Kim Stanley Robinson, "The Ministry for the Future" (2020)

Ministry means: a governmental or super-governmental department with certain responsibilities to oversight or rule. And in addition to being a term of the polity, the word has religious implications (work of a spiritual or charitable nature is, in the Christian context, a ‘ministry’) either literally or by extension—Coleridge’s secret ministry of frost, say. Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel, The Ministry of the Future, is about a UN administrative body charged with minimizing the ongoing and increasingly catastrophic effects of climate change, and quite a lot of the novel concerns itself with the minutiae of administrative life: its frustrations and structural inertias, its toothlessness in the face of bad-faith greedy nation-state and corporate actors. But Robinson’s is also a novel hot with anger about its subject—a secret ministry of wrath—and although it ultimately bends towards a guarded kind of optimism about humanity’s capacity to face this challenge it takes us through prodigies of human suffering and death on its path. And in that sense ministry is the right word. The Latin word minister stands in a subordinate relation to the word magister, ‘master’. As the magister is magis (bigger, greater) so the minister is minus (reduced, lesser): the word means ‘attendant, servant, waiter’ and ‘aide’ but also ‘accomplice’. And that’s behind Robinson’s novel too: the burning conviction that we are either actively fighting climate change, or we are accomplices in its depredations.

It’s a righteous novel, and I’m a KSR fan of longstanding, so I expected to like Ministry of the Future. And I did, if only up to a point. Beyond that point I ... didn't, really. Nonetheless, I’d suggest, or I would if it didn’t just look perversely contradictory, that the very reason I didn’t much like The Ministry of the Future is actually an index of its success: its ambition, its throughline and above all its—well, it’s ministry.

It’s a fat book (nearly 600pp) that is thin on plot. We get: pipette-doses of Mary’s story (she’s the head of the titular ministry, based in Zurich) and of Frank’s story, a US medic working in a clinic near Lucknow. Frank is caught in the book’s most vividly written scene, its opening chapter—an unprecedented heatwave that collapses all the infrastructure of human existence and kills 20 million people across a wide swathe of northern India: Frank survives but is severely PTSDd. There are a few other mini-narratives. But that's not most of the book, by bulk. Instead the text laminates slices of this narrativizing with thicker layers of non-narrative stuff. There are many, many lecturettes about climate science and economics and blockchain and stuff, sometimes just laid out in prose, sometimes disposed into jaunty little pseudo-Socratic dialogue exchanges. Some chapters are wholly given over to short prose riddles: ‘I zing and I ping and I bring and I bling. Freed to self in the heart of the sun I banged around in there for a million years … I am not strange, I am simple’ and so on. Fret not, KSR ends these riddling insets with the solution: ‘What am I? I am a photon’ [p236]. Or DNA. Or ‘the market’. Or, on one occasion, ‘I am blockchain. I am encryption. I am code. Now put me to work’ [p.177]—this isn’t the first of KSR’s novels to have a hard-on for blockchain, one feature of his later oeuvre I find it hard to wrap my head around, frankly.

As ever with Robinson, there’s a great deal of interesting stuff in amongst all this, and it would surely be superfluous to object to the KSR Infopump, deployed in this novel as it has been in so many of his books to draw liquid Info from under the sliding glaciers of ignorance and misinformation in order to spray it over the frozen surface to refreeze informatively in plain sight. Some of his ideas are either naïve or brilliant in their simplicity or perhaps both—viz., when the next financial collapse (which will, of course inevitably come) sends the banks cap-in-hand begging again to national governments for handouts, bail them out in return for shares, and so at-a-stroke nationalise them. Voilá! Others are simple-sounding but, if you think about them for a moment, likely hard actually to do.

