CBR Bingo: TBR
I’ve owned The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson for at least a few years. I think I bought it because the front cover said, “One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of the Year” and the premise sounded interesting. Somewhat disappointingly, I ended up DNFing this one at about the 30% mark, but I got enough of an impression of it to want to write a review.
In the near future (which might now technically be the past, since I took so long to pick this up), India experiences devastating heat waves, killing millions. Frank is an American visiting as part of a humanitarian aid organization and becomes one of the very few survivors in a city greatly impacted. Suffering from survivor’s guilt and extreme PTSD, he begins to take extreme views on the prevention of climate change. Mary is the leader of the titular Ministry for the Future, a multi-national organisation dedicated to preserving the planet for future generations.
From as far as I got into it, this book was well-written, and I liked the message it was trying to send. Frank and Mary’s storylines were interesting, and they were just beginning to intersect. What killed it for me though was the disjointedness of the other part of the book. This is approximately 500 pages long, and there are over 100 chapters in this book. We’re constantly flicking back and forth between Frank’s story, Mary (and her teammates’) stories, as well as what can only be described as short essays. Again, these weren’t necessarily bad, but there were far too many of them, and they really disrupted the flow of my enjoyment of the story being told. The experience was a bit like trying to watch a dramatic TV show and someone coming in and changing the channel to a documentary every 2 minutes. You might like both shows, but you don’t necessarily want to watch them at the same time.
Ultimately, this got to the point where I dreaded picking it up again, so I just didn’t. I don’t think it’s a bad book, but stylistically, it’s just not for me. It might work better for people who tend to read in smaller doses, rather than carving out a few hours at a time to sit down and read.
