Reading the Future in Situ
Was it a good idea to read Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future while I was visiting India? It was spring in North America and a too-hot-too-soon start to summer in India.
In the book, the temperature hits 42° C in Delhi (that’s over 107° F). The protagonist, working for an NGO, persuades the locals to go dip in a lake, which turns out to be hellishly warm and dreadfully polluted. Spoiler here: People die in the millions.
Temperatures are rising in the real India as well. On the outskirts of Chennai, the humidity (in my real-life present moment while I was reading the book) made the day’s 38 degrees C feel more like 47.
We weren’t jumping in any lakes. Instead we ate mangoes and tried our best to create breezes with ceiling fans. But Tamilnadu State, I’m told, is something of a leader in alternative energy. Solar and wind are tossed around in conversation, although I didn’t see huge evidence of either in the narrow window of my 3-week trip. Everyone agreed these technologies are part of a necessary future but in ordinary conversations, I rarely heard the words “climate” and “change” cobbled together.
In Robinson’s book, the Minister for the Future, Mary Murphy, calls her counterpart in India, with whom she’s on first-name terms. The Indian government plans to spray sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere to replicate the blanketing effect of a massive volcanic eruption. An international task force is at work tackling the very problem we’re really plummeting towards even now—the unsurvivable “wet-bulb” temperatures causing the catastrophe that opens the novel. It’s hard to see where fiction ends and plausible reality begins.
The story moves slowly and relentlessly through the technological possibilities—geoengineering, atmospheric physics, oceanic physics, obscure military maneuvers. The terrorist network named the “Children of Kali” builds on the logic of desperate activists in our own time. .
The speculation is pretty close to our reality, but manages to remain curiously hopeful. Sometimes that can be reassuring. On days when the headlines portend disaster, real hope can feel like a fictional stretch.
