can be fun and entertainment can be educational. It’s not either/or. The best art does them both. One of the ways I could think to make the novel entertaining was this play of genres, or play of forms. When you start a chapter in The Ministry for the Future, you do not know what form you are reading. It quickly becomes obvious, in the first page of the chapter. “Oh, this is the smooth host and the grumpy guest, they’ve come back again.” Or “Oh, this another riddle,” etc. So it isn’t mysterious, but it is playful. And I did it for that.
TL But I did feel that my anthropocentric worldview expanded a bit when I was reading it, like when I dig into Indigenous cultures and the like.
KSR That meant a lot to me too. Oral storytelling was crucial to me when I wrote Shaman. And I’ve written scenes from animals’ perspectives in other works as well. The deepest parts of our brains grew in the Paleolithic, and before. And they made us who we are now. We’re not genetically any different than we were fifty thousand years ago. That being the case, we have to pay close attention to what we were doing fifty thousand years ago, and we have to keep doing it. Those paleolithic activities are human, they’re sane, they’re healthy for the biosphere, and they’re healthy for our individual bodies. To the extent we lose this in our modern culture, we’re losing our health and our sanity. These lessons are not difficult to discover. They already live in our bodies and our brains. You just need to pay attention.