So, as per my strained simile a few lines earlier: since thousands of gigantic glaciers are sliding with increased rapidity towards the sea (to melt, and so lift sea-levels to drown our coasts, displace billions and crash our precarious modes of living) why don’t we—stop them? They’re sliding because global warming has melted a hovercraft-cushion of water beneath them. So let's drill down, and pump that water away, and then the glaciers will stick on frictionful rock and grit and cease their sliding. Indeed, the sheer weight of these titanic blocks of ice will push the water trapped berneath them a long way up any drillhole: 87% of the way up, KSR thinks, which only leaves us needing a small pump action to bring it the rest of the way up. But the amounts of water we’re talking about (a cube of water four kilometers across) would require millions of pumps, and those pumps are likely to get clogged with silt and goop, and would themselves require energy and problems mount upon problems. In this novel KSR explores the difficulties this solution is liable to encounter pretty well, actually. Less so with other ideas, which do rather strain readerly credulity. So: pro-environmental terrorists are able to do prodigies of damage to carbon-polluting technologies and industries (planes, factories, cattle farming) with ease, thereby dissuading people from continuing with them, and all without massively destabilising international relations, causing World War 3 or even catching that many casualties. Really? There are various kinds of handwavey new tech: satellites beaming microwaves from space, for one, picking up the slack in fossil fuel energy production; an old idea in SF I know, but a bit Father Christmas for all that. New tech for scrubbing carbon from the atmosphere is similarly waved, handily. A secret black ops branch of the Ministry captures Davos, the entire town, plus all the high-rank attendees of its celebrated annual economic forum: holds everyone hostage for a month, forcing them to cook for themselves and attend reeducation lectures and then just ... lets them go. There seems surprisingly little retribution for this improbable and peculiar act.

But my main takeaway has less to do with the content of this novel, and more to do with its style and form. This is how characters talk to one another:

“Okay!” said Mary. “What should we be telling national governments to do now?”

Bob said: “Set increasingly stronger standards for carbon emissions across the six biggest emitting sectors, and pretty soon you’re in carbon-negative territory and working your way back to 350.”

“The six biggest emitters being?”

“Industry, transport, land use, buildings, transportation and cross-sector.”

“And how do you get reductions in those six sectors?”

Eleven policies would get it done, they all told her. Carbon pricing, industry efficient standards, land use policies, industrial process emissions regulations, complementary power sector policies, renewable portfolio standards, building codes and appliance standards, fuel economy standards, better urban transport, vehicle electrification and feebates, which was to say carbon taxes passed back through to consumers. [p.251]

Got that? Not an um or an er in sight, which perhaps indicates that the answers to climate change are so well-known that any knowledgeable person can rattle them straight off when prompted, or else indicates that KSR isn’t really interested in, like, reproducing the uh way people actually people actually talk. The question, I suppose, is whether calling Mary’s interlocutor as-you-know- ‘Bob’ is enough to leaven this lump of pure dumpery. I don't know. Dumping can be informative but dreary. A little nod, a tiny wink. Does it suffice? Maybe. But there are many, massy lumps like this in the book as a whole, fatbergs clogging the throughline sewers of the story. Or perhaps I mean to say: there are many, massy fascinating insights into a very real and extremely pressing contemporary situation. It depends on how you look at it. 

Either way, KSR really leans into his approach. Chapter 67 begins with the sentence: ‘taxes are interesting’, as if daring the reader to demur. Having set Frank’s story going with one of the most extraordinary and memorable opening chapters I’ve read in years, Robinson then pootles him around in a ‘will-he won’t-he commit to becoming a terrorist’ storyline for a couple hundred pages, and then parks him in a Swiss prison for a couple hundred more—bold! Or perhaps bonkers. One plank of this novel’s plan for addressing climate change is the dismantling of capitalism, in part to be effected by turning all the banks into co-ops. ‘The profits,’ KSR assures us, ‘don’t get shifted out as shares to shareholders, but are rather divided three ways, with a third distributed among the employee-owners, a third devoted to [environmental] capital improvements and a third given to charities chosen by the employees.’ He goes on with various other minutiae of the new arrangements: ‘the wage ratio between management’s top salary and the minimum level of pay is set at three to one … open admission … the sovereignty of capital … participatory management … inter-cooperation’—it goes on and on. Finally KSR breaks off with: ‘This list is worth studying in detail, but not here’ [p.273]. If you say so, Stan.

