Jens Martin Gurr, Julia Hoydis, Roman Bartosch
1
Modeling the Pitfalls of Climate Change Communication: Kim Stanley Robinson’s The
Ministry for the Future [unpublished draft – please do not circulate further]
Abstract: Drawing on recent work in the field of model theory, this essay engages with the
challenges of fiction-based climate change communication and presents a reading of Kim
Stanley Robinson’s 2020 novel The Ministry for the Future. It interrogates two key fallacies
about fiction and climate change communication: that literature should provide factual
information and that emotional identification is needed in order for literature to be an effective
aid in the process of communicating climate change. Suggesting an alternative understanding,
critical findings from the literary analysis are integrated into an ecocritical approach to cultural
modeling.
In the approximately two decades in which climate fiction has become a prolific genre of its
own, it has evolved significantly and developed a number of characteristics that make it a
relevant, if unwieldy, factor in successful climate change communication (Goodbody). Despite
its growing visibility and the increasing awareness of its potential, a number of concerns have
emerged in ecocritical analyses of fiction-based climate change communication that warrant
closer attention1
: one such concern is that climate fiction is often a form of ‘preaching to the
choir’ – those who read climate fiction are frequently not the ones in need of further elucidation
on the threats of climate change (Schneider-Mayerson, “Influence of Climate Fiction” 478–
79). Another key issue relates to affective and cognitive strategies of much cli-fi of the
anglophone Global North: the use of fear and the engagement with a growing sense of urgency
(Wagner), the use of fiction for “info-dumping” or “hectoring” (Goodbody and Johns-Putra 9;
Hoydis, “Dialogues” 16), or the simplistic reliance on identification with sympathetic
characters. One task of an ecocritical approach to climate change communication in and
through fiction therefore lies in understanding how literary texts “model processes of
environmental learning” beyond the didactic impulse of seeing texts as vehicles for information
or triggers of emotional response (Goodbody 320).
Judging from its many reviews, as academic engagement with the text is still scarce,2
Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 novel The Ministry for the Future appears destined to become
an instant ‘classic’ in the cli-fi genre. This, we argue in this essay, is partly due to the fact that
it “model[s] processes of environmental learning” (Goodbody 320) and in virtually
unprecedented fashion supports reflections on the pitfalls of climate change communication.
Modeling Climate Change Communication: Robinson’s Ministry for the Future
2
In order to show how Robinson’s novel functions as a ‘theory-generating novel’ in this regard,
drawing on model theory (esp. Mahr, “Modelle und ihre Befragbarkeit), we first introduce the
potential of a cultural theory of modeling and outline an understanding of texts as ‘models of’
and ‘models for’ debates on climate change. This will help us to address what we take as the
key challenge connecting both climate change communication generally and the above
concerns about the role and potential of fiction specifically: the intricate entanglements
between descriptive and normative accounts of climate change (Latour 43). We argue that the
classic ‘is–ought problem’ – which philosophy knows as Hume’s Law – is at the heart of much
of the climate debate and therefore also constitutes a key concern when thinking about fiction
as a means of climate change communication. Secondly, we draw on research findings
concerning the development of cli-fi (e.g., Goodbody and Johns-Putra; Johns-Putra) to situate
the genre within the field of climate change communication and to show in which ways The
Ministry for the Future compellingly addresses some of its key challenges. What interests us
here is thus emphatically not whether the strategies of transformation depicted in the novel are
realistic or whether its normative impetus could and should be followed. Rather, we investigate
how the text can be read as a potential instrument in climate change communication that in a
highly reflexive way unfolds the theory that informs its own practice of communicating
“climate imaginaries” (Hulme 225).
1. From ‘Is’ to ‘Ought’: Texts as ‘Models of and for’ the Climate Debate
The debate about climate change and, by extension, about climate change communication, is
complicated by the fact that its concepts are ‘thick.’ In philosophy and anthropology, a concept
is called ‘thick’ if it contains both descriptive and evaluative components (Müller-Salo 17).
While it is logically impossible to come from the descriptive to the normative side of things –
an ‘ought’ can never follow from an ‘is’ (Hume’s Law) – the transition is common in everyday
thinking and speaking, especially if moral concerns seem somewhat obvious. In Bruno Latour’s
persuasive example, “[i]f you are on a bus and you see a passenger is about to sit down on a
seat where you have put your baby, the statement that you won’t fail to make – ‘There’s a baby
on the seat’ – will certainly be a constative utterance … and a performative utterance” at the
same time (47–48). Latour’s point is of course that information about climate change and an
allegedly neutral voice from science no longer suffice as descriptive statements when the
biosphere is in peril, rendering climate change an exemplary case of the is–ought problem: the
utterance ‘The planet is on fire’ can hardly be met without strong evaluative responses.
“Astonishingly,” Latour concludes, “this type of utterance now comes not only from poets,
Modeling Climate Change Communication: Robinson’s Ministry for the Future
3
lovers, politicians, and prophets but also from geochemists, naturalists, modelers, and
geologists” (49).
We argue that fiction not only engages with these issues on a thematic or
representational level, for instance by including science communicators as well as skeptics into
its personnel and thus showing how the ‘is’ of scientific fact is notoriously turned into different
and incommensurable ‘oughts.’ Fictional discourse itself can in addition be said to spell out
the problematic yet pervasive move from description to evaluation, thus rendering literary
analysis a productive tool for reflections on the is–ought problem in climate change
communication. In order to make this case, we suggest conceptualizing fiction as an instance
of cultural modeling.
According to a general theory of models (Stachowiak 131–33), all models share the
characteristics of being (1) representational, (2) reductive, and (3) pragmatic. A model may
therefore be defined as a simplified physical, digital, or mental representation of a more
complex outside entity to which it must be functionally or structurally similar. Models are
devised or chosen for a specific purpose and – depending on that purpose – will selectively
focus on different characteristics, elements, or connections of the system perceived as central
to this purpose while disregarding others. Thus, a map of a city with color-coding in green,
yellow, or red to represent high, medium, or low average incomes per district is a model of that
city in that it (1) represents the city, (2) does so in a highly selective, simplified, abstracted,
and aggregate form, and (3) does so for specific purposes – possibly to support decisions about
where to launch social cohesion programs – while it would be largely useless for other
objectives.
