Utopias are rare in fiction because they lack dramatic tension. Ministry for the Future serves as proof of this: after a harrowing opening, it’s 550 pages of life going very well for everyone in general but no one in particular. The book is largely devoid of characters or a traditional plot. Anything that might be interesting to the reader happens offscreen so that we can focus on extremely detailed descriptions of rewilding efforts as observed by dirigibles, brief meeting notes of government committees, or first-person accounts of the life experiences of a photon.
Here’s a short list of the book’s events which sound captivating but are unfortunately handwaved past in a few sentences:
- Terrorists use drones and swarm missiles to basically end standard air travel, shipping, traditional armed conflicts between nation states, consumption of animal products, and coal power.
- An open-source, distributed social media platform emerges that rapidly displaces all existing social media companies and allows users to monetize their own data.
- The world collectively agrees to a de facto individual wealth cap of $50mil / person and uses a variety of legal and extra-legal means to enforce it.
- Refugees are granted global citizenship and universal free travel.
- Fiat currencies are replaced by a single blockchain-based carbon coin which doesn’t have power consumption issues and just works.
Each of these would face incredible resistance from individuals, organizations, and nations. Unfortunately, the book either has no interest in exploring that resistance or assumes that everyone would come around quickly.
As a result, the world presented in this book is extremely hard to relate to even though it begins here & now.
