This morning I finished the latest book in our Unofficial Book Club, Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future. For some reason we started off with science fiction novels (I'm not certain exactly why) and we could never seem to quite get away from them. The Ministry for the Future is described as a "science fiction nonfiction novel." Truthfully, while it had some nice moments, mainly related to cool science things I didn't no anything about, I didn't like this book at all. It was as if Robinson wanted to tell, briefly, about a number of tangible science things that we could actually do to save the planet, he decided to do it through a poorly laid out story - which mean, at least in my opinion, that neither the story or the science really worked. Essentially, neither path was ever able to gather any momentum before you popped back to the other lane again. The question I kept coming back to was one of will: why don't we have the will to make these changes? In the book so much of the change was brought about by sheer desperation, either because of profound ecological degradation or a global depression or ecological terrorism, all of which raised interesting points but which Robinson never followed through with in any meaningful fashion. It received some great reviews, but then I think there are books that are sort of negative review proof (as in, the topic is simply not something that a reviewer feels he/she should attack), and ecological degradation is definitely one of them. I'm going to pass the book on to some of my science geek friends, who may enjoy it a lot more than I did.
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