Mathematician and information theorist Bernd Mahr has argued that models should
additionally be understood in their dual nature of always being both “models of” and “models
for” something:
A model is always based on something of which it is a model, i.e. departing from which
or referring to which it has been produced or chosen, its matrix. The purpose of building
or choosing a model is its use.… One of the typical uses of models is their use as a
means of designing [or creating] something. [Here] models are samples, preformations
or specifications.… The notion of the model can therefore only be explained
convincingly if it is acknowledged that a model is always both a model of something
and a model for something. (“Modelle und ihre Befragbarkeit” 331–32; emphasis
original; our trans.)3
Adapting this notion, a model can be understood as being to varying degrees both the
descriptive rendering of an entity of which it is a model and, at least implicitly, the prescriptive
blueprint for the design or transformation of a future entity for which it is a model. With regard
Modeling Climate Change Communication: Robinson’s Ministry for the Future
4
to fiction-based climate change communication, it seems relevant further to broaden this notion
to encompass prescriptive accounts of ‘ought nots’ – including, for instance, dystopian writing,
cautionary tales, and worst-case scenarios of all sorts. A literary text can thus be understood as
modeling the climate crisis if it is, again to varying degrees, descriptive in its representation of
(parts or facets of) the crisis, its causes, or consequences and if it is, sometimes only implicitly,
prescriptive in that it formulates directions or options for an engagement with or response to
the crisis or suggests novel ways of reading the crisis because of its engagement with the
normative polyphony that any ‘thickening’ of facts entails. This dual nature is also evident in
the fact that texts not only represent an external reality but centrally contribute to shaping
perceptions of reality and thus to highlighting that a different world is at least conceptually
possible or that a different understanding of it might be valuable.
The notion of texts as models lends itself to being applied to a wide range of
representations of and engagements with the climate crisis, and we are building here on extant
work in the field that conceives of textual practice as a practice of modeling (Bartosch,
Literature; Taylor). What we are adding to the theoretical discussion and will also point out as
central to a reading of Robinson’s novel, is the notion that novels can reflect on the is–ought
divide at the same time that they are bridging it themselves. However, and more clearly than
in Mahr’s original conceptualization, where “model of” and “model for” are two sides of the
same coin or may only be gradually more or less prominent in different models, ‘model of’ and
‘model for’ are here regarded as occurring in different combinations and gradations. To be
sure, Mahr clearly states that models “can be used for very different purposes: models can be
descriptive for us, like Bohr’s model of the atom, prescriptive, like [an ISO standard],
conceptual, like the architecture of a software system [and several further purposes]” (“Modelle
und ihre Befragbarkeit” 332; our trans.). For our purpose, however, it is precisely the
combination of and oscillation between ‘model of’ and ‘model for,’ between descriptive and
normative components, that needs to be conceptualized more clearly.
There has recently been an increased interest in adapting a general theory of models
(with frequent references to Stachowiak and especially to Mahr) to literary studies and in
disciplinary literary and cultural studies approaches to the theory of models (see several
contributions in Balke et al. as well as in Dirks and Knobloch; Wendler). Pioneering work has
been done, for instance, in two research training groups in Germany (e.g., Erdbeer; Matuschek
and Kerschbaumer; for a different account, see Frigg). Moreover, model theory is productively
being used in interdisciplinary contexts, for instance in exploring the relations between
aesthetic and economic modeling (see Model Aesthetics), or in the field of literary urban studies
Modeling Climate Change Communication: Robinson’s Ministry for the Future
5
with an understanding of texts as qualitative models complementing the quantitative models
currently dominant in urban research (Gurr). We argue that, given the prominence of is–ought
conflations in climate change communication, model theory might be especially productive in
this field, too.
2. Two Fallacies of Climate Change Communication through Cli-Fi
As a “significant body of narrative work broadly defined by its thematic focus on climate
change and the political, social, psychological and ethical issues associated with it” (Goodbody
and Johns-Putra 2), cli-fi has many forms and faces. It has roots in science fiction, but has over
the years come to embrace and incorporate speculative and realist fiction, thriller plots, elegy,
personal memoir and other genres and modes. We now seem to have entered a new phase, in
which a growing sense of urgency and ever more apocalyptic prognoses about the acceleration
and the increasing impacts of climate change appear to have influenced cli-fi production. The
beginning of this new phase might be situated around 2018: in climate science, this period saw
the publication of the 2019 IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing
Climate with its grim prognosis of a “decrease in global biomass of marine animal
communities, their production, and fisheries catch potential, and a shift in species composition
… over the 21st century in ocean ecosystems … under all emission scenarios” (IPCC 22) as
well as the first part of the 6th IPCC Assessment Report (2021) with yet clearer and more dire
diagnoses of the state of the climate system. In climate activism, this has been the time of
widely publicized milestones such as the emergence of the “Fridays for Future” movement in
2018/2019 or Greta Thunberg’s “I want you to panic” speech in Davos in 2019. Moreover, the
unprecedented number and intensity of storms, wildfires, droughts, heat waves, and floods in
the years since 2018 – all, as attribution science tells us, further instances of the reality of
climate change (Otto) – appear to have brought home to all but the most die-hard climate
skeptics that climate change is not an abstract problem of the future. One widely publicized
and hotly debated response to this increasingly gloomy outlook has been Jonathan Franzen’s
2019 The New Yorker essay “What If We Stopped Pretending?” with its claim – often read as
defeatist – that “[t]he climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that
we can’t prevent it.”
