Ministry For The Future

In Kim Stanley Robinson’s anti-dystopian novel, climate change is the crisis that finally forces mankind to deal with global inequality.

New York Review, by Bill McKibben

The prolific science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, who is at heart an optimist, opens his newest novel, The Ministry for the Future, with a long set piece as bleak as it is plausible. Somewhere in a small city on the Gangetic Plain in Uttar Pradesh during the summer of 2025, Frank, a young American working for an NGO, wakes up in his room above a clinic to find that an unusually severe pre-monsoon heat wave has grown hotter still and more humid—that the conditions outside are rapidly approaching the limit of human survival. Actually, conditions inside are approaching the same level, because the power has gone out.

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Cover Photo of The Road

The Road

In The Road, a father and son traverse a bleak landscape after the apocalypse. The father knows he is dying.  He knows they can’t survive another winter so they head south through California toward the coast.  All of Cormac McCarthy’s great fiction is grim—All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing. But no other book by McCarthy is so unremittingly grim as The Road. It won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was adopted as a film in 2009.

Cover photo of the Dog Stars

The Dog Stars

This superb post-apocalypse novel compares well with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but is somehow less unremittingly grim. The protagonist Hig has survived the pandemic that killed everyone he knows.  He lives in a small abandoned airport with his dog and one other man, a veteran sharpshooter. Then he finds a woman he loves.