The negative way of spinning all this would be to say that this novel can be a dry read, sometimes positively drought-dry. There are stretches here which are, baldly stated, an effort for the reader to push through. But the positive way to spin it would be to see it as a novel not just about climate change, but about the kind of stories we tell ourselves about disasters like climate change. Those stories are, clearly, not helping at present. Take ‘eucatastrophe’, Tolkien’s term for a thrilling story in which disaster impends, becomes more and more inevitable and then is averted at the very last moment. It’s a real workhorse of storytelling nowadays, is the eucatastrophe, especially in cinema. There is a threat to the whole world! Let’s imagine that as a singular, external thing: an asteroid on collision course, a huge invading alien spaceship. Then let’s draw out the approaching disaster and make it seem like it could never be overcome. Finally, bam: rabbit from hat, the hero saves the day at the last minute.

The Ministry for the Future is, in effect, saying: that’s a bad story—not bad in entertainment terms but bad in verisimilitude terms. It is saying: we are actually, right now, indeed facing a threat to the whole world, but it’s not a single thing it’s a complex and deeply-embedded function of human interrelation and social praxis. It’s not exterior to us, it is us. And it won’t be solved by a single heroic flourish in the nick of time. It will be solved by a congeries of difficult, drawn-out, collective labour, much of which is so inimical to ‘popular narrative’ that we dismiss it as boring. It’s not boring, though: it’s literally life-and-death. And so one part of our large, human task will be: to reconfigure the kinds of stories we are telling ourselves about disaster and how to avert it.

What Sinks "Underwater"

 

Although, actually, I rather enjoyed William Eubank's 2020 science fiction action horror movie. But it doesn't really work, and I was curious why. Spoilers follow.

It's essentially Alien underwater. A deepwater drilling platform located (improbably enough) at the bottom of the Mariana Trench is hit by what seems at first an earthquake. Kristen Stewart and other highly attractive underwater drilling technicians, as all commercial drilling technicians of course are, run around the collapsing facility in their underwear, closing bulkheads and pressing control panel buttons and so on. Some of them are killed in the chaos. The survivors clamber into diving suits and make their way across the seabed to a different part of the facility, where the escape pods are located. More of them die, this time hauled away by tentacled monsters—hitherto-unencountered lifeforms, mansized pallid motile globs of feelers and teeth. As the facility further collapses more of the cast are, as per Alien, snaffled by these nameless horrors. There is much wriggling through collapsed, flooding corridors, and plenty of shock moments, diving suit helmets suddenly filling with blood as their wearers howl and so on. 

Finally Stewart, Jessica Henwick and John Gallagher make it to the escape pod room, all the slightly less attractive cast members having been tentacled-away. Stewart manages to send Henwick and Gallagher away in their pods, but her own pod is broken, so she stays behind. And this is where the movie stages its big reveal. The human-sized undersea monsters are merely the progeny of one absolutely gigantic tentacle-and-teeth monster

Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
From ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken waketh

... and it's Cthulhu! It's your actual gigantic Lovecraftian beast. Stewart gazes into the ph'nglui mglw'nafh r'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagnian horror for a while, and then presses the base's nuclear self-destruct (all mining platforms, as I understand it, are equipped with one such) immolating herself and the elder horror both at once. 