In keeping with drastically increased public awareness of climate change in this phase,
there appears to be a growing consensus that those who read climate fiction know the facts and
need no wake-up calls – much recent cli-fi has thus tended either to focus on inspiring hope
and on pointing out solutions or on the recognition of inevitability (sensu Franzen) and on
Modeling Climate Change Communication: Robinson’s Ministry for the Future
6
elegiac representations of loss and mourning. A case in point for the latter is Charlotte
McConaghy’s 2020 novel Migrations. Set in “a future near enough you could almost mistake
it for the present” (Morton), the text laments “[a] nameless sadness, the fading away of the
birds. The fading away of the animals. How lonely it will be here, when it’s just us”
(McConaghy 62). Passages such as the following are representative of this type of fictional
response to the climate crisis:
There are no more monkeys in the wild, no chimps or apes or gorillas, nor indeed any
animal that once lived in rain forests. The big cats of the savannas haven’t been seen in
years …. There are no bears in the once-frozen north, or reptiles in the too-hot south,
and the last known wolf in the world died in captivity last winter. (McConaghy 24)
In light of these developments, it seems pertinent to pay attention to two misleading
assumptions that continue to inform the debate about the efficacy of cli-fi in climate change
communication: the first one concerns the role of scientific facts in shaping and changing
behavior, while the second one touches on the role of emotional engagement. Skepticism about
these assumptions, it seems to us, has also found its way into recent climate change novels,
which, in the more ambitious and theoretically informed cases, no longer rely on them or even
explicitly provide critical commentary. We propose the designation of ‘cognitive fallacy’ for
the belief that information retrieval leads to meaningful or appropriate action. In climate change
communication, the so-called ‘gateway belief model’ was established to describe this
assumption about the role of facts, scientific consensus, and knowledge (Boykoff 54, 151; van
der Linden et al.). The notion that a central function of fiction in climate change communication
is the transmission of factual knowledge is informed by this line of thinking. However, since
literature must not be confused with “the eco-pedagogical department of the IPCC” (Garrard
47), the notion of learning ‘through’ literature needs to be reconceptualized to overcome a
simplistic – if surprisingly prevalent – reliance on communicating facts to “galvaniz[e] readers
into action” (Goodbody and Johns-Putra 9). This is one instance where cultural modeling might
help.
This also applies to the even more persistent problem of what we propose to term the
‘sentimental fallacy’: this conceives the emotional appeal of stories as central to triggering
appropriate affective and attitudinal responses, either by invoking sympathy or by inviting
identification with likable characters. Recent work in cognitive literary studies and empirical
ecocriticism4
has challenged such a simplistic understanding and demands a more nuanced
framework for the role and potential of literature:
Rather than treat emotion as a lever or switch to be directly calibrated and pulled for a
desired effect, the climate change communication community should adopt a more
nuanced, evidence-based understanding of the multiple and sometimes counterintuitive
Modeling Climate Change Communication: Robinson’s Ministry for the Future
7
ways that emotion, communication and issue engagement are intertwined. (Chapman
et al., 852)
Despite these insights, discussing the role of fiction in fostering climate consciousness, Gesa
Mackenthun has recently defended the ‘role model and identification argument,’ stating that
[l]iterature can encourage sustainable behavior by representing exemplary, e.g., carbonavoiding,
actions of believable characters.… inspir[ing] readers to reflect on and imitate
the fictional action. This requires narrative access to readers’ imaginations which is
usually best achieved through the deployment of exemplary characters (inviting
identification). (8)5
While identification and emotional contagion do play a role in readerly experience (Weik von
Mossner), assuming that ‘exemplary’ actions and characters instigate sustainable behavior
seems to us somewhat facile. That literary writing itself occasionally critiques such didactic
and idealist notions is a case in point. Take Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019): although the
novel does in parts – inescapably? – rely on such mechanisms, it is the personification of grand
issues, its representation through ‘human-interest stories,’ that the character of Piya ironically
comments on: “‘Human interest, huh?’ said Piya. ‘I guess the sci-comm guys in my university
would be happy about that.’” (302). All in all, it seems that neither factual information nor
likable protagonists inviting identification quite do the cultural work they are still often
believed to do.
It seems to us more promising to think of such cultural work as a form of modeling.
Regarding the above findings from model theory, both dystopian disaster imaginaries and
elegiac fictions of loss and mourning may then seem to be questionable as ‘models for’ in the
narrower prescriptive sense of model theory: they do not function as prescriptive ‘models for’
in that they fail to provide pathways to ‘positive climate futures.’ However, considering the
history of literary cautionary tales and the critical potential of dystopia, with its concentration
on the modeling of negative scenarios in order to alert readers to dangerous path dependencies
and catastrophic tipping points, it seems important to us also to understand ‘modeling for’ in
the sense of such accounts that do not center on optimism. These texts rather present and bring
into narrative conversation a polyphony of normative and value-based accounts of scientific
facts about climate, thus enabling deeper understanding of the complexity of climate
imaginaries as “sets of beliefs, narratives, technologies, discourses and practices that condition
what climate futures are thought of as possible, likely, or (un)desirable” (Hulme 230). Thus, if
model theory is to allow for a nuanced understanding of the entanglements of descriptive and
normative, of ‘is’ and ‘ought,’ then to disregard the function of literature in highlighting the
‘ought not’ would be to ignore important manifestations of cli-fi.
Modeling Climate Change Communication: Robinson’s Ministry for the Future
8
However, given the critiques of doomsterism and the widely perceived need for more
hopeful visions of the future, a prime function of cli-fi may well be to provide such scenarios.
This need is exemplified, for instance, by the Arizona State University’s Center for Science
and the Imagination: with its “Climate Imagination Fellowship” program, in which Kim
Stanley Robinson is centrally involved, the Center pursues the mission of “[i]gniting collective
imagination for a better future” (CSI). Its ambition is thus clearly in tailoring ‘models for’ in
the sense primarily introduced here, i.e. optimistic scenarios of a world in which humanity ‘will
have succeeded’ in averting catastrophic climate change. This function of the grammatical form
of the future perfect lies at the heart of what – beyond the much-needed but insufficient function
of inspiring hope – climate fiction of the kind exemplified in Robinson’s The Ministry for the
Future is capable of doing.6
Without referring to the future perfect and its grammatical and
cognitive functions,7
the inspirational effects of such narratives of how humanity ‘will have
managed’ are central to what, in her essay that also briefly discusses The Ministry for the
Future, Mackenthun terms “Social-Ecological Transition Stories” (7).
