The Ministry for the Future
Novel by Kim Stanley RobinsonWikipedia
29
MENTIONS
17
EPISODES
14
PODCASTS
Search complete. 29 mentions across 17 episodes found for "The Ministry for the Future".
Nov 3, 2026
Steve RichardsHOST
Yeah, it's great actually to widen this, although Nick has some doubts about the criteria and the way we're applying it.
Steve RichardsHOST
One I haven't heard of, The Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson about climate breakdown.
Steve RichardsHOST
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn.
Steve RichardsHOST
I imagine it goes without saying that 1984, Brave New World and Animal Farm remain essential political reading and perhaps more relevant than ever.
Aruna ChandrasekharGUEST
To be clear, Mumbai was not on the list of the world's hottest 50 cities in April, all of which cataclysmically in India.
Aruna ChandrasekharGUEST
Mumbai's is not the kind of heat that lodges itself in the foreign correspondents' imagination, or recalls Kim Stanley Robinson's novel, The Ministry for the Future, in which more than 20 million people die in the furnace of a North Indian high heatwave.
Aruna ChandrasekharGUEST
But the Mumbai heat can be more insidious than the 40C plus weeks that have now been baked into the summers of the Indo-Gingetic Plain.
Aruna ChandrasekharGUEST
Daytime air temperatures are in the high 30s, while wet bulb temperatures, which measure humidity as well as air temperature, hover around an oppressive 28C.
9 MINS LATER
Aruna ChandrasekharGUEST
So yeah, you've got the old colonial bits of the city, you've got fancy new parts, you've got international airports, you've got all of that.
Aruna ChandrasekharGUEST
And this is the financial capital of India.
Aruna ChandrasekharGUEST
So it's also very different from, you know, a rural heat wave set in the Ministry for the Future, where you are looking at And for me, that was one thing where I'm like, if I'm not sure of the numbers and I feel insincere sort of estimating them, then, you know, if there is, you know, those issues of debts are important and they're terribly important.
Aruna ChandrasekharGUEST
But what is it like to live with it? And it's also a question of the living.
Jake Casella BrookinsHOST
And thinking about that, that sort of like back and forth of using science fiction itself as something of, if not a political tool, at least maybe like a potential kind of political blueprint, right? That like, here's how we could think about things.
Jake Casella BrookinsHOST
That has a very, right? I think Robinson's work, like I'm thinking particularly of the Ministry for the Future and maybe the Science and the Capital Trilogy.
Jake Casella BrookinsHOST
That have this deep commitment to a kind of openness and spirit of international cooperation.
Jake Casella BrookinsHOST
Right.
Jake Casella BrookinsHOST
But I feel like feel conflicted in ways that kind of rhyme with this.
Jake Casella BrookinsHOST
Right.
Jake Casella BrookinsHOST
And that in, you know, in the ministry for the future that it has on the one hand, this really.
Jake Casella BrookinsHOST
glowing side of this is how we're all going to come together.
Farrah BosticHOST
Yeah.
Farrah BosticHOST
I mean, I guess the properly construed then people, you know, should be understanding this as a race that even if Democrats do well for varying definitions of the word well, the cycle is one in which they are still behind.
Farrah BosticHOST
Right.
Farrah BosticHOST
and will continue to be behind and this is part of what i guess i get out with the sense of if you're a if you're a low information as they like to say a voter and you're not or you are just a person does not pay attention to politics all the time and your thought is well you know congress hasn't done anything except a tax cut and a couple other things i don't know about and now it's their chance to do something and they kind of conveniently forget that the president has a veto, and they conveniently forget that the Roberts Court also has a veto, then they will feel disillusioned by Democrats being in charge of Congress.
Mike PodhorzerGUEST
But we all are.
Mike PodhorzerGUEST
And we are seen as less than for not understanding how our whole way of life depends on observing them, even when it doesn't work in our interests.
Farrah BosticHOST
I mean, the thing I like about Rebecca Tracer's piece about Troy Jackson is try though the consultants might, he still answers people's questions and does so in the way that he would.
Farrah BosticHOST
Like the consultant speak is it's taken a while to permeate into him.
Kelly ShueGUEST
This was one of the inspirational books for why I started working on this.
Kelly ShueGUEST
called Ministry for the Future by Kim Robinson.
Kelly ShueGUEST
What that book describes is a horrific wet bulb episode that occurs in India.
Kelly ShueGUEST
It's only a week, but it's a week-long heat wave that kills 20 million people.
Catherynne M. ValentePANELIST
I love that one.
Catherynne M. ValentePANELIST
Ministry for the Future? Yeah, Ministry for the
Dan MorenHOST
Future.
Dan MorenHOST
Team two, we are at time and we need an answer, I'm afraid.
Catherynne M. ValentePANELIST
High Dune's all I got.
Dan MorenHOST
All right.
Catherynne M. ValentePANELIST
Ministry for the Future Wars.
speaker_2PANELIST
We're going to go to the audience.
Timothy LockGUEST
We have this, me and a few other colleagues nationally have this climate fiction book club that we do.
Timothy LockGUEST
And we most recently read Ministry for the Future.
Timothy LockGUEST
I don't know, Kim Stanley Robinson book.
Timothy LockGUEST
Maybe you've read it.
Max WilbertHOST
Yeah, absolutely.
Max WilbertHOST
Well, we don't know what shape the future is going to take, and I don't know if you've read Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future, I imagine.
Max WilbertHOST
Oh,
Adam McKayGUEST
the best.
Peter Marcus BachHOST
I do have a book in my shelf, but yeah, I'm slowly going through my fiction backlog.
Peter Marcus BachHOST
So, you know, I've read Kim Stanley's other one, which was The Ministry for the Future.
Peter Marcus BachHOST
Quite funny because it takes place in Switzerland and I was so familiar with all the locations, but yeah.
Joshua HarrisonGUEST
Well, he lives in California, travels all over the world, and is unafraid to think about what it all means.
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