The whole movie is expensively mounted, well-made, nicely designed, earnestly acted. It is no more intrinsically silly than was Alien back in 1979. And yet it doesn't work. I wonder if the reason it doesn't work is because this Lovecraftian flourish mismatches the tenor of the movie as a whole. Underwater is, as Alien was, body-horror. Now, body horror can be very effective at spooking and upsetting us, squicking our sense of somatic integrity and safety. But Lovecraft did not write body horror. His stories do sometimes contain horrible bodies, but that's not the same thing. Lovecraft wrote topographic horror. Think how ‘The Dunwich Horror’ begins with pages and pages of eerie scene-setting off the Aylesbury turnpike in north central Massachusetts; or how ‘The Colour Out Of Space’ opens by situating itself in a particular Arkham locale (‘the old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there. French-Canadians have tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles have come and departed. It is not because of anything that can be seen or heard or handled, but because of something that is imagined. The place is not good for the imagination, and does not bring restful dreams at night.’) Heidegger distinguished between space and place in order to valorise the latter as the dwelling of Being. Lovecraft intuitively turned this around, and his work generates a queasy apprehension of place as the iteration of nightmarish inescapability, place as the already-dwelt-in by nameless ghastliness. There's nothing in the generic corridors and control rooms of Underwater's subsea base that can evoke that, and the scenes of the cast lolloping across the ocean bed entail no connection, or recognition, in the audience. Can't have the unheimlich without the heimlich, after all. 

Platonesi: Susanna Clarke's "Piranesi" (2020)

 
Reviews of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi have been cagey about revealing too much of the plot, as if to say even rudimentary things about the novel would be to spoil it. I don’t see this, I must say. But perhaps you want to exercise caution.

Clarke's title character, narrating in first-person via his journal entries, is the only living inhabitant of a vast mansion—so vast that he can never find a way out of it, so huge an ocean washes tidally through the lower levels, and clouds float through the upper ones. The House consists of an endless succession of rooms and corridors, adorned everywhere with marble statuary past which Piranesi wanders, feeding on seaweed and fruits de mer from the ground floor, and tending the skeletons of thirteen previous inhabitants of the place. Piranesi is an unusually ingenuous, almost a child-like narrator, and we soon realise that the only other person in the House—a twice weekly visitor called ‘The Other’, whom Piranesi considers a friend—is probably not all he pretends, no matter how much Piranesi trusts him.

This is all well-evoked, the universe of the House neither mistily sketched nor over-rigorously delineated. The worst you could say is that it's more cool conceit than rigorous narrative, more a arrangement of striking images than a framework able to furnish all the satisfactions the novel as a form. I suppose those images refract (a) Clarke herself stuck largely inside her house since 2012 with her debilitating, chronic illness, (b) a Lewisian Narnia-style allegory by which the world is God's strange mansion—Magician’s Nephew supplies the novel’s epigraph—and (c) some manner of anxiety about climate change (the lower levels are dangerously flooded!) 

In all it is a good though not, I think, a great novel. I'm not sure it has the unexpectedness or baffling eloquence of particular image that defines the best surrealism (your mileage may, of course vary). Certainly it would be hard to claim it as on a par with Strange and Norrell, undeniably a major work of 21st-century fiction. But I enjoyed it very much, and its core idea has lingered with me since I finished it a couple of weeks ago. It’s an upholstered short-story rather than a novel, but that’s OK.

On the topic of spoilers, I’m a little puzzled by the reviewerish pussy-footing. Aspects of the way Clarke unfolds her story seem to me readily guessable, even from the basic summary of the premise I give here. Things go broadly how any reader who thought about the matter for five minutes would anticipate them to go. Piranesi wandering his strange megadomus would hardly fill two hundred and fifty pages, so of course there are complications. But perhaps you would prefer to stop reading now, if you haven’t yet picked up Clarke's novel, lest I taint your enjoyment. I mean, perhaps you never started reading this blogpost, in which case you obviously have no problem.

My point is that before I'd even cracked the covers of the novel, and just going on the reviews I'd read, I asssumed that Clarke was going to set her drafty, universe of oceanwashed inward marble halls against our world (after all, the epigraph is from the Magician’s stuffing Nephew) and that when I started reading it seemed obvious that the Other would prove to have come from the latter. And so it transpires: not just him but various others including, we soon discover, Piranesi himself. That P. cannot remember the other world is a function of the strange, memory-effacing effect the House has upon those who live within it for any length of time. The Other relies upon this amnesia (he ‘tests’ Piranesi by dropping words like ‘Battersea’ into conversation, to check that they strike him as meaningless). 

