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Comment by SamBorick | Hacker News Reader

This is the inciting incident for the author of the Mars Trilogy's recent book "The Ministry for the Future".

I highly recommend it if this stuff scares you, and you need a little climate hope.

I'm halfway through the book. That opening bit is so great, and the rest has been a big letdown so far. Really feels like that opening was written as a short story and then the rest of the book was just tacked on. Maybe the second half will be better.

It doesn’t. I appreciate that the author wants to tackle big themes, but there was so much hand-waiving and wishful thinking about how people want to live and choose to live that it really undermined the plausibility of the plot.

I did appreciate some details, like the idea of airships for long distance leisure travel and large swaths of land being returned to wilderness. But overall it didn’t live up to the hype.

Maybe it was just because I was listening to it at 1.5x speed, but it definitely felt like there were just too many ideas jammed together.

Especially the CarbonCoin idea. Possibly a good approach, but it made for some bad storytelling.

Having read a number of KSR books, I admire the creativity, but find some ideas a bit half-baked. The characters and storytelling are generally a bit lacking in depth and development as well.

Consider reading Walkaway by Cory Doctorow if you haven't. Excellent book - I haven't read the one you're talking about but from what you mention I think it deals in similar themes

The book never gets better. It was a painful read for me.

That's disappointing. I had similar issues with The Mars Trilogy. I've yet to finish the last book, and the middle book took a long time to slog through.

> An imagined scenario from 2041

Why is this an imagined scenario? It happened in 2019:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_heat_wave_in_India_and_Pa...

Not relevant to the general topic, but, from that article, TIL Pakistan has a city named Jacobabad (cf. Islamabad), which was indeed named after a (British) Jacob.

And 2015.

I just read this opening two days ago, and it's frightening how well he paints the picture and how plausible it is to actually happen.

I read the opening chapter while sitting in my 95°F bedroom in the middle of Seattle's record heatwave. This certainly made for a viscerally impactful reading experience, but not necessarily one I would recommend.

kim stanely robinson? i remember aurora completely shattering my views on what it might mean to send humans to try and live on other planets. will try to get this one from the library

It's a bit preachy, and he really needed an editor to trim the fat, but the story's pretty good.

Does the book end on a hopeful note?

Yes. It felt a little unrealistic IMO but it does describe throughout the story many different solutions that are more and less effective / politically attainable.

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