2023-10-24 22:02:55
“The Ministry of the Future”, a science fiction novel regarding the climate struggle by author Kim Stanley Robinson, hits bookstores on Wednesday. The book describes a humanity in peril that manages to mobilize in the face of global warming, with Switzerland and Zurich in the background.
“Established in 2025, the goal of the new organization was simple: to advocate for the world’s future generations and protect all living creatures, present and future. It was quickly nicknamed ‘the Ministry of the Future’.”
Told entirely through the first-hand accounts of its characters, The Ministry of the Future attempts to explain how climate change will affect us all in the decades to come.
“We should all be terrified. This is likely to happen if we don’t act quickly. That’s what I wanted to write from the beginning. Say, ‘Hey!’, stop with this illusion of adaptation, what is needed is to reduce emissions and limit the temperature,” Kim Stanley Robinson explained on Tuesday on RTS 7:30 p.m.
A humanity that manages to avoid self-destruction
In this science fiction novel, the utopia is simply that of a humanity which manages to avoid its self-destruction. “Will civilization be intact by the end of the century? This is the optimal scenario. The bar is very low for a utopia, but we are there,” summarizes the American writer.
In his work, humanity finally achieves this. After a catastrophic heat wave that killed more than 20 million people in India, terrorism, sabotage and uprisings, the Ministry of the Future, a UN body, was created in 2025 and set up its headquarters in the city of Zurich.
The solutions that this body then proposes and succeeds in having adopted “are not fiction, but reality”, judges Jean-Pierre Danthine, economist and former member of the management of the BNS.
“These are the measures that we know. A carbon tax that is sufficiently generalized, and then there are activities that we would like to have started, which are activities where we pay for the non-emission of carbon , and the one we talk regarding the most and which seems the most justified to me: it is to prevent primary forests from being destroyed in the Amazon or in Africa,” he explains.
A new relationship with nature
Monetary, financial, industrial or even agricultural action: everything is activated in the novel, but there is also a reflection of the relationship that humans have with living things and with nature. This is the message of the Zurich emblem Ganymede, a sculpture familiar throughout the novel and with which the book ends.
The famous Ganymede sculpture on Zuercher Buerkliplatz, photographed on Wednesday, September 27, 2017, in Zurich. [Walter Bieri – keystone]
Reportage TV: Pascal Jeannerat
Adaptation web: ther
1698194790
#Ministry #Future #science #fiction #climate #fight #Wednesday #rts.ch
