Kim Stanley Robinson: So just in this, in the five years since the book has come out. I’ve seen—and I think everybody else has—pendulum swings in our attitudes towards climate change in particular and world history more generally. And I guess I’m gonna venture that there are more pendulum swings to come, that the act of pretending that we’re not in trouble sticking your head in the sand or even actively trying to wreck science, that this can only go on for a while before it, it leads to small catastrophes, but it also leads to a generalized sense of, dismay or disgust, repulsion that reality bites. And as reality continues to bite, by which I mean people continue to die, things keep happening that you can’t deny. That there’ll be more and more people saying, look, we actually do have to cope with reality itself. So this is my impressionistic sense of how things have gone. And the moment that we’re in now is very, very weird. But maybe they all have been.

Mike DiGirolamo (narration): Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I’m your co-host, Mike DiGirolamo, bring you weekly conversations with experts, authors, scientists, and activists, working on the front lines of conservation, shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet. Holding people in power to account. This podcast is edited on Gadigal land. Today on the Newscast, we speak with Kim Stanley Robinson, often referred to by critics as one of the greatest living science fiction writers. He’s won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards. Many of his books explore themes of environmental sustainability, economic and social justice, climate change, the biodiversity crisis, and science in general. In this conversation, he reflects upon perhaps his most well-known work, The Ministry for the Future, published in 2020. The novel is largely seen as a landmark in utopian science fiction writing. The story revolves around how the world addresses its many ecological crises through intergovernmental leadership and cooperation. In this expansive conversation, Robinson tells me what he might change about the book today and reflects upon the novel’s positive impacts in the real world, explaining the book’s challenges to the current world economic order, and visions of a post-capitalist society. He also explains why he believes we are fighting a war of ideas. Not just through literature, but through storytelling and journalism, and he expands on what he believes will help humanity fight this battle. I thoroughly enjoyed speaking with Robinson as much as I enjoyed reading his book, which I confidently recommend to our listeners. We won’t spoil major plot points in this conversation, but we definitely tread ground discussing key themes and characters. He also previews his next work about Antarctica. Which is due in 2026.

Mike: Kim Stanley Robinson, welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. It’s a pleasure to have you with us.

Stan: Good to be with you, Mike.

Mike: So I took the liberty of reading the entirety of the Ministry for the Future, which you’ve, you’ve published some years ago now, but the book starts at the beginning of January, 2025, I believe. So we’re past that time now in, in real life. Would you change anything in your book today? Are there any reflections that you have that maybe you would reconsider?

Stan: Well, yes, I have many reflections. It’s been six years since I finished writing the book. I finished it at the end of 2019 and I got a chance to do some last-minute revisions in the copy-editing phase in spring of 2020 so that I could make minor references to the pandemic. But by and large the book was finished before the pandemic hit in spring of 2020. And you know, it’s been six long years and a lot of stuff has happened. Many of the things I would change I would’ve changed the next day if I had understood properly what I had done. It’s not really the events of the last six years that has caused me to have second thoughts, but merely reconsideration because there’s so many elements in that book. Some of which I’m quite familiar with and others were somewhat new to me. So, I mean, to give you an example, I should never have used the word blockchain. Because blockchain is a clumsy and antiquated technology that is now permanently associated with Bitcoin, which is a kind of a scam and energy sink of the worst sort. So what I really meant was simply digital money or crypto um, cryptographic, secured digital money, which already exists in other forms. That was a mistake that got a lot of attention because people are so entranced by that word, and if I had just not used it, I would’ve been more consonant, maybe not with this 2025, but with what I think will happen in the 2030s. There were other things that have happened since, one category might be…there’s a very late chapter set of the history of Hong Kong and Beijing, which stuff that’s happened since I finished that book has made that particular scenario either unlikely or impossible. It’s hard to tell but it’s the nature of the beast that trying to give a relatively detailed history for the 30 years coming, starting right now, or in the case, starting say, a short time into the future that’s going to, create a hit or miss situation within the first year, and that’s the way science fiction always is. It’s not a matter of prediction and getting predictions right or wrong. It’s a scenario that needs to look plausible and fit within the constraints of reality that at least judged by the readers. And the novel is a kind of negotiation between the readers and the writers. A thought experiment where the writer writes a whole bunch of prompts, which are the sentences, and then the reader brings it alive in their own mind by an act of the imagination. So there’s an intense collaborative aspect to novel writing and reading where you know, some better prompts might have had a better response in the reader’s minds. But readers are generous and they are often intensely creative and are understanding that a science fiction work almost immediately becomes a historical novel. It’s a…what people thought in 2019 might be possible to happen. By the time you get to now 2025, you have to read Ministry for the Future as a kind of a vision from 2019. How well does it hold up now? Well, luckily it holds up pretty damn well, but there are some things that I regret right from the start.

