20 Nov 2024

The Götterdämmerung Syndrome years

Submitted by Kimon

It's been a long time since the last update. Another year, another peak in greenhouse gas emissions, a "Götterdämmerung Syndrome" year before things get better, in Ministry for the Future parlance.

The Götterdämmerung Syndrome, as with most violent pathologies, is more often seen in men than women. It is often interpreted as an example of narcissistic rage. Those who feel it are usually privileged and entitled, and they become extremely angry when their privileges and sense of entitlement are being taken away. If then their choice gets reduced to admitting they are in error or destroying the world, a reduction they often feel to be the case, the obvious choice for them is to destroy the world; for they cannot admit they have ever erred.

 

We open by an obituary: recently, famous Marxist literary critic and KSR's PhD supervisor and long-time friend Fredric Jameson passed away (Locus Mag). He was in the acknowledgments of many of Stan's books.

 

Back in June, Kim Stanley Robinson was invited to the University of Oxford at the Hertford College for the official launch of the "Oxford Ministry for the Future" (OMF), which hopes to amplify voices for a sustainable political economy of the future.

Here's more background on the thinking that lead to this by Anette Mikes and Steve New: 'Our Ministry for the Future – Reshaping capitalism to help solve the climate crisis" -- a part of their academic article "How to create an optopia? - Kim Stanley Robinson's "Ministry for the future" and the politics of hope".

The inaugural event itself, titled "Inventing a Sustainable Political Economy for the Climate Crisis", featured Kate Raworth (author of Doughnut Economics) and KSR alongside some very, very interesting panellists: environmental historian Venus Bivar, climate litigation expert Ben Franta, corporate sustainability expert Mette Morsing Smith, author Laline Paull and environmental geographer Jamie Lorimer. Here it is below (YouTube):

 

Ministry directly engages with the functioning of international institutions, and this has gotten KSR invited in many venues. In September, he participated in the United Nations' Summit of the Future 2024 at UN HQ, New York City, an event where both world leaders and plenty of representatives of civil society participated. On the UN side, the event resulted in the Pact for the Future declaration.

As usual in such things, there were plenty of side events alongside the main political part of the event, during the Summit's Action Days: KSR participated in the one called "From Idea to Action and Impact: mobilizing the outcomes of the Summit of the Future", convened by the UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES Coalition:

This event will foreground proposals from the Wales Protocol for Future Generations, highlighting initiatives in community, national and international contexts demonstrating how the ambitions of the Declaration on Future Generations can be achieved.

Where there was an inter-generational discussion between KSR and Leonie Hoffmann, master’s candidate from HEC Paris. A recording of the event is on the UN's website.

See also side-event details at ASU; Summit UN News teaser; KSR interview in the UN's podcast The Lid Is On.

 

Some more interviews:

 

Ministry won the Best Foreign Novel award at the 2024 Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, honoring the best SF/F work published in France in 2023 (Locus Mag).

 

Ministry keeps popping up in many articles here and there. For instance:

 

Some reviews of Ministry:

 

Plus, some academic articles entirely focused on Ministry:

  • Monticelli and Frantzen, 2024. Capitalist realism is dead. Long live utopian realism! A sociological exegesis of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. The Sociological Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261241261452
  • Beke and Kiss, 2023. Planetary consciousness, biospherical governance, climatic rightfulness: interpretation and contextualization of Kim Stanley Robinson's novel The Ministry of the Future. Metszetek. https://doi.org/10.18392/metsz/2023/1/2 (Hungarian)

 

As usual by now, here are some articles that are related to Ministry and make reference to it (some paywalled):

 

Some more "odds and ends":

 

That's all for now -- stay tuned for more updates soon, with more maintenance work on the website in particular.

(Photo: Max Brückner's depiction of Götterdämmerung, the twilight of the gods, for Richard Wagner's opera)