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Comment by thinkingtoilet | Hacker News Reader

Before anyone jumps into this book I would caution against it. This book had many very cool ideas and moments. The way it played out felt very "real". However, in the end there was very little actual story and was very boring at times. I actively dislike Neal Stephenson but if you want a near-future climate story I would recommend Termination Shock over Ministry For The Future. Just a random internet person's two cents.

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I also read KSR's book. It was interesting at times. However, the research on the financial topics, including the central banks and "global financiers" was quite bad.

I don't recall the glaring errors right now, however, given this is an area where I (at least once upon a time) was an expert, it was quite bad to read this and realize there are likely other serious errors in topics with which I am not at all familiar.

While this is of course a work of fiction, getting verifiable facts wrong, intentionally or not, ruins it for me.

I thought the idea of a "carbon coin" issued by central banks (the primary financial theme of the book) was on fairly solid ground. I'd be interested to know what you found implausible about it.

The main thing that irked me is that the book focuses on technical solutions as if that's what we're missing (carbon coin! pumping water from under ice sheets! etc.) but completly glosses over the actual consequences.

To piggyback on the rest of this thread, people like meat and don't want to stop eating lots of meat. People are not going to like things that make them stop eating meats, whether it's governement buying out producers, a carbon tax, a carbon quota, whatever.

"Ministry of the Future" is full of stuff like "and the central bankers could reshape the economy, so they did by doing XYZ" as if "XYZ" was important but barely discusses the fact that "reshaping the economy" might upset lots of people. How were they convinced to give up air travel, cars, etc?

I think in the book those people were convinced to give up air travel by the eco-terrorists known as the Children of Kali shooting commercial airliners out of the sky, and not shooting down cleaner alternatives like airships. A persuasive argument, to be sure.

> People are not going to like things that make them stop eating meats, whether it's governement buying out producers, a carbon tax, a carbon quota, whatever.

I think the point of the book is that when the consequences are serious enough, it pushes significant social and behavioral change that people would not consider or accept otherwise. It's hard for us to imagine how society could actually change so drastically, but when people have been through a crisis of immense proportions, they think differently. India completely transforming its governance structure seems implausible but only because we haven't experienced 20M people dying at once from a preventable cause. These kind of events are triggers for social revolutions. We've seen this in history.

Sure, but then the story is about 1. the Indian heatwave and 2. the transformation; whether the transformation came about through carbon coins or carbon quotas or whatever is a detail. But it's the focus of the book.

Right; that was my takeaway.

the eco-terrorism was an interesting aspect that I hadn't thought of before, but actually seems quite plausible

Since we’re here.. These are probably everyone’s top 2 eco-punk novels but the rest of an appropriate top 10 list is way more contentious, and imho sources like goodreads or whatever will always have many items that aren’t really even in the genre.

So I’ll offer the “metatropolis” anthology, which as a bonus has an audiobook version read by the Star Trek cast. Anyone got anything else?

Thanks! I'm generally not into short fiction, but I'll give this one a go.

One thing I like about The Ministry for the Future, is that it doesn't focus on the "apocalyptic" aspect (i.e., the usual fighting for survival), but rather examines the political and economic aspects.

I agree it doesn't have much of a story. It reads much more like a non-fictional recounting of events, but provides a lot of food for thought about how things might unfold. Just don't approach it like your typical novel.

Sounds a bit like The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkein. If you finish reading LotR and then try to read this book, you'll be in for a rude awakening.

I had trouble with the Mars series and never got through it.

I kind of wonder if it is easier for me to enjoy fiction that requires more "suspension of disbelief" with ftl or time travel, alien races and magic.

In comparison when I don't have to suspend any disbelief, we haven't met aliens, other worlds are actually too far to get to, and physics and science is unyielding... it is harder to enjoy myself.

> I actively dislike Neal Stephenson

Why is that?

I really liked Snow Crash and Anathem. Reamde was okay. I don't remember much about Diamond Age or Cryptonomicon.

I've never felt that in author is wasting my time while reading a book until him. He desperately needs a different, or any, editor. He manages to cram a 400 page story into 700 pages. Just non-stop side tangents and long passage after long passage that goes no where and means nothing to the story. It's fine to have stuff like that to build a world but this he goes overboard. If a character needs to get groceries, he'll turn one sentence about needing to go get groceries into three pages of nothing about how grocery stores work. I find it extremely boring at times, and after you read one of his books and get clued into this, it's hard to read a second book and stay interested.

I think I started having trouble getting through his stuff with the baroque cycle.

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