Mike: Hmm. It’s interesting to hear you say that because you’ve said before that we’re all in a science fiction novel that we’re all co-authoring together. So where are we now in that novel do you speculate?

Stan: Well, that’s a good question, Mike and I ponder it a lot because it’s very strange. We are in a science fiction novel that we’re all co-writing together. I believe that to be an accurate description of our moment in history. And the reason I say that is because things are changing so fast. That there’s heavy weight of various futurities that are hanging over us in the present. And what we do now casts us into a trajectory towards one future scenario or another that is pretty visible on the horizon for us. So if we do the right things, we get to kind of a prosperous age of health for all and prosperity, justice and dodging, particularly on Mongabay I think it’s important to talk about this, dodging the mass extinction event that we have already begun, but we still have the power to forestall. On the other hand, if we do things wrong, if we stick our heads in the sand or if we get defeated by people who are sticking their heads in the sand or actively want to wreck the world, then we could go down a very dark road to a place of food shortages, social breakdown, and a mass war of all against all, and including the mass extinction event. So the science fictional aspect of our present is in that sense of heavy consequences of futurity and so given all that, where are we now? Well, what I want to point out is that I’ve gone through like everybody else, I believe, quite a few whiplash, pendulum swings in my feelings and in the world situations since the book came out in the fall of 2020. So, in the year or two after it came out, it 2020, 2021, 2022, the pandemic, it was like a punch on the nose to everybody on Earth saying the biosphere can kill you. And it can change society instantly so that your ordinary life is now canceled and you’re frightened that you might die, and then you behave in a different way. And that happened, but a lot of people, maybe everybody was so uncomfortable with that experience that it was hard to take on in some kind of psychological slash historical sense. There’s a lot of repression. What happened to you in 2021? Well, you can’t quite remember because of repression. And so at first, Ministry for the Future was being read in those years as a first of all, people had time to read. But secondly, it was like a prophecy. Oh my gosh. There’s gonna be hard times, but we could get to a good outcome, and this book seems realistic. There’s no point along the way where I say to myself, that couldn’t possibly happen. And so it was taken up with a great deal of appreciation, let’s say, and it seemed to me that because of the pandemic, climate change was being taken much more seriously than before from 2021 through 2024 Biden was president, the IRA bill got passed, climate change was on the table. Every year the COPS were bigger and bigger and they take over the news cycle for two weeks every November and things were actually happening. And I can say having been writing climate fiction for about 25 years, not continuously, but for sure often, I would say that the world had come awake and that the pandemic was a punch on the nose saying, we gotta pay attention to climate change. But then repression. The return of the repressed, which will come later I presume. But part of that repression is to say, I didn’t like that. I don’t wanna admit that that happened to me in my life. I therefore, in the United States in particular, I stick my head in the sand. I pretend it didn’t happen. I go on as before I fly more, I eat more beef, I consume more goods, I reject the idea that I have to do anything to adjust to climate change. So just in this, in the five years since the book has come out, I’ve seen, and I think everybody else has, pendulum swings in our attitudes towards climate change in particular and world history more generally. And I guess I’m gonna venture that there are more pendulum swings to come, that the act of pretending that we’re not in trouble sticking your head in the sand or even actively trying to wreck science, that this can only go on for a while before it leads to small catastrophes, but it also leads to a generalized sense of dismay or disgust, repulsion that reality bites. And as reality continues to bite, by which I mean people continue to die, things keep happening that you can’t deny, that there’ll be more and more people saying, look, we actually do have to cope with reality itself. So this is my impressionistic sense of how things have gone. And the moment that we’re in now is very, very weird. But maybe they all have been.

Mike: And, you know, speaking of things as they are, perhaps challenging them, your work—at least people note that your work—often presents alternatives to capitalist systems. And this is something about the book that fascinated me a lot and using fiction to show these, like for example. One piece of science fiction that a lot of us are familiar with is Star Trek. You know, the idea of conducting a society that isn’t predicated on money, and a lot of people I find dismiss this stuff as being “just fiction,” but you have stated that money itself is a fiction. So, I’m curious to hear from you. Do you envision a world without money for us at some point?

