Book Section
Ross Shields

From Climate Model to Climate Fiction

Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future as Operative Literature
This essay asks how climate fiction relates to climate models, focusing on Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future and referencing the theoretical work of Walter Benjamin and Fredric Jameson. It is argued that Robinson’s novel exerts an ‘operative function’ through the formal treatment of three themes: the feedback loop between climate scenarios and human behaviour, the impossibility of perceiving global warming as a unified phenomenon, and the difficulty of speaking for non-human actors.
Part of Breaking and Making Models Containing:
Introduction / Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Marietta Kesting, Claudia Peppel
Models as Media of Worlding in Sadie Benning and Fernand Deligny / Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky
Abstraction as Strategy for Worldmaking: Generalization in Freud’s Rat Man / Julia Sánchez-Dorado
From Climate Model to Climate Fiction: Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future as Operative Literature
The Slime Mould’s Many Bodies, or Modelling Networks with Physarum polycephalum: Fanon with Lévi-Strauss / Maria Dębińska
Persistence: Model Asylum Narratives and a Recognizable ‘Transgenderness’ / B Camminga
The Statistical Cloud of Race: Lancelot Hogben’s Anti-Eugenics between Populations and Organisms / Ben Woodard
Crises in Modelling: Articulations of the Romanian Labour Market in the Long 1990s / Alina-Sandra Cucu
Models, Markets, and Artificial Intelligence: A Brief History of our Speculative Present / Orit Halpern
Large Language Models, Parrots, and Children: Modelling Speech, Text, and Learning Processes / Marietta Kesting
Modelling Institutions, Instituting Models: The Juridification of Politics and the Performative Power of Naming / Natascia Tosel
Aesthetic Modelling at the Limit of the Human Montage: Vignettes of Homes and Homing / Marta Aleksandrowicz
The Exophonic Lyric: A Poetics / Mark Anthony Cayanan
Towards a Genealogy of Moffie: Troubling the Binary Model of Understanding either Homosexuality or Homophobia as Un-African / Ruth Ramsden-Karelse
Title
From Climate Model to Climate Fiction
Subtitle
Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future as Operative Literature
Author(s)
Ross Shields
Identifier
Description
This essay asks how climate fiction relates to climate models, focusing on Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future and referencing the theoretical work of Walter Benjamin and Fredric Jameson. It is argued that Robinson’s novel exerts an ‘operative function’ through the formal treatment of three themes: the feedback loop between climate scenarios and human behaviour, the impossibility of perceiving global warming as a unified phenomenon, and the difficulty of speaking for non-human actors.
Is Part Of
Place
Berlin
Publisher
ICI Berlin Press
Date
20 May 2025
Subject
climate models
climate fiction
Kim Stanley Robinson
Walter Benjamin
Frederic Jameson
operative literature
Rights
© by the author(s)
Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Language
en-GB
page start
79
page end
107
Source
Breaking and Making Models, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Marietta Kesting, and Claudia Peppel, Cultural Inquiry, 33 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025), pp. 79–107
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Publication scheduled for 20 May 2025