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The Ministry for the Future

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The Ministry for the Future

By: Kim Stanley Robinson
Narrated by: Jennifer Fitzgerald, Fajer Al-Kaisi, Ramon de Ocampo, Gary Bennett, Raphael Corkhill, Barrie Kreinik, Natasha Soudek, Nikki Massoud, Joniece Abbott-Pratt, Inés del Castillo, Vikas Adam
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About this listen

Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favourite reads of 2020

Established in 2025, the purpose of the new organisation was simple: to advocate for the world's future generations and to protect all living creatures, present and future. It soon became known as the Ministry for the Future, and this is its story.

From legendary science-fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson comes a vision of climate change unlike any ever imagined.

Told entirely through fictional eye-witness accounts, The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, the story of how climate change will affect us all over the decades to come.

Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us - and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face.

It is a novel both immediate and impactful, desperate and hopeful in equal measure, and it is one of the most powerful and original books on climate change ever written.

©2020 Kim Stanley Robinson (P)2020 Hachette Audio UK Science Fiction Fiction Thought-Provoking Socialism
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Not heavily plot driven but riveting nonetheless. Enough emotional engagement in the main character, Mary, to keep you invested. But the carefully researched facts and about economics, science and ecology are vital and illuminating.

Everyone should read this book

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The analytical parts of this story are priceless. The story itself is mostly interesting but I felt some passages overlong and even self indulgent. the reading is a bit mixed, certainly good enough but not great with occasional errors that should have been picked up. but this is a timely book bordering on a must-read, and the most fully systemic view of a planet since Dune.

brilliantly systemic exploration of our future

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I think very hard to enjoy due to distracting voices that do not add to the story in any meaningful way. What is wrong with just having someone with a comprehensible voice reading the story without doing absurd accents. All of the accents attempted are done so half-heartedly and creates a squirming awkwardness when trying to enjoy the story.

Really interesting story almost unlistenable voice acting

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🧡 This was fascinating and so very insightful about world politics and economics. It's an incredibly detailed imagining of a climate catastrophe and its aftermath. But as a work of fiction alone, it falls short, with the story very much secondary to the science. I’m still glad I listened and it's made me think about so much, but it is much more dire warning than novel.

💚 I’d compare it to World War Z in tone and structure, but with climate change instead of zombies. Both are a series of separate accounts in the aftermath of a disaster. But this doesn’t hang together as tightly.
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SOUNDBITE

🎧 Eleven narrators take on this mammoth tome and, for the most part, deliver admirably. However, there are some questionable accents and strange production choices at times.

🎧 There were enjoyable aspects of the audiobook, but on balance, I’d recommend the written version. This was very hard to follow in audio form.

Science over Story

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Feels wrong to write a review after only listening 3 hours, but one of the readers of this audiobook is just aweful, it is driving me bonkers. The attempts og «foreign dialects» «performed» by the woman that reads the part of Mary is so bad that it ruins the rest of the book. The irish dialect of Mary is good but everything else is purely painful to listen to. It is so bad it makes me angry. Would pay good money to have it rerecorded by someone else.

Good story, horrible reader

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