Stan: Well, that’s [a] particularly hard question because it pokes the needle right at one of the inescapable necessities, which is exchange of goods and services amongst people on this planet. How do we run that? So let me backtrack and contextualize that a little bit. I am a utopian science fiction writer, and I have written very often about post-capitalism, societies that of one way or another are at the, they are never well beyond capitalism, partly because of this theory that I take out of Raymond Williams of the residual and the emergent, that any political economy that you live in has residual elements of the ones that came before it still embedded in it. And then it has emergent aspects of the next ones to come, which are harder to understand ’cause they’re new and they’ve never existed before. So, if you say that feudalism is in between stage between the old command economies of the agricultural revolution era of the ancient kingdoms and empires, and an unborn capitalism and with aspects of both. And then capitalism has residual aspects of feudalism. This is important to understand, and it’s obvious as hell right now that we live in a kind of a feudalism liquidified by money because of the radical inequality of our time, worse than the inequality between kings and peasants in the feudal period I might point out—then capitalism has that feudalism in its background as a residual that never went away and is stronger than ever in some senses. And then something else emergent that has to do with what you can only call post-capitalism the next stage. You can’t quite call it socialism or communism anymore because of 19th century and 20th century experiments in styles that got called that and styles of political economy I mean, not just style, style, but you need to call it something to market. Sometimes I call it X. And I do think that elements of socialism, the public over private justice for all horizontalization of power which is called for by certain anarchists, but in any case, equality where every person on the planet shares adequacy, and about the same amount of political power and about the same amount of wealth relative within a magnitude or so of each other that this is something new in history having not existed before, except back in the paleolithic before the agricultural revolution. So, for me, writing these futures out, they’ve only, it’s possibly a missing thing that I should have written an idealized perfect, an in-state, no, a utopia, a full utopia, without worrying about how to get there. But mostly I’ve written future histories in which the getting there is the entire point. What could we do to make things better now? And if we did a few things, well, now, what would it be like 50 years from now, a hundred years from now? This is a zone that science fiction rarely goes into. It’s usually now day after tomorrow like ministry or else it’s space opera like Star Trek and it’s off there amongst the stars in a story space that isn’t very realistic. The in-between, like what’s gonna happen a hundred years from now, that’s been my working zone and I’m relatively unusual in that amongst my fellow science fiction writers. It’s a good zone because it makes you think. And so, as I’ve tried to imagine, well, what will the next system be like? How could you improve capitalism so well, so much that you got to equality, justice and sustainability with the biosphere, and you called it post-capitalism just because you lack a name for it. Well, I’ve done that many times. And Ministry itself is one attempt at that to show the very beginnings of a change to a system where there’s more power of the people over, over the, the 1%, the oligarchy, so it’s a relatively modest utopian attempt. I don’t think I get a whole lot of approval from those people who would like to jump to heaven, as the Chinese say. And for whom I should be describing a really perfect system that doesn’t worry too much about the currently existing system, but I’ve always been interested in trying to tell the story of the getting there and maybe I need to write a novel set in the “there” someday. Although I don’t know what. I’ve never been able to wrap my head around that. So this is my own story of trying to write these kinds of stories.

Mike: Hmm. And yeah, I mean what you point out that that sense of getting there is really, it’s really well told in the book, obviously. It could be argued that what occurs in the novel is sort of akin to a ‘degrowth’ of sorts which is an economic concept we’ve covered here at Mongabay. What are your thoughts on degrowth, and would you say that it’s sort of a part of the future that you create in this book?

Stan: Good question. I don’t like the name degrowth. I think it’s wrong. What you need is a different term that suggests a growth of wisdom, balance, sustainability. A growth in sophistication in the relationship between human civilization and the biosphere that sustains us. And also, economic and energy growth for the poorest 2 billion people on the planet who don’t have adequacy, a lot of them don’t have electricity, they don’t have clean water, they don’t have toilets. When you say degrowth, in that context, you immediately are speaking from the point of view of the top 10% on this planet in terms of prosperity and wealth, and it rings hollow, it rings false. And besides which the whole project of civilization and human world history has been, you might say, growth of goodness reduction of suffering. Okay. So you have to reverse that to be growth of absence of pain, growth of absence of suffering nevertheless it’s growth, it’s a progress in a most general sense of the word, not progress in the terms of the western world kicking ass on the rest of the world, and taking everything over, which is one historical definition of progress that somewhat delegitimate that word, but in the more general vocabulary, sense of progress as things getting better than they were in the past of a life for our descendants that is as good as what we have had passing along a planet that is in health a growth of goodness. So degrowth, I thin, is a spiky, negative counterproductive name. And then, okay, let’s try to look closer at what people in that movement are saying. Yes, the developed world, the richest 30% of people on the planet should burn less carbon, use less stuff, destroy less habitat than they do so that those consumption habits should degrow. And I think that’s what these people are trying to point out and say. And they’re right in that, they just have picked the wrong way to tell the story by way of a name that for somebody living in a cardboard shack with no electricity, water, or toilets, has to regard as just an  affront to their human dignity.

