Currently in the center of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, and I am a bit in awe of the teaching going on in the book. I need to check on the science and research behind, but I believe much of what KSR is doing is presenting current proposals on how to mitigate climate change. He has made this urgent (far more so than all the science presented in the Mars trilogy). Yes, it is undeniably true that I care more about the climate of earth than terraforming Mars… still I think this is written differently. Tiny chapters in an immense book. All characters connected tangentially by the crisis of our end-times… little first-person stories inserted (i.e. a kayaker saving citizens during a massive LA flood called “atmospheric river”) told by unnamed characters. I’m only half-way through, so what looks like experimental formatting may indeed thread together in ways I’m not expecting. Bravo if they do. What I am saying is that I am riveted by a book whose only plot so far as I can tell is apocalypse, and whose main character is a bureaucrat described pretty flatly as a middle-aged Irish woman. I loved KSR since I read 2312 in 2014… so much intellect and heart intertwined. Look at me gushing—like a pump pulling ground water from beneath a glacier for the purposes of re-freezing. Jesus.