(2021-06-27) Traven Ministry For The Future

Mike Traven on: The Ministry for the Future. the world manages to actually set up an institution to represent the interest of future generations. It asks the question, what if humanity actually took its collective responsibility seriously? What would that look like? In other words, it's an agency hack

The real action is in policy, not personal adventure.

There is little resistance from the base of society; and the reluctance of the bankers and other policy makers is overcome with a little bit of judicious and mostly bloodless terrorism.

he's talking about really interesting and important questions! How in fact do humans deal with problems at a global scale, and how can they do better? Thus the book is not so much about climate change as on the human effort to respond to it

Another theme of the book is that while law and bureaucracy is important, and in the best case can implement "a new structure of feeling", or improved software for the global villiage, the only real way to overcome resistance is with violence

I'm comparing it (somewhat unfairly) to another work of near-future SF I read recently, Distraction by Bruce Sterling (Sterling Distraction), where climate change was present but was just one factor in a general sense of low-key societal collapse, and the characters work through the political process of trying to get things done and rebuild more workable institutions.

summary, it kind of sucks as a novel. However – it's a masterpiece at something else; not clear exactly what you would call that genre (lightly fictionalized scenario planning, maybe?). The closest point of comparison might be Frances Spufford's Red Plenty.