Mike (narration): Hello listeners. Thank you for tuning in. If you’re a first-time listener, welcome and if you’re enjoying this episode, we highly recommend you subscribe to us on the podcast platform of your choice, and if you’re really enjoying our work. Leave us a review and let us know what you think. Mongabay is a nonprofit news organization, and we rely on the feedback in support of readers and listeners like you. If you wanna support open access and independent news, head to mongabay.com and click on donate in the upper right corner of the screen. Thanks very much, and back to the conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson.

Mike:  I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about two characters in the book, which I thought are really incredibly well written. One of them is Frank. And he has this, he has this like sort of righteous rage that I feel is really relatable and I’m curious, was there an inspiration for this character?

Stan: No. No, not an individual that I know or and not myself, although I want to… what I think I can point to is all of the people who mean well, who want to do something good, who volunteer their efforts, even if they get paid a tiny bit. And this is another Mongabay type point, trying to find a project in the world that adds to value and sustainability rather than just takes advantage of being a prosperous American, prosperous young American white male, and perhaps one of the most privileged people in the history of the world, but wanting to do something good and then you have trauma and the two are not always linked. But I’m interested in post-traumatic stress disorder with a personal interest. And I’d say now that all humans at some point will become post traumatic because traumas happen to all of us and by trauma, I think I would say premature death of people that you love is a primal is one of the main sources of post-trauma. Trauma itself. And so then a lot, every human has to cope with this and if you’re young enough, it might never have happened to you, but most humans, it will have happened to already. And if you’re listening to this, you might immediately be able to point to your own trauma. That is easy to identify by its very nature. So then most people get by, get past it. They don’t suffer the PTSD. The stress. The stress they suffer the disorder, not in terms of recurrence, nightmares, inability to function, that kind of thing. PTSD is a very particular disorder, but not everybody who’s experienced trauma experiences PTSD. Why is that true? And this was interesting to me as a novelist. I wanted to follow a character with PTSD to investigate what had happened that made it so bad that it was not really recoverable, and what would a person like that do if they were struggling to recover or to go on? And so Frank, the moment that I conceived of the character, a young American man caught up in a mass catastrophe of climate death on the other side of the world amongst people that he doesn’t know very well, that was one of the origins of this, of the novel for me. Just, okay, I need to follow that out. And then of course when he runs into Mary, it gets much more complicated and becomes a story of two people who ought not to be friends for multiple reasons and yet seem to be, they have some kind of relationship that I find very hard to characterize.

Mike: Yeah, it was one of my favorite parts about the book uh frankly speaking. And by the same token, was there an inspiration for Mary by any chance?

Stan: Mary, yes. Because there are a bunch of middle-aged women who are powerful in this world, and they have to cope with patriarchy as well as power in ways that make them interesting and effective. And I had read about, mostly I had read about these people now I’ve met quite a few of them. Just in the last week I was in a conference with Mary Robinson, the Irish politician, who I had read about and now have met three times. And I thought that she was an admirable character, not just for being president of Ireland, but for being the UN head of human rights the undersecretary or representative. Then also the two, two women very, very important in the creation of the Paris Agreement. Laurence Tubiana from France and Christiana Figueres from Costa Rica. I also was an admirer of Angela Merkel of the Prime Minister of Germany and of Christine Lagarde, who was head of the EU Central Bank for a while at least. I think that was her role. It’s become a…they’re, they’re still a minority when it comes to world leaders in responsible positions, but there are more and more of them, and they have a well, it’s too simplistic. They’re…world history doesn’t have a moment where such a high percentage of women have positions of responsibility and power. Whether it means anything or not as to the course of world history has yet to unfold. But I certainly had models that I had admired and I thought, let’s make one of them the character here. Because I needed a type, I needed someone to stand in for responsible leadership in the world. I needed one character to stand for a whole class of characters. And novels do this all the time. Every character in a novel is to a certain extent, typical in that they are a type of a certain category of persons that we then take an interest in because of their roles in society. And in this case, I wanted to follow out that role in society and populate it with one person. I made her Irish thinking of Mary Robinson. I called her in the text when I wrote the first five drafts, eight drafts of the novel was just Mary Robinson. It was a joke about myself. And finally my editor, when he saw that draft, he said, you know, Stan, it’s gonna…people are gonna think you’re talking about Mary Robinson, the real Irish woman. And I said, well, yeah, that’s true. And he said, change the name. And we hunted around. I needed to get to a…I needed to get to an Irish name that was not Protestant Irish, but was a Catholic Irish. Anyway, the hunt came finally up with a very obvious Mary Murphy.