3. Novels as ‘Models of and for’ the Climate Change Communication Debate: The
Ministry for the Future
Given these insights into the potentials and shortcomings of fiction in fostering climate
consciousness, Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent The Ministry for the Future (2020) may well be
exemplary in its self-reflexive engagement with the debate, which goes beyond even what
Robinson’s earlier cli-fi novels, such as Forty Signs of Rain (2004), do in this regard (see also
Johns-Putra, “Ecocriticism”): On the one hand, it contains information on a range of fields
related to climate change – climate modeling, glaciology, geo-engineering, the global financial
system and monetary incentive structures, epidemiology, climate and health, wildlife
preservation, and a host of further fields – but it presents them in a highly ambitious
experimental literary form that undercuts the charge of mere ‘info-dumping,’ as we will discuss
below. On the other hand, it is clearly a novel of ideas with an agenda of inspiring hope that
the climate crisis may still be manageable – an agenda that is not as simplistic as some
discussions of the novel have suggested. Seemingly ignoring some of the basic conventions of
fiction, critics have read political actions of characters and groups in the novel (e.g., ecosabotage
and the assassination of oil executives) as expressions of the author’s views on
appropriate means of addressing the climate crisis (see, e.g., the reviews by Probst or by Frame
and Flamm). This, however, is not what a model-theoretical take on literary narrative suggests.
Modeling Climate Change Communication: Robinson’s Ministry for the Future
9
Beginning with a harrowing depiction of a heat wave in India that kills millions,
Robinson’s novel recounts the story of how, over decades and against a lot of resistance and
setbacks, humanity succeeds in a transformation toward a sustainable, more equitable world,
involving large-scale geo-engineering, sustainable mobility, cooperative agriculture, and major
parts of the globe reserved for wildlife preservation. A central agent in this transition is the
titular Ministry for the Future, set up as an intergovernmental body in Zurich in 2025 with its
head Mary Murphy, one of the novel’s two ‘protagonists’ (a term that will have to be qualified).
One of the central instruments in the transition is a financial mechanism implemented
by the world’s central banks: carbon quantitative easing, the financial remuneration of carbon
avoidance and sequestration by means of carbon coins, a cryptocurrency issued and backed by
the world’s leading central banks (Robinson, Ministry 172–76 et passim). The novel here
appears to share the diagnosis recently formulated by Amitav Ghosh in his similarly sweeping
The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021):
[E]xtractivist capitalism is on its last legs, its end foreordained by the withering of the
very horizon on which its existence is predicated – the future. When the future becomes
radically uncertain, nothing [financial] works: insurance, share prices, credit, dividends,
even money (which is, after all, a promissory note that someone must redeem.) (241–
42).
In Robinson’s novel, however, the central banks as the guarantors of capitalism’s continued
functioning, use capitalism to both save it and to transform it from within: initially skeptical,
the bankers argue that financial measures designed to make the world economy shift toward
sustainability are outside their “purview” of financial stability (Ministry 188), until Murphy
succeeds in making it clear to them that a world in crisis is inherently unstable: “[The Fed chair,
Jane] Yablonski nodded, grimly amused. ‘If the world ends, the dollar is in trouble.’” (188; see
also 288–89):
If [the world’s major central banks] were now using their power to protect the biosphere and increase
equity, the world could very well … take a new course.… And yet by their own criteria, so pinched and
narrow, they were doing the necessary things. They were securing money’s value, they still told
themselves; which in this moment of history required that the world get saved. (510–11)
Through these instances, the novel presents several models of climate action. However, it is
clear that no single measure can bring about the change. Although the emphasis on institutions
such as the Ministry for the Future or the central banks suggests a top-down approach, this is
counterbalanced on the level of the two ‘protagonists’ by the character of Frank, a development
aid worker who survived the Indian heat wave with severe post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD) and who, throughout the novel, acts as the visible representative of radical,
occasionally illegal, and even violent, bottom-up activism. Moreover, numerous references to
bottom-up activities also highlight their role in the transition. For instance, a four-page chapter
Modeling Climate Change Communication: Robinson’s Ministry for the Future
10
lists NGOs, activist groups, collectives, and other agents of change toward sustainability and
equity (Robinson, Ministry 425–28). Bringing together a heterogeneity of different approaches
as well as different values, including the strengthening of democratic institutions and economic
experimentation alongside eco-terrorism and various personal narratives of loss and resilience,
the novel models both potential pathways for transformation and a polyphony of conflicting
voices and incommensurable values, both of which we describe as ‘modeling for’ or the
normative side of climate change communication.
On the side of ‘modeling of,’ one of the most striking features of the novel is the
unprecedented amount of factual information it provides, with many chapters in the form of
meeting notes, lectures, expository essays, first-person accounts, and eyewitness reports.
Though this wealth of factual information – on banking, monetary theory, taxation systems,
inequality indices, health science, climate science, geo-engineering, glaciology, sustainable
agriculture, approaches to wildlife preservation, and countless further, economic, sociological,
technological, and scientific concepts – might be dismissed as a grotesquely inflated amount
of ‘info-dumping,’ this impression is dispelled precisely through the multiplication of voices
and the avoidance of an authoritative climate-expert perspective commonly chosen for such
factual expositions in many previous cli-fi novels. Thus, the novel features passages told from
the point of view not only of innumerable, often nameless witnesses and victims of climate
change as well as scientists, activists, and other agents of change, but also chapters with
“blockchain … code” (Robinson, Ministry 177), “the market” (191), “a photon” (235–36), “a
carbon atom” (327–29), or “history” itself (385) as speakers. In her insightful review of the
novel, Ahne appears still to understate the case when she speaks of “a Dos-Passos-like
multiperspectivity” (12; our trans.; for the multiplicity of perspectives highlighted in numerous
reviews, see also Berry; Burgmann; Canavan; Poole; Probst).
In contrast, Mackenthun comments on the novel’s “polyvocal concert – sometimes
chorus – of impersonal voices” (11) but does not read it as central to its mechanics of climate
change communication. Given her assumption that the effectiveness of cli-fi in climate change
communication depends on sympathetic characters endowed with enough interiority to allow
for identification, she – like others – rather regards the “lack” of “psychological interiority”
(Mackenthun 11) as a defect in Robinson’s novel. To us, however, this seems to be precisely
its deliberate and informed response to the simplistic assumptions of the ‘sentimental fallacy’
outlined above. Thus, with the refusal to put the many expository passages into the mouth of
one or the other ‘interesting’ or ‘likable’ character – often, indeed, of any recognizable,
individualized character – as well as with the impersonal clipped news-report style, meeting
Modeling Climate Change Communication: Robinson’s Ministry for the Future
11
notes, Socratic dialogue, handbook articles, riddles, or prose poems, and other forms employed
throughout, the novel appears deliberately to undermine and prevent readerly identification.
