His most recent novel is called The Ministry for the Future, dubbed a work of “cli-fi” — climate fiction. It helps us think about the disasters in front of us, but also what we can do about them. Philippe Vion-Dury of Socialter magazine spoke to the author about ecoterrorism, geoengineering, and the themes that pervade contemporary literature.
PHILIPPE VION-DURY: Your novel doesn’t match classic genres of “utopia” or “dystopia”… it’s not even science fiction really. How would you define your attempt with The Ministry for the Future? Proleptic realism? Fictional Prospective? Some even say it is an essay or a political tract (albeit one that’s eight hundred pages long) turned into a novel. There are, indeed, multiple passages that are clearly meant to inform the reader…
There are some famous novels in American literature which make the mixed nature of the form very clear — Moby Dick by [Herman] Melville, and USA by John Dos Passos, which was [Jean-Paul] Sartre’s favorite American novel. These are great novels, beyond my capacities, but they have been inspirational for me in my own work, in particular for 2312 and Ministry. You could say these novels are in the form of a bricolage or heteroglossia, or poly-vocal braids — but you see what I mean. (...)
PHILIPPE VION-DURY: The ambivalence of a certain kind of sci-fi regarding technology is sometimes emphasized: while criticizing technology or it’s possible use, it also strengthens its core position in our vision of the future, its halo of ineluctability. We could say, with the Mars trilogy, that you were doomed to strengthen the belief that one day we will be able to terraform an exoplanet, and why not alter or save Earth, too, by these same means. You also stage geoengineering experiments in The Ministry for the Future, which carry an additional ambivalence: Even if we don’t want to do it, will we be able to keep us from doing it if things go mad? How do you feel about that?
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON: I want to point out that we have been technological for the entire history of our species, and indeed we evolved with technologies (of fire and stone and wood, etc.) to become human in the first place. Any simple criticism of technology as such is a misunderstanding of what humans are: the social primate that uses technology. Homo faber.
So, if the underlying power source for our civilization — a technology — has accidentally poisoned us — which it has — then it’s entirely appropriate to wield other technologies to reverse the damage if we can. Some damage can be reversed (buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere), but other damage can never be reversed (extinctions). Since we’re beginning a mass extinction event, we have to consider all possible actions as things we might want to do while they will still help.
Calling some of these actions “geoengineering” and then defining them in advance as bad actions is not a helpful move at this point. Women’s rights are geoengineering: when women have their full human rights, the number of humans goes down, and there is less impact on the Earth. Once you accept that, the uselessness of the word is made evident. Each move our civilization makes has planetary repercussions, and all are now important. Just think of it that way, please, and avoid all knee-jerk judgments in the service of ideological purity of the individual bourgeois subject holding said opinion. Purity of one’s beliefs is highly overrated.
PHILIPPE VION-DURY: Regarding technology, Ursula Le Guin says it’s “a heroic undertaking, Herculean, Promethean, conceived as triumph, hence ultimately as tragedy.” I’ll quote: “If, however, one avoids the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic, and redefines technology and science as primarily cultural carrier bag rather than weapon of domination, one pleasant side effect is that science fiction can be seen as a far less rigid, narrow field, not necessarily Promethean or apocalyptic at all, and in fact less a mythological genre than a realistic one.” What do you think about that?
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON: That’s all fine, and I loved Ursula and her transformative views, but she would agree with this, I hope: a carrier bag is a technology! So quit with the mythic distinctions and focus on survival of civilization, please, which will be a technological accomplishment, just as the danger was created in part by earlier technological accomplishments.
That said, the real creation of danger comes from capitalism, as Le Guin would also agree with. If technology was deployed for human and biosphere welfare, we would be in good shape even now; but it’s deployed for profit, appropriation, exploitation, and gains for the rich, very often — and so the best good is not accomplished and we are in terrible danger. This is not the fault of technology, but of capitalism, which of course is a systems software, so therefore also a technology — but a better one is justice.
by Philip Vion-Dury, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: Will Ireland / SFX Magazine / Future via Getty Images
