ABSTRACT Climate fiction's dominant futurist imaginaries trend towards resolved futures, particularly in apocalyptic and techno‐utopian representations of our climate futures. These closure‐driven narratives treat the future as a fated, distant event, limiting climate fiction's interrogation of human agency, responsibility, and potential action in the face of a global climate crisis. Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future (2020) rejects the notion of fated futures, instead depicting the future as unresolved, ongoing, and open to human intervention. Robinson's multi‐perspectival writing refuses to prioritise any one perspective or strategy for imagining our climate futures as he perpetually stages but does not resolve the contested struggles to act against environmental collapse. His novel interrogates questions of agency, violence, and justice, first marrying scientific solutions with structural reform and then undermining such rationalist approaches with unethical tactics, secretive operations, and mystical forces, ultimately revealing that a better world must be fought for and the power for such change comes from unlikely and/or unwanted figures and places. By juxtaposing climate disasters, systemic problems, and survival strategies, Robinson generates new talking points, even when the conversions are far‐fetched. In his climate imaginary, there is no linear path to survival nor to destruction. The novel instead imagines a diverse assemblage of tactics and actors, with Robinson writing against fatedness through his constant excavation of movements and reforms that can all propel alternative futures.
Maryn Gardner (Sat,) studied this question.