The novel thus ‘models’ the climate debate in the sense that it represents its complexities and
entanglements and points out possible directions for the debate – however, without simplistic
advocacy.
So far, however, discussions of the novel have tended to read it as a thesis novel, a
novel that uses fiction for a clear agenda, and have systematically underestimated its potential
as a think piece and exploratory text. As an example, we discuss one of the novel’s most
controversial issues, the role of violence in the transition to a sustainable world: it remains open
what share the Ministry’s secret branch has in the more radical measures – the shooting down
of 60 commercial jets in one day (Robinson, Ministry 228), the sinking of diesel-powered
container vessels (417), or the assassinations of oil magnates and other “climate criminals” (86,
254, 347, 390–91) – all of which lead to radical, ultimately more sustainable changes in
mobility, transportation, and economic production. Take the attack against commercial aircraft:
Everyone alive knew that not enough was being done … and the pressure kept building.
So it was not really a surprise when a day came that sixty passenger jets crashed in a
matter of hours.… clouds of small drones had been directed into the flight paths of the
planes involved, fouling their engines.… One message was fairly obvious: stop flying.
And indeed many people stopped. (Robinson, Ministry 228)
A number of critics less attuned to reading fiction as fiction – occasionally, but not exclusively
those reviewing it for scientific journals – have read the novel as a rather unsubtle call for
action: “violence towards petro-capitalist structures by agents from the Global South is
portrayed as justified, even necessary, as a form of anti-imperial struggle for survival” (Frame
and Flamm). However, we contest the view that the passage justifies violence. Here, the
distinction between the text as a ‘model of’ and as a ‘model for’ is crucial again – it is the
unwarranted conflation of the two that frequently complicates the debate. Eco-terrorism, we
argue, is here represented – descriptively, as a ‘model of’ possible future developments – as
one potential response to the climate crisis. However, the passage is far from simplistically
functioning as a ‘model for’ appropriate or legitimate action. Even if one made the crassly
utilitarian argument that the “seven thousand … innocent” casualties of these attacks pale in
comparison to the millions who die as a result of climate change and that the attacks, by
effectively ending fossil-fueled flying, save many more lives than they cost, this cannot be read
as a ‘justification’. The crashed flights predominantly involved “private or business jets, and
the commercial flights … had been mostly occupied by business travelers. But people, innocent
people, flying for all kinds of reasons: all dead. About seven thousand people died that day”
Modeling Climate Change Communication: Robinson’s Ministry for the Future
12
(Robinson, Ministry 228). Thus, if read as a ‘model for’, the passage delineates the moral
dilemmas and the ambivalence of such actions and thus rather invites reflections on the
distinction between representations of what might occur and what should occur. In sum, to
conflate the action of individual characters and groups in the novel with the author’s personal
views8
and to read the fact that violence plays a role in the transition as justifying that violence,
as some critics have done (Frame and Flamm, but also Probst), ignores the multiperspectivity
and underestimates the complexity of the novel. More appropriately, in one of the most
perceptive short reviews on the occasion of its German translation being published, Ahne
highlights this exploratory nature of the text:
A novel beginning in a very recognizable present and ending in a desirable future: Is
this possibly not so much literature as activism? And ultimately one that propagates
violence? It is not that simple. Science fiction writer Robinson … is too good a
storyteller to make his novel the vehicle of a message. Ministry for the Future is not a
how-to manual but a detached exploration of the dynamics that might turn a world
driven by the forces of inertia into one of change. (12; our trans.)
“[N]ot a how-to manual but a detached exploration of the dynamics that might turn a world
driven by the forces of inertia into one of change” is an apt way of accounting for the dual
function of literature that we are here describing by way of modeling theory. Interestingly, as
a text that speaks directly to some of the pitfalls of climate change communication, the novel
frequently contains explicit reflections on these pitfalls: thus, it comments on the cognitive
biases that allow people to ignore the threats of climate change (Robinson, Ministry 349), on
the “tragedy of the time horizon” and the problem that “we can’t imagine the suffering of the
people of the future, so nothing much gets done on their behalf” (172). It also – following Rittel
and Webber’s 1973 account of “tame” vs. “wicked problems” (160) – defines the climate crisis
and questions of global equity as “wicked problems, in the technical sense of the term [as]
problems that not only could not be solved, but dragged other situations down into them; they
were contagious, in effect” (Robinson, Ministry 482).
In another highly self-reflexive passage, the text even explicitly unfolds a model theory
exemplifying the dual notion of models as ‘models of’ and ‘models for’ as well as virtually all
implications of the distinction highlighted above. What is more, this reflection is to be found
in a central chapter depicting the meeting in which the key national bankers first discuss the
idea of the carbon coin crucial to both the plot and the conceptual work of the novel. In this
chapter, one of the novel’s ‘protagonists,’ Mary Murphy, head of the Ministry for the Future,
visits California for a meeting with the bankers and for a number of site visits in this model
state. The passage needs to be quoted at some length to show just how many facets of model
theory are elaborated on here, including issues of scale (for the notion of scale in ecocriticism,
Modeling Climate Change Communication: Robinson’s Ministry for the Future
13
see T. Clark; and Bartosch, “Scale”) and the simplifications and abstractions needed in the
reduction of reality to the model, but also the inverse process, the reintroduction of complexity
in the return to reality:
California … ran at carbon neutrality, having established strong policies early on. They
were intent to continue that process … what they were doing was a model other people
could learn from.… Inside [a big warehouse] the US Army Corps of Engineers had
created a giant model of the California bay area and delta, a 3D map with active water
flows sloshing around on it.… The Californians told her and showed her how the
northern half of the state was now functioning.… All this they told Mary while looking
down on the pretty model of the landscape filling the warehouse, as if from a small
satellite.… “It looks great,” Mary said. “I hope we can do this everywhere.” “Models
always look good,” Esther said cheerfully. But she was proud of it – not just the model,
but the state.