Mike: I want to jump back to the topic that kind of kicks off the novel, which is a heat wave. But then about midway through the book, the topic of people’s perceptions of what can or cannot happen to them is sort of addressed. So the heat wave that occurs at the start of the book is…is horrific, but then they begin happening in the United States, in Southern communities. I believe you mentioned in the book that Northern states start to sort of assume “it can’t happen here,” which I found interesting because when I was a kid in the 1990s, there was this devastating Chicago heat wave, and I remember distinctly feeling like that could happen. Because I lived in Cleveland, which is roughly in the same sort of Latitude , so I’m kind of curious, how aware do you think people are in, in cities about how dangerously close we are to wet bulb 35 temps?

Mike (narration): If you’re unfamiliar with the term wet bulb temperatures, this term was coined to describe a combination of heat and humidity. If the air outside is dry and you put a wet cloth over the bulb of a thermometer, it will cool the thermometer down and the temperature will drop. This is the wet bulb temperature. If the air is already extremely humid, that cloth can’t really cool that thermometer all that much. Scientists explain that a wet bulb temp of 35 Celsius is the threshold at which this evaporative cooling effect that humans use, which is known as sweating, no longer works effectively for us and without air conditioning, we can die in a matter of just six hours even if we are young and healthy. These temps have already occurred on the planet, particularly in the tropics. However, recent research indicates a lower temperature of around 31.5 Celsius may represent a more accurate wet bulb threshold.

Stan: Well, that’s a good question and I can’t really speak for the whole population, I think probably not aware enough. The further north you get the more people are thinking, well, that can’t happen here. That heat wave that you talk about from the nineties in Chicago is actually famous as such. One of the highest wet bulb temperatures ever recorded was just outside of Chicago in the nineties, and it was wet bulb 35 for an hour or two. So, obviously the Midwest and anybody who’s lived in the Midwest, this combination of heat and humidity can strike pretty high when it comes to latitude lines. At a certain point you are too far north for the cooking to, although we remember, I hope, British Columbia suddenly having temperatures of 105, although they weren’t as humid. We…that was a more of a wet bulb 30 event and this is something that’s being studied very closely now and partly because of my book how fatal are wet bulb 35 compared to wet bulb 33 compared to…and also how long do they have to last before they’re going to be fatal to anybody who isn’t in air conditioning. And the book has been intensely read in India and for obvious reasons. That’s where I placed the heat wave. And so the discussion there is could it happen? Well, they’re, they’ve certainly experienced wet bulb 34 and even 36 for hours at a time. And so the general sense is yes, it could happen, but we’re used to it. We have resources that are physiological and social, and to a certain extent now, technological. Word is good getting around in India that if you have solar power that is like rooftop or balcony that is capable of functioning even if the grid goes down as it effectively in Ministry for the Future they only had in that first scene they only had a generator and they even that got stolen and it would’ve run outta gas. But if you have a little solar power array that will run an air conditioner with sunlight alone and with some battery powers. In other words, in India already five years later, they’re beginning to say to each other in the circles, aware of the book and aware of this problem. That’s not the same group. The people aware of the book are quite small. The people aware of the problem is quite large, but they’re all beginning to say, the more distributed electricity is, the more we might be able to survive. And the first chapter of ministry for the future becomes in essence impossible because of technological advancements. I find this very reassuring. And I mean, that might be a little too small of a word to use. I’ve been terrified for the last six or seven years that something like this would happen. We’re very close. It could happen and it still could be a heat wave catastrophe that kills hundreds of thousands to millions. But the more time passes, the more we have actually technologically enabled ourselves to kind of dodge the worst of it. And that’s a good thing to know because we, we are also exposed to heat and humidity combinations, and as climate change continues, as global warming continues for a 40 billion tons of CO2 and then related methane and  the CFC gasses, as we keep pouring that stuff into the atmosphere, the heat’s gonna keep rising. And it’s surely gonna happen someday, somewhere that a wet bulb 35 event lasts for a week and a lot of people are gonna die. But the better a prepared we are for that in every way, the less the mortality rate will be.