So, yes: the story brings in new characters from our world, and takes Piranesi on a path towards an understanding of his actual condition. This includes him encountering other texts and manuscripts, including ones he had himself earlier written but which he now has forgotten. In parallel with Piranesi's burgeoning awareness we, as readers, piece together an our-world-set story about an Aleister Crowley-type magus, called Laurence Arne-Sayles, who gathered a group of acolytes around him with promises that he could access miraculous dimensions, and who used his power over these people to indulge his various sadistic caprices. The twist is that where Crowley was a fraud, Arne-Sayles actually could do what he claimed. He had devised a ritual to open a portal from our world to Piranesi's House.

Arne-Sayles stranded Piranesi (we learn his ‘real’, our-world name about halfway through) in the House. The amnesiac quality of the place has meant he has forgotten this, and all his prior life as well. The story of the novel is really the story of him recuperating that lost knowledge.

That's not the main thing that interests me about this novel. Rather I'm struck by the extent to which Clarke's novel is Platonic. Very Platonic. Much Plato.   

In particular I'm interested in what it says about the state of contemporary Fantasy. Because what Clarke’s novel does is dramatize Plantonism—it takes Platonism, or Neoplatonism, seriously, just as Lewis does in his Narnia books. The final pages of The Last Battle are perfectly up-front about this: both Narnia and our world are revealed as inferior imitations of the Realm of the Forms, Lewis’s God, into which the Pevensies and other good Narnians (but not Lewis’s meshuggener dwarfs, nor his we-can-be-honest Muslim-caricature ‘Calormen’) are granted access. It's all in Plato, we're explicitly told. Lewis, steeped in medievalism, felt at home with a Neoplatonic folding together of the Realm of the Forms and the Christian God and I suspect Clarke does too. If there’s a twist at the end of this novel it is—unless I have misunderstood things—that the House is our world, Plato’s cave of deprivation and forgetfulness, and ‘our world’ figures in Clarke’s conception as the sunlit outside, which is quite a neat reversal. 

I don’t know how common it is to ‘believe’, genuinely, in Plato nowadays. Perhaps lots of folk do, though if so I’m not among their number (I've heard it said that mathematicians are more liable to be Platonists than other kinds of people). But I am interested in the way there seems to have been a little cluster of strictly ‘Platonic’ fantasy novels lately: Stephenson’s Anathem for one, Jo Walton’s Socratic trilogy for another. If I’m right that Clarke is styling the House as a version of Plato’s Cave, with statues and fragmentary graffiti rather than shadows, then the pervasive sea-swell, the scent of salt, the dangerous rising tides, the albatrosses and other oceanic fauna, become an interesting addendum to the parable as originally told in The Republic. Or perhaps not, for according to Marie-Élise Zovko when Plato wrote of a cave it was a sea-cave that he most likely had in mind:

Plato’s Sicilian voyages may have influenced his formulation of the central analogies which form the axis of the Republic, in particular the Analogy of the Cave. The characteristics of Plato’s cave are reminiscent of caves inhabited or in regular use from prehistoric times to Classical antiquity, which lie along the ancient seafaring routes across the Adriatic. A great concentration of these caves are located on the islands and coastline of central and southern Dalmatia in present-day Croatia, as well as in Apulia … Both shores were inhabited by Illyrian tribes in the period when the Mycenaean Greeks first colonized the region, and the Illyrians continued to be a significant presence after the establishment of the Greek colonies of the Eastern Adriatic and Southern Italy. Syncretistic ritual practices of which there is evidence in the caves of Southern and Central Dalmatia appear to have had their roots in a mixture of older Illyrian rituals and Greek mysteries or hero worship. [Marie-Élise Zovko, ‘Of Caves, Lines, and Sea Travels: Plato’s Syracusan Voyages and the Central Analogies of the Republic’, in Heather L. Reid, Davide Tanasi and Susi Kimbell (eds) Politics and Performance in Western Greece Book Subtitle: Essays on the Hellenic Heritage of Sicily and Southern Italy Book (Parnassos Press 2017)]

I suppose Clarke’s cave is filled with neoclassical statuary because, taking inspiration from the artist whose name supplies the novel's title, she conceives not an Ancient Greek house but a later, Renaissance or Early Modern one. And, because Neoplatonism exists in the shadow of its Platonic origins. And I suppose her protagonist lives in the House alone because one of the ways the Early Modern era ‘read’ its duties towards this more perfect form of the divine was in terms of seclusion: eremites, anchorites, hermits living in their cells and so on.