Back in San Francisco … on the top floor of the Big Tower [the view] reminded Mary
of the day before, looking down on the model of California, but this time it was real,
and vast. (Robinson, Ministry 183–87)
The passage at the end even suggests the need at some point to restore complexity and scale in
the return from the model to reality. It therefore seems important that, when it comes to
modeling “processes of environmental learning” (Goodbody 320), a discussion of modeling
must also bear in mind the danger of mistaking the model for reality, of ignoring the reduction
of complexity necessary to any modeling and thus ultimately the need at some point to restore
this complexity in an application of the model to reality (Gurr 15–18). Regarding the potential
of literary texts in climate change communication, this is the crucial step in which readers need,
as it were, to look up from the model and to apply insights gained from the model to our reality.
This need for readers to apply insights from the reading of texts to their reality can be
conceptualized in terms of what, following Hannes Bergthaller, one might call the ‘diegetic
leap’ from the textual model back to reader’s “lifeworld”:
At the end of the story, the seed is suspended in mid-air. In order to catch it, to achieve
the closure which the text withholds, the reader must reach beyond the text and take the
leap from the fictional world of the text into her own lifeworld – i.e., she must interpret
the story of her own world …. Such a conversion is, I submit, the object of all texts that
strive to “raise consciousness” or aim at any sort of political effect – and it bears
repeating that this conversion is not something that can be traced back to “facts,” but
an effect of the narrative’s structure. (167)
If a text is a plausible model of something, its being a persuasive model for something can
explain how we come from textual to empirical world in a variety of text types and by means
of different, yet structurally related ways. Important work on the nature and emergence of
literacy (Gee; Mitchell and Burkholder) can build on the insights of an ecocritical approach to
model theory which in turn can provide a better understanding of the role and potential of
fiction in climate change communication (Bartosch, “Reading”).
Modeling Climate Change Communication: Robinson’s Ministry for the Future
14
4. Conclusion
In a way that suggests a complex understanding of model theory and the function of models –
an understanding we have shown to be self-reflexively unfolded in the text9
– The Ministry for
the Future models the pitfalls of climate change communication by explicitly discussing and,
in its own practice, addressing its key challenges: while it occasionally zooms in on individuals
and on certain aspects of the problem, it largely refuses to heed what common wisdom argues
climate change communication needs to do, namely to scale, to reduce, and to personify. Nor
does it simply narrativize information or use emotional manipulation for narrative impact.
Robinson’s novel, it seems, mobilizes a whole range of occasionally conflicting narrative
strategies in its attempt to tell ‘the whole story’ of climate change and social transformation
and to do justice to climate change precisely by looking at it as a complex, “wicked problem”
(Robinson, Ministry 482, following Rittel and Webber) with its range of scientific and
technological, political, economic, and societal entanglements and implications. To understand
the novel as an exercise in ‘modeling of’ and ‘modeling for’ the climate crisis and the debates
about how to address it, helps to make sense of this complex assembly. The same can be said
about its personnel: the novel’s refusal to provide sufficient psychological interiority ever to
allow readers fully to identify with any of its characters undercuts simplistic assumptions about
the role of sympathy and identification in climate change communication through fiction.10
We therefore suggest that reading texts as responses to the previously identified
fallacies – the ‘cognitive’ and the ‘sentimental fallacy’ – and as literary texts does better justice
to narrative perspectives, questions of identification, and the manipulation of sympathy, as well
as to challenges in climate change communication. Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for
the Future, like few other texts to date, lends itself to such a reading, just as it lends itself to
highlighting the productivity of model theory in addressing the oscillation between normative
and descriptive, between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ and between ‘model of’ and ‘model for’ in climate
change communication.
Works Cited
Ahne, Petra. “Sind wir noch zu retten? Kim Stanley Robinson hat mit Das Ministerium für die
Zukunft den Roman zum Klimagipfel geschrieben.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 4
Nov. 2021, p. 12.
Balke, Friedrich, et al., editors. Modelle und Modellierung. Wilhelm Fink, 2014.
Bartosch, Roman. Literature, Pedagogy, and Climate Change: Text Models for a Transcultural
Ecology. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
---. “Reading and Teaching Fictions of Climate.” Holmes and Richardson, pp. 349–52.
Modeling Climate Change Communication: Robinson’s Ministry for the Future
15
---. “Scale, Climate Change, and the Pedagogic Potential of Literature: Scaling (in) the Work
of Barbara Kingsolver and T.C. Boyle.” Open Library of Humanities, vol. 4, no.2, 2018,
p. 26, doi.org/10.16995/olh.337. Accessed 04 Jan. 2022.
Bergthaller, Hannes. “‘Trees are What Everyone Needs’: The Lorax, Anthropocentrism, and
the Problem of Mimesis.” Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic
Conversations on Ecocriticism, edited by Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer, Rodopi,
2006, pp. 155–75.
Berry, Michael. “Kim Stanley Robinson’s Got Ideas to Stave Off Extinction: Inside his New
Novel, The Ministry for the Future.” Sierra Magazine, 6 Oct. 2020,
www.sierraclub.org/sierra/kim-stanley-robinson-s-got-ideas-stave-extinction.
Accessed 25 Nov. 2021.
Boykoff, Maxwell. Creative (Climate) Communications: Productive Pathways for Science,
Policy and Society. Cambridge UP, 2019.
Brady, Amy. “A Crucial Collapse in ‘The Ministry for the Future’: An Interview with Kim
Stanley Robinson about his Newest Novel.” Yale Climate Connections, 2 Nov. 2020,
yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/11/a-crucial-collapse-in-the-ministry-for-the-future/.
Accessed 25 Nov. 2021.
Burgmann, J.R. “The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.” Australian Book
Review, no. 425, Oct. 2020, www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/current-
issue/883-fiction/6892-j-r-burgmann-reviews-the-ministry-for-the-future-by-kimstanley-robinson.
Accessed 25 Nov. 2021.