Mike: You know, for those audience members listening this, you know, it’s an amazing book that you’ve written here, and I highly recommend folks read it. And you’ve written this story which has influenced a lot of people, but you’ve also mentioned that “we are fighting a war of ideas and you can’t do that in just a book.” You said that in a previous interview and you pointed that more convincing stories and narratives are needed to speak to people about the polycrisis, such as oral storytelling. I’m curious to hear what other modes of storytelling you think are needed here. Things like, you know, things like we do here at Mongabay, such as nonprofit news. What are some other modes of storytelling and communication that you think could help us fight this war of ideas?

Stan: Well, I’d like to start this by saying a gigantic thank you to Mongabay and to Rhett Butler and everybody who works at Mongabay. This is a great venue for spreading news, and it’s partly because it’s nonprofit and it’s partly because it focuses on some success stories. The “when it, when it bleeds, it leads” this aspect of journalism to go to the catastrophic and the disasters and the things that have gone wrong as being most dramatic, as getting the most clicks. Well, it’s distorted our sense of reality itself because so many people—maybe a majority of us—are so hooked into social media in the largest sense of we are all paying attention to our screens. We’re all getting the news. I’ve said it this way before. Everybody knows everything. Now, that’s not quite true. But I’m gonna say that there were more phones than there are people. And even those people in this world who are illiterate, who literally cannot read, and there’s more of those people than you would imagine, they still know everything because they’ve got a phone and they talk and word spreads by word of mouth in remarkable lightning like ways. Not extensively over the world, but intensively within communities of the people you talk to. So stories spread the news and everybody knows everything because of this global community. But the thousands, and I’m gonna say even millions of people who are doing good work to save, restore, repair the biosphere and the wild animals, land use work, direct work with animals. Indirect work. Across all media and in all forms as jobs. Those are millions of people out there whose stories are under-reported to everybody else. So one thing that Mongabay does is it tells the good stories of us helping our wild cousins to stay alive through this hard time, and with the idea that we could get to it a better time where we’re stabilized the relationship to the biosphere and our wild cousins, our horizontal brothers and sisters. Are doing as well as we are, and we’re all doing pretty well together. This Utopian vision, you’ve gotta tell the stories of the successes along the way because that’s an envisioning of…if there were more of those kind of stories than there were stories of extraction, destruction, and injustice, it would be a sign that things were getting better in world history at large, and we might be squeaking through this terrible moment in world history. Combination of accidental burning of carbon into the atmosphere and ranking the biosphere in ways that were not really intentional, but we’re a byproduct of greed and carelessness. Ranging from that all the way to intentional destruction and cruelty for its own sake, a kind of what I call the Götterdämmerung, the tearing down of the world by the old Gods as they die. They want them to tear the world down with them because they don’t want anybody to survive them. When they die, everybody else has to die with them. This is a kind of deep narcissism. You see it in Trump and you see it in the far too many people who flock to him and enable him and are part of that movement, this Götterdämmerung, if we have to change or die. Then we’re gonna make everybody die because we don’t want to change and we don’t want to admit the world is real. Well, that force exists. Those people exist. I’m sad to say it, but it’s obvious it’s true. And against that is all the people doing good work and devoting their entire lives and careers to this good work. And so when you have a venue like Mongabay telling the stories of one aspect of it, what you would then want, and it’s sort of there is an ecosystem of journalism and of information sources that are sometimes academic, sometimes scientific. You have science itself, which is a major force for all these good things doing its work. And those stories need to get reported. As happening so that people can understand that we have not lost this fight yet. We’re in the middle of a fight and it’s a real fight, and it will go on for decades, but it’s certainly not lost. So, I’m…I read with intense pleasure Mongabay as one of about…I don’t know…For me, I mean, everybody has to limit their intake so as not to go crazy and run out of time, but there’s probably maybe 10 to 20 venues of information that I regularly consult, trying to get a not just an accurate picture of the world, but a positive picture of the world.

Mike: Well, first let me just say thank you for being so complimentary of the work we do. We certainly appreciate it. You gave an address to UCLA recently and it’s quite fantastic for those that are listening. I’ll link it in the show notes, but in it, you say you cannot kill the future, and I just wanted to give you a moment to sort of expand on that. What do you mean when you say you cannot kill the future?

