If you imagine that dogs, not in the most extreme distress, would eat their fellows; or if you believe that bootstraps are a perfect lever – that rising up by them under one’s own power hasn’t always, ever been a farce; or if you consider the rapacious consumption of our world to be divinely mandated; or if you trust any American president as a man of the people (particularly all who came after the tricky fellow who claimed not to be a crook); or if you view the internal report that Exxon produced regarding carbon emissions in the late 1970s as a hoax; or if you think that the rentiers among us are virtuous and just; or if you judge regressive taxation to be a reasonable practice; or if you cheered when Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko proclaimed, “Greed is good”; click off now. This is not the book for you.
To those who remain, I say read Ministry for the Future. It is doubtless imperfect. It is, also, obviously a labor of love. I respect Kim Stanley Robinson all the more for having produced it. It is a rare gem of speculative fiction that does not end with a world in crisis. The device that K. S. R. employs to make this so is the rather violent end of our current economic system – fiction to be sure.