Canavan, Gerry. “Of Course They Would: On Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the
Future.” LA Review of Books, 27 Oct. 2020, lareviewofbooks.org/article/of-coursethey-would-on-kim-stanley-robinsons-the-ministry-for-the-future/.
Accessed 25 Nov.
2021.
Chapman, Daniel A., et al. “Reassessing Emotion in Climate Change Communication.” Nature
Climate Change, vol. 7, no. 12, 2017, pp. 850–52.
Clark, Rebecca. “‘Visible only in speech’: Peripatetic Parasitism, or, Becoming Bedbugs in
Open City.” Narrative, vol. 26, no. 2, May 2018, pp. 181–200.
Clark, Timothy. “Derangements of Scale.” Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate
Change, edited by Tom Cohen, vol. 1, Open Humanities Press, 2012, pp. 148–66,
dx.doi.org/10.3998/ohp.10539563.0001.001. Accessed 04 Jan. 2022.
CSI: Center for Science and the Imagination. Arizona State University, csi.asu.edu. Accessed
25 Nov. 2021.
Dames, Nicholas. “The Theory Generation.” n+1, vol. 24, 2012,
www.nplusonemag.com/issue-14/reviews/the-theory-generation. Accessed 25 Nov.
2021.
Dirks, Ulrich, and Eberhard Knobloch, editors. Modelle. Peter Lang, 2008.
Erdbeer, Robert Matthias. “Poetik der Modelle.” Textpraxis, vol. 11, 2015,
www.textpraxis.net/robert-matthias-erdbeer-poetik-der-modelle. Accessed 25 Nov.
2021.
Frame, Bob, and Patrick Flamm. “The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson (2020).”
Polar Record, vol. 57, 2021, doi:10.1017/S0032247421000243. Accessed 25 Nov.
2021.
Franzen, Jonathan. “What If We Stopped Pretending?” The New Yorker, 8 Sept. 2019,
www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending.
Accessed 25 Nov. 2021.
Frigg, Roman. “Models and Fiction.” Synthese, vol. 172, no. 2, Jan. 2010, pp. 251–68.
Modeling Climate Change Communication: Robinson’s Ministry for the Future
16
Garrard, Greg. “Cultivating Viewpoint Diversity in Ecocritical Pedagogy.” Cultivating
Sustainability in Language and Literature Pedagogy: Steps to an Educational Ecology,
edited by Roman Bartosch, Routledge, 2021, pp. 47–63.
Gee, James Paul. “The New Literacy Studies.” The Routledge Handbook of Literacy Studies,
edited by Jennifer Rowsell and Kate Pahl, Routledge, 2015, pp. 35–48.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. Fontana, 1993.
Ghosh, Amitav. Gun Island. John Murray, 2019.
---. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. U of Chicago P, 2021.
Giesecke, Dana, et al., editors. FUTURZWEI Zukunftsalmanach 2017/18: Schwerpunkt Stadt.
Fischer, 2016.
Goodbody, Axel. “Beyond Communication: Climate Change Fiction.” Holmes and
Richardson, pp. 320–29.
Goodbody, Axel, and Adeline Johns-Putra. “Introduction.” Cli-Fi: A Companion, edited by
Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra, Peter Lang, 2019, pp. 1–17.
Gurr, Jens Martin. Charting Literary Urban Studies: Texts as Models of and for the City.
Routledge, 2021, doi.org/10.4324/9781003111009. Accessed 25 Nov. 2021.
Holmes, David C., and Lucy M. Richardson, editors. Research Handbook on Communicating
Climate Change. Edward Elgar, 2020.
Hoydis, Julia. “Dialogues with the Machine, or Ruins of Closure and Control in Interactive
Digital Narratives.” Open Library of Humanities, vol. 7, no. 2, 2021, pp. 1–24,
doi.org/10.16995/olh.4695. Accessed 04 Jan. 2022.
---. “(In)Attention and Global Drama: Climate Change Plays.” Holmes and Richardson, pp.
340–48.
---. Risk and the English Novel: From Defoe to McEwan. de Gruyter, 2019.
Hulme, Mike. Climate Change. Routledge, 2022.
IPCC. “Summary for Policymakers.” Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a
Changing Climate, 2019, www.ipcc.ch/srocc/chapter/summary-for-policymakers.
Accessed 25 Nov. 2021.
Johns-Putra, Adeline, editor. Climate and Literature. Cambridge UP, 2019.
---. “Ecocriticism, Genre, and Climate Change: Reading the Utopian Vision of Kim Stanley
Robinson’s Science in the Capital Trilogy.” English Studies, vol. 91, no. 7, 2010, pp.
744–60.
Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Translated by
Catherine Porter, Polity Press, 2017.
Mackenthun, Gesa. “Sustainable Stories: Managing Climate Change with Literature.”
Sustainability, vol. 13, no. 4049, 2021, pp. 1-22, doi.org/10.3390/su13074049.
Accessed 25 Nov. 2021.
Mahr, Bernd. “Ein Modell des Modellseins: Ein Beitrag zur Aufklärung des Modellbegriffs.”
Dirks and Knobloch, pp. 187–218.
---. “Modelle und ihre Befragbarkeit: Grundlagen einer allgemeinen Modelltheorie.” Erwägen
– Wissen – Ethik/Deliberation – Knowledge – Ethics: Forum für
Erwägungskultur/Forum for Deliberative Culture, vol. 26, no. 3, 2015, pp. 329–42.
Mattheis, Lena, and Jens Martin Gurr. “Superpositions: A Typology of Spatiotemporal
Layerings in Buried Cities.” Literary Geographies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2021, pp. 5–22,
https://www.literarygeographies.net/index.php/LitGeogs/article/view/162. Accessed
25 Nov. 2021.
Matuschek, Stefan, and Sandra Kerschbaumer, editors. Romantik erkennen – Modelle finden.
Ferdinand Schöningh, 2019.
McConaghy, Charlotte. Migrations. 2020. Vintage, 2021.
McEwan, Ian. Solar. Random House, 2010.