Stan: Well, thank you for that. I will say that that UCLA talk, I was particularly angry but I didn’t want to just do a rant and it… particularly for a certain crowd of people, the like-minded, similar values to myself, it was, it’s all too easy now and it’s been all too easy since January to go into rant mode and it’s somewhat of a waste of time. So I tried to contextualize it and give a new angle on it. I was making some experiments. I did a calculation of how much $10 billion of medical research would add to the average lifetime of humans everywhere on earth. This is a thought exercise that I think people should follow up on because it’s quite remarkable how much damage the Trump administration is doing to the longevity of young people in particular. And I was speaking to a college audience, so I wanted to impress them with the idea that this stuff is not abstract or casual, that they’re use losing years of their life by the attack on science and the attack on medical research. And so then I was also thinking about the Trump administration’s attempt to revoke everything good that’s happened in the last 20 to 50 years as civil rights and what gets called DEI, justice in general to kill all that. I was experimenting with the term futurecide. Because we have genocide, we have ecocide. These are powerful words. And of course they’re all keyed off of the power of the word genocide. And I was thinking we should talk about futurecide, that these people are effectively trying to kill the future and go back to some version of the past that is hallucinated anyway and was bad to begin with, but they seem to want it because of a sense of privilege and power and pride and also negative emotions of power over others of cruelty and boot on the neck kind of power in the world. Against that, there’s been a concerted effort by good people all over the world since World War II to make a better world society going forward. And to kill that off is an attempt to kill a certain version of the future. So futurecide I don’t think works. I haven’t really repeated that UCLA lecture or the thought in that, because indeed you can’t kill the future.

What you’re really trying to do there is say. “I want my kind of future, which you might think is bad, but I want it, and I’m gonna get it no matter how you oppose me because ha ha ha, I’ve got more power and I can put the boot on your neck.” Well, this is a political moment. It’s not gonna last. These people have..they only had a tiny majority in the votes for presidency. They happen to control the three arms of the US government, but the rest of the world is looking on appalled and good people everywhere are looking on appalled. So this is. This…it’s going too far to call it futurecide. And I reckon that it was an experiment. It was my version of a rant an attempt to find new ways of thinking through this bad historical moment that we’re in and to oppose the people doing the bad things in the administration by making claims against them. I think probably there was better rhetorical methods to bring to bear here, but that’s what happened at UCLA, which you have to…I think this was early March when I gave that talk.

Mike: For those in the audience who haven’t read your book yet, is there anything that you’d like to impress upon them before they do?

Stan: Well, yes, I would say go past the first chapter. That this is a book about struggle and about getting through a bad moment in history, a dangerous, bad moment, and that it’s going to be, there were gonna be a lot of reversals. And indeed, now this administration is one of the reversals, so the book asserts by the action of the novel, by the plot that despite a lot of bad things happening, we can still get to a good outcome by holding together and accepting the defeats and losses without giving up, but persisting perhaps with even more intensity to get to a better world. And that the novel tries to portray that in a way that you can still believe when you finish the book. Therefore, it’s worth reading the whole thing and not just stopping after the truly awful first chapter. And indeed, the badness doesn’t stop there. And indeed, some of the struggles to make a better world take a bad turn and become violent in ways that are not useful. And some people have misunderstood the novel as advocating that. What I was trying to do was be realistic and say in a world where there’s gonna be people really angry at having seen their entire family and village die. They’re gonna want not just justice, but revenge. So there’s gonna be some counterproductive and senseless violence even from people who mean well, not to mention the people who mean very poorly. So, it’s a novel. It’s just one novel. But I think judging by the reaction that I’ve seen to it over the last five years that it’s a novel worth reading to give yourself a kind of cognitive map of the way the world is going now, the way things work and the way things might be bettered. And also a sort of sense of hope or resiliency in the face of the reversals that will inevitably come along the way. That, okay, bad things will happen. And now we’ve got at least two years of really bad stuff coming out of the US administration. Meanwhile, good work is being done in Europe. Good work is being done in South America, and good work is being done in China. So that, even the bad news should not be too discouraging or lead to despair or climate dread or a feeling “Oh, it’s all over. We’ve already lost.” No there will never be losing in that sense. Or at least not until things have gotten way, way worse than they are now. Right now we’re just in the most pitched moment of the battle, and I think that reading ministry for the future can help in the waging of that battle.

Mike: Stan, my last question for you, is there anything that you’re working on that on the horizon that people can look forward to?

