Tag: global warming

Ministry for the Future

Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson has gone into the future for us, and things are as we all, surely, anticipate. The world is burning and flooding and we are wiping species from the planet with aplomb. We have soiled the bed. Civilisation, basically, has fucked itself. This is not so much a catastrophe story (though it certainly begins that way), but a genuine and extraordinary exploration at what we might do afterwards to save what is left before the apocalypse.

I can see why Barack Obama called it his book of the year for 2020. Maybe if it had been published before he left office he might have kick-started a better response, instead of kicking the can up the road so future current numpties could blow it up. In Ministry for the Future the disaster of climate change somehow doesn’t (as we’re praying) miraculously come right by itself but escalates at an alarming rate. Who’d have thought? The UN sets up a ‘Ministry For the Future’, a body protecting the rights of future citizens from known harms committed by their ancestors. That’s us. The après moi le déluge generation. What a brilliant scenario.

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The Chthonic Cycle – book review

The Chthonic Cycle, by Una Cruickshank

First a huge congratulations for the presentation of this book and it’s glorious fold out covers, featuring Sasha Francis’s artistic impression of its themes. It sums them up, natural forces, re-birth, jewels, fossils, water, all strewn together across the page, interconnected and tantalising. Most of the stuff pictured I don’t recognise and nor would I if it were under my feet – how many of us have walked past a lump of ambergris in the sand or sat on a rock hiding a small fortune of ammonites? This book is full of things you may have missed.

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Overstory — book review

Overstory, by Richard Powers

This is another commitment book. I might have got on better with a rest before the attempt, having come straight out of some heavies. A chick lit or comedy, perhaps, to give a bit of a breather. It did overwhelm me, as I think a forest probably should, but not in a good way.

I persevered with it, through the numerous characters and their overlapping stories, because the theme is so important. The theme is that trees — or more particularly, forests — are the life blood and lungs of the world. We humans are destroying them at a horrifyingly alarming rate and something should be done.

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Flight Behaviour — book review

Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver

Dellarobia is a woman in small town hillbilly USA, pregnant at seventeen, now ten years a wife and mother who is bored and disappointed in her life, heavy with the burden of being judged and found wanting. Her husband Cub matches his name; I can hear his slow drawl in my head. He’s gentle, a two-hundred pound child and dumb as a cow and Dellarobia has the smarts but not the provocation to take her beyond small town life. “Her anger collapsed into a familiar bottomless sorrow,” is a good description of her state.

The book opens with Dellarobia walking up into the hills to a tryst, but what she finds instead is a small movement, a fleck of orange wobbling, a butterfly on the wing. It changes everything, as we all know a butterfly beating its wings can do.

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