Modeling Climate Change Communication: Robinson’s Ministry for the Future
17
Mitchell, Claudia, and Casey Burkholder. “Literacies and Research as Social Change.” The
Routledge Handbook of Literacy Studies, edited by Jennifer Rowsell and Kate Pahl,
Routledge, 2015, pp. 649–62.
Model Aesthetics: Between Literary and Economic Knowledge [website of the DFG-funded
research network], model-aesthetics.com. Accessed 25 Nov. 2021.
Morton, Ellen. “In Charlotte McConaghy’s Migrations, a Woman Tries to Document a
Dwindling Species.” The Washington Post, 11 Aug. 2020,
www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/in-charlotte-mcconaghys-migrations-
a-woman-tries-to-document-a-dwindling-species/2020/08/10/dbbe3a9a-d817-11ea-
930e-d88518c57dcc_story.html. Accessed 25 Nov. 2021.
Müller-Salo, Johannes. Klima, Sprache und Moral: Eine philosophische Kritik. Reclam, 2020.
Otto, Friederike E.L. “Attribution of Weather and Climate Events.” Annual Review of
Environment and Resources, vol. 42, no. 1, Oct. 2017, pp. 627–46,
doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-102016-060847. Accessed 25 Nov. 2021.
Poole, Steven. “The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson Review – How to Solve
the Climate Crisis.” The Guardian, 20 Nov. 2020,
www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/20/the-ministry-for-the-future-by-kimstanley-robinson-review-how-to-solve-the-climate-crisis.
Accessed 25 Nov. 2021.
Probst, Maximilian. “Die Zukunft ist schon da [rev. of The Ministry for the Future].” Die Zeit,
21 Oct. 2021, pp. 29–30.
Rittel, Horst W. J., and Melvin M. Webber. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.”
Policy Sciences, vol. 4, no. 2, 1973, pp. 155–69.
Robinson, Kim Stanley. Forty Signs of Rain. HarperCollins, 2004.
---. The Ministry for the Future. Orbit, 2020.
Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew. “The Influence of Climate Fiction: An Empirical Survey of
Readers.” Environmental Humanities, vol. 10, no. 2, 2018, pp. 473–500,
doi.org/10.1215/22011919-7156848. Accessed 25 Nov. 2021.
---. “‘Just as in the Book’? The Influence of Literature on Readers’ Awareness of Climate
Injustice and Perception of Climate Migrants.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in
Literature and Environment, vol. 27, no.2, Spring 2020, pp. 337–64.
Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew, Alexa Weik von Mossner, and W.P. Małecki. “Empirical
Ecocriticism: Environmental Texts and Empirical Methods.” Interdisciplinary Studies
in Literature and Environment, vol. 27, no.2, Spring 2020, pp. 327–36,
doi.org/10.1093/isle/isaa022. Accessed 04 Jan. 2022.
Stachowiak, Herbert. Allgemeine Modelltheorie. Springer, 1973.
Taylor, Jesse Oak. “The Novel as Climate Model: Realism and the Greenhouse Effect in Bleak
House.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 46, no. 1, Spring 2013, pp. 1–25.
van der Linden, Sander, et al. “Gateway Illusion or Cultural Cognition Confusion?” Journal of
Science Communication, vol. 16, no. 5, 2017,
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3094256. Accessed 04 Jan. 2022.
Wagner, Phoebe. “Embracing the Environmental Grotesque and Transforming the Climate
Crisis.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Advance
Article, 2021, doi.org/10.1093/isle/isab086. Accessed 04 Jan. 2022.
Weik von Mossner, Alexa. Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental
Narrative. Ohio State UP, 2017.
Wendler, Reinhard. Das Modell zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft. Wilhelm Fink, 2013.
Yanow, Dvora. “Cognition Meets Action: Metaphors as Models of and Models for.” Political
Language and Metaphor: Interpreting and Changing the World, edited by Terrell
Carver and Jernej Pikalo, Routledge, 2008, pp. 225–38.
Modeling Climate Change Communication: Robinson’s Ministry for the Future
18
1
As Hoydis notes, “the difficulties of communicating climate change in any medium [concern] the
challenging complexity of science, scales, causalities and temporalities involved and its nature as a truly global,
yet only slowly unfolding crisis” (“(In)Attention and Global Drama” 340); for a more detailed summary of
approaches to cli-fi novels, film, and drama, see the section “Theme IX: Climate Change Fiction” as well as other
interdisciplinary perspectives in Holmes and Richardson.
2
Apart from numerous reviews, there is as yet little to no scholarly engagement with the novel. A brief
discussion is to be found in Mackenthun.
3
See also Mahr, “Ein Modell des Modellseins”; for this dual nature of models, see also Geertz 93 and
Yanow.
4
See Schneider-Mayerson, “‘Just as in the Book’”, “The Influence”; Schneider-Mayerson et al.
5
For a summary of the ‘sympathy and identification’ argument, see also Goodbody and Johns-Putra 7–8.
6
For a perceptive discussion of Robinson’s influential earlier Science in the Capital trilogy and its
“Utopian Vision,” see Johns-Putra, “Ecocriticism”.
7
In this understanding of the normative sense of the future perfect, we take our cue from the German
foundation FUTURZWEI (literally: ‘future perfect’), which seeks to work toward a more sustainable, resilient
and livable future through the telling of success stories of how, again from a future vantage point, this ‘will have
been achieved’ (see futurzwei.org, as well as Giesecke et al.; for this function of the future perfect, see also
Mattheis and Gurr).
8
In an interview with Brady, it is clear that Robinson finds violence against individual oil executives
problematic and does not advocate it but believes it may happen. He also makes it very clear he does not condone
many of the opinions voiced by characters in the novel.
9
The novel can thus be read as a ‘theory generation novel,’ not in the sense in which Dames or R. Clark
use it – as a novel by a member of the generation informed by ‘Theory’ (they name Teju Cole, Jennifer Egan, Ben
Lerner, and Jonathan Lethem) – but as a novel that in highly reflexive ways unfolds the theory that informs its
own practice. We might thus rather speak of this type of novel as a ‘theory-generating novel.’
10
McEwan’s Solar (2010) comes to mind as a novel that in similarly self-reflexive ways goes beyond
simplistic assumptions about the role of identification and sympathy (Hoydis, Risk 537–54).