Fair warning, lots of spoilers ahead of you have not yet read The Ministry for the Future.

Long story short, I’m just about halfway through The Ministry for the Future and struggling to see why it’s so well-loved. I need to know if there’s something I’m missing and it’s worth finishing, this is just down to individual taste, or it truly is just mildly maddening to read and I should stop while I’m ahead. Perhaps to some extent I also just need to put these thoughts out there and sanity check myself haha.

KSR is well-known for dense, well-researched, and detailed novels. Characters often take a far, far back seat to the narrative itself and the world he builds. I’ve read the Mars trilogy and I can accept that. Unique, nonstandard formatting isn’t an issue either! Often it can lead to fascinating interactions with the text, as in Aurora. However, it feels like The Ministry for the Future is less a coherent world KSR is showing us around and more a semi-coherent dream journal. The book flips back and forth between weirdly formatted, narrated dialogue and essays on political economy, every now and then interjecting an actual narrative or two.

Plus, this dream journal format seems to mistake detail for research and desire for likelihood in a lot of cases. There’s nothing particularly wrong with saying “don’t worry too much about how we got here” in the set-up to a story that stands on its own merits, but how can we use that line of thought to justify a supposedly thoroughly-researched narrative of the near future? Maybe this is simply a case of a KSR novel finally touching on my own areas of education and experience long enough for me to see the flaws, but I don’t really think Mars had this many suspensions of disbelief and I’m not uninformed there. In particular, I was continually brought out of the novel by:

• wondering what economist hurt KSR in the past given the constant assertions that economics is inhuman and somehow incapable of seeing humans as anything other than simple rational actors (despite modern economics being almost wholly focused on seeing humans and markets as irrational a lot of the time and what that implies)

• trying to figure out why the only terrorists that ever seem to get their hands on plane killing drones are the ones KSR agrees with, and never any governments

• trying to figure out why those governments respond to terror attacks by doing… nothing of note, even when global shipping gets massively curtailed

• speaking of which, trying to figure out how exactly society is weathering the effective death of the container ship and global trade with just the stock market being an issue (see: post-COVID logistics insanity)

• attempting to figure out how India, not to mention the world, manages to just conveniently throw off all vestiges of BJP and Congress and/or Facebook overnight.

Undoubtedly humanity is capable of great things, and undoubtedly even just the first half of The Ministry for the Future posits fascinating possible solutions to the problems presented by climate change. Undoubtedly we need this kind of a book as we try to figure out how to wrestle with this as a society. I can’t help feeling, though, that all the fascinating proposals and the well-researched science are cheapened massively by the questionable sociology, geopolitics, and political economy. Add to that the narrative and structural choices and the feeling I’m left with halfway through is a vague confusion at the popularity of this book.

So, the sanity check: am I missing something here? Should I keep going on the second half?