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.
| Title |
From Climate Model to Climate Fiction
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| Subtitle |
Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future as Operative Literature
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| Author(s) |
Ross Shields
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| 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.
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| Is Part Of | |
| Place |
Berlin
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| Publisher |
ICI Berlin Press
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| Date |
20 May 2025
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| Subject |
climate models
climate fiction
Kim Stanley Robinson
Walter Benjamin
Frederic Jameson
operative literature
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| 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.
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| Language |
en-GB
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| page start |
79
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| page end |
107
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| 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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