The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
While there's a fair dose of escapism in SciFi, at heart the genre's raison d'être is to explore possible futures, and this is absolutely where The Ministry for the Future sits, and in fact, the only (albeit important) science bits of the book are concepts that already exist, I suspect, at least as theories. At core, Robinson's 2020 book is about how we (collectively) may map a path to a successful (or at least not horribly failed) tackling of man-made climate change. It starts around now (2025) and ends roughly 30 years later, and is centered around a UN institution tasked with handling climatic issues, albeit with very limited means. I have a lot of niggles about the form of the book. I found the narration not to be as fluid as I would have liked, there are short, weird inserted chapters that seem to serve very little purpose, the voice changes constantly from first person to third to indeterminate narrator... But all this is dwarfed by the sheer ambition of the book and its breadth in tackling political, social, financial, scientific issues and more, and bringing it all to a coherent and satisfying end. So while I think the book could have been better written, I was blown away by the substance. One criticism that could be levied here is that the book may seem overly optimistic. I think the thought exercise was to map a reasonably believable route to tackling climate change, and as such, there is a dose of in-built optimism, but since the "believable" part still works for me, I would argue it's a success. While your mileage may vary, if you're not a climate denier, I'd say this is compulsory reading.
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