The Ministry for the Future is published by Orbit (RRP £20). “Have you heard,” one asks, “that the warming of the oceans means that the amount of omega-3 fatty acids in fish and thus available for human consumption may drop by as much as sixty percent? And that these fatty acids are crucial to signal transduction in the brain, so it’s possible that our collective intelligence is now rapidly dropping because of an ocean-warming-caused diminishment in brain power?” The other replies: “That would explain a lot.” Indeed it would. There is no shortage of sardonic humour here, a cosmopolitan range of sympathies, and a steely, visionary optimism.ĭark comic relief comes from fragmentary dialogues between unnamed speakers. Luckily, when he opens one of his discursive interludes with the claim “Taxes are interesting”, he makes good on it within two pages. Robinson shows that an ambitious systems novel about global heating must in fact be an ambitious systems novel about modern civilisation too, because everything is so interdependent. Within these pages there is much hard science, of atmospheric and oceanic physics, usually helpfully explained by a passing expert but also speculative military strategy – the invention of “pebble mob” missiles, which converge on a target speedily from all directions, renders almost all military hardware redundant – plenty of economic history and much comforting detail about the grey civility of Switzerland in winter. by Kim Stanley Robinson Hardcover, 613 pages purchase Early in New York 2140, two boys jump into their inflatable boat to begin the day's business, scavenging through the canals of a.

Kim Stanley Robinson, who wrote the classic Red Mars trilogy of novels about geoengineering the red planet to be habitable by humans, now offers a story about whether we can geoengineer Earth back into Earth. Meanwhile, scientists at the poles are trying to pump water out from under the ice caps to prevent them from sliding into the ocean and raising sea levels catastrophically.

New yorker kim stanley robinson