In September 2022 we met to discuss the first fiction book choosen for the book club: The Ministry For The Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.

This book offers a vision of the coming century honest to the scale of the climate crisis and a plausible path to addressing it. The ministry is a group created according to existing provisions of the Paris Climate Agreement, with the mandate to “advocate for the world’s future generations of citizens” and defend “all living creatures present and future…by promoting their legal standing and physical protection.” The staff includes professionals adept in law, economics, ecology, earth, ocean and atmospheric sciences; disaster and refugee specialists; and artificial intelligence.  The story begins with tragedy in 2025 and ends in the 2040’s with a hopeful, but long road ahead scenario.

Kim Stanley Robinson is an American writer of science fiction. He has published twenty-two novels and numerous short stories and is best known for his Mars trilogy. Many of his novels and stories have ecological, cultural, and political themes and feature scientists as heroes. Robinson has won numerous awards, including the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Nebula Award for Best Novel and the World Fantasy Award. Robinson's work has been labeled by The Atlantic as "the gold-standard of realistic, and highly literary, science-fiction writing."