Stan: Yes, and thanks Mike, because it actually relates to Ministry. Some good things have coming out of Ministry for the Future tangible in the world. For one thing, the UN is trying to create a new UN role that they would call the Envoy for the Future. That’s cool and probably will be a great organizing place. Then also at Oxford University in England, the people at Hartford College and elsewhere at the business schools there, they have started up the Oxford Ministry for the Future and they are doing meetings and conferences and organizing efforts to make a better world to conceptualize and work on it and teaching their students at Oxford in a new environmental humanities major for which the Oxford Ministry for the Future will be a kind of content provider and an organizing principle. Also very cool. And then lastly, what brings me to the answer to your question is there’s a group of people that have organized a nonprofit called Ice Preservation Institute that is trying to investigate whether the methodology described in Ministry for slowing down the big ice sheets in Antarctica could actually work. And that involves some experiments in the field, drilling through glaciers, sucking, pumping the water out from under them, seeing if that slows them down. And that would be proof of concept, that such a method, which I described in my novel. It could work in the real world in the future. And if we could slow down the great ice sheets in Antarctica, this would be very crucial to sea level that if those ice sheets slide off in Antarctica, in the West Antarctic ice sheet in particular sea level goes up about seven meters, say 25 feet. Well, this is catastrophic for humans and for wild animals and for ecologies worldwide, the coastal strip margins of the world are crucial to all of us human and wild alike. And if we could stabilize those ice sheets through the hot years through the overshoot and get back to some cooler time with them still in place. This would be a huge victory. Well, I describe it happening in Ministry from an idea that was given to me by a Polish glaciologist Slawek Tulaczyk who teaches at UC Santa Cruz. And when a Silicon Valley technology person read the novel, he googled Glaciologist nearest me. And unbeknownst to him having not read the fine print in the book, he had gotten Slawek. He went over to UC Santa Cruz and said, what do you think of this method? And Slawek being the originator of the idea said, well, I think it could work. And that began this ice preservation. So I am writing a nonfiction book about Antarctica. I’m almost done. It’s just like my Sierra book. It’s geology, history, biography, memoir, and a certain futurology or futur of, and also wildlife, although in Antarctica that’s very limited and fascinating, but you know that mostly Antarctica is one gigantic chunk of ice without a whole lot of living creatures except around the coastal margins. But in any case, in this book, I’ve written up the story of this ice preservation as the last couple chapters to show what might happen down there in the future, which is somewhat of a reprise with a little bit more realistic streak in it than happened in my novel. So that book will come out in 2026 sometime, and it’s been a… I was in Antarctica twice in 1995 and in 2016. And so I was gonna say it’s been a huge pleasure to write again about Antarctica. I wrote my novel about it in 1998. I figured I would never have a reason to write about it again, but so much is happening down there, and there were so many stories to tell that I didn’t actually get to tell in my novel, that it’s been a pleasure and also a relief for my brain because I’ve been so consumed by the work involved of Ministry for the Future, events like this one and many more, that I haven’t had an opportunity to write another novel. And it’s kind of freaky for me, not a comfortable feeling whatsoever. And so, these nonfiction books, the Sierra book, the Antarctic book, they’ve kept my head in the game. They’ve kept me feeling kind of sane and productive through what’s been a really crazy time. So I actually now think this Antarctic book with which will have photos and maps also like the Sierra Book will be quite a lot of fun and fun to read.

Mike: Well, I absolutely would love to read it when it’s out and I’ll make sure I pick up a copy. Stan, I could talk to you all day long, but I want to be respectful of your time. It’s been an absolute pleasure speaking with you. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Stan: Well, thank you Mike. My pleasure too.

Mike: If you want to listen to speeches given by Kim Stanley Robinson referenced in this conversation, or purchase a copy of the Ministry for the Future, see the links in the show notes. As always, if you’re enjoying the Mongabay Newscast or any of our podcast content and you want to help us out, we encourage you to spread the word about the work we’re doing by telling a friend. Word of mouth is the best way to help expand our reach. But you can also support us by becoming a monthly sponsor through our patreon page at patreon.com/Mongabay. Mongabay is a nonprofit news outlet, so even pledging a dollar per month does make a big difference, and it helps us offset production costs. So if you’re a fan of our audio reports from Nature’s Frontline, go to patreon.com/mongabay to learn more and support the Mongabay Newscast. But you can also read our news and inspiration from Nature’s frontline at mongabay.com. Or you can follow us on social media, find Mongabay on LinkedIn at Mongabay News, and on Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and TikTok, where our handle is @Mongabay or on YouTube @MongabayTV. Thanks as always for listening.