Abstrakt
Although Kim Stanley Robinson's science-fiction works New York 2140 (2017) and The Ministry for the Future (2020) both address the world's environmental destruction and consider global transformations towards better futures, the later novel raises problems only marginally present in the earlier one. Without bypassing the question of American hegemony, The Ministry for the Future shifts its primary focus from the United States to multiple global locations.
If the gruesomeness of the world in New York 2140 remains largely in the background, violence and counter-violence permeate the chapters of The Ministry for the Future. More somber and melancholy, the more recent novel does not conclude that a solution to the destruction of humans and the rest of the natural world is (eco)terrorism but as Gerry Canavan wrote in the Los Angeles Review of Books "[w]hat passes for hope here is [...] a very particular, very narrow trail somewhere between reform, revolution, and revenge." For that reason, I will read the shift from New York 2140 to The Ministry for the Future alongside Mary Kaldor's analysis of old wars, new wars and wars on terror, and highlight the novels' transnational tactics and strategies of non-violent resistance.
Specifically, I will emphasize the role in the novel of liberation theology movements, organic farms and ecovillages, the 2000 Watt society, refugee aid centers and other such civil-society formations in the dismantling of the violence of petro-states and fossil-fuel companies.