Jonfaith's Reviews > The Ministry for the Future

Enough should be a human right, a floor below which no one can fall; also a ceiling above which no one can rise. Enough is as good as a feast—or better.

How Scandanavian, as Bjork once opined (in an unrelated context). This book oozes optimism which by definition isn't bad but reading it only gives us an escape, not even a set of dreams, perhaps a hatful of dreams would suffice, let's ask Willy W.
Or Wily Brandt as he knelt.
It isn't an urge to be glib but a recognition which fuels this post. I suffer from biosphere grief, a sense of loss and impending collapse. KSR gives us a hopeful yarn. Another reviewer said this is a counterpart to his The Years of Rice and Salt . I really liked that exploration in alternate history. I didn't care near as much for this, a literary effort to forestall defeatism?
The opening of the novel is harrowing, and I wasn't familiar with wet bulb conditions, but I could feel such through the prose, which is an endorsement for sure. It is the subsequent happy turns (although many of them are the result of sweeping acts of terror which somehow receive a pass, authorial or otherwise) and the surfeit of questionable science. I understand this is speculative fiction, but some leaps are ridiculous, but then I'm just an aged cynical progressive, still searching for an embraceable metanarrative.