One thing that particularly fascinates me in this novel is the way, as I see it, it styles apocalypse in architectural terms. It’s not just that Piranesi is, as it were, living in the ruins after the cosmic catastrophe, or that the ruins are the world, its that the ruins are interiorised architectural spaces. I’m not sure I can think of another work that figures apocalypse this way—though there are, of course, a great many verbally-rendered apocalypses, from John of Patmos’s Biblical vision through ten thousand religious or science-fictional ends-of-the-world; and we’ve seen an increasing shift in the centre of gravity in the apocalyptic imagination from words to images, from John Martin’s enormous canvases in the nineteenth-century to the plethora of big-screen cinematic renderings of world-ending disaster of modern times. But this move to architecture is interesting, more so (I think) than the story Clarke is actually telling. I wonder if this is also Neoplatonic, or at least inflected by Clarke’s Lewisian interest in older modes of thinking or apprehending the world:

Neoplatonic thought has no concept of the ‘sign’, in which words denote things by representing or standing for them, and in which the sign and its referent are distinct registers. This absence enables us to comprehend the intellectual centrality of the key Neoplatonic doctrine of the interpenetration and respective mirroring of microcosm and macrocosm. That doctrine was ‘influential’ beyond identifiably Neoplatonic thinkers. In this episteme the entire universe, from its smallest to its largest parts, from the humblest animal to God, consists in a series of resemblances, similarities and sympathies. There can be no concept of an arbitrary relation in which one thing, a sign, stands for and represents another. All relations are real relations, and all connections between aspects of existence reflect their respective natures. Hence symbolic relations both have significance and are real relations, or connections in nature. There is no space for the ‘classical’ gap between signs and existence. Renaissance thought is hyperrealist. The world presented to knowledge consists of emblems, traces, signatures and resemblances. These are the marks of that network of spiritual-real interconnections whereby the whole tissue of existence is held together.

I’m quoting here from an essay by Paul Hirst, who moves from this to a meditation on what we might call the ‘architectural Imaginary’:

For Renaissance thought a central question is how to present those traces of harmony and cosmic order—not to represent them but to make them immediately present to human subjects. In such presentation geometry has a privileged position as the fundamental mirroring of the natural order, since it is both an elaborated science of ordered forms and the present and manifest form of the order of the world. The figures of geometry correspond to the constitutive proportions of the world. The two fundamental proportional relations accessible to experience are those of the human body and those of the harmonic scale. Such devices provide traces and resemblances whereby man can be put into immediate contact with the divine. Hence the familiar Vitruvian figure has a philosophical significance belying the fact that it is a commonplace. Such figures and proportions are supra-intentional: they present the cosmic order, even if those who draw them do so merely from convention. For the Neoplatonic architectural theorist the order of the world could best be revealed through conscious purpose, through the rationally planned design of the architect-adept. This systematizes experience, putting it at the service of intellect and the superior perception of cosmic order. Hence the philosophical and practical significance of an architecture that links science, art and spiritual concerns. Proportions in structures are the visible resemblances of the order of man and the universe. [Paul Hirst ‘Foucault and Architecture’, AA Files 26 (Autumn 1993), 54]

I wonder if something along these lines is going on with Clarke’s vision in this novel? And, having started down this line of thought, I'm wondering if there is something similar going on not only in the original engravings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi himself, in all their proliferating ur-fractal architectural splendour and terror—but also in the tendency of my beloved genre to render its worldbuilding in quasi-architectural terms: vast cathedral-like spaceships, floating cities, whole planets smothered with buildings. There's a lot to think about, here.