Robinson's Voice in Personified Subjects

The Ministry for the Future is Kim Stanley Robinson’s letter to society. Robinson’s objective is to spur his readers into action, but some chapters are written as a direct order. This authorial voice is most seen in Robinson’s chapters dedicated to personifying subjects and forces a perspective that compels the reader to feel they are being told an action. Robinson uses personification in The Ministry for the Future because he believes the actions he orders his readers to take, are keys to improving our earthly problem called climate change.

Often, Robinson does not tell the reader the subject he personifies, but expects the reader to know it by the context of the second person point-of-view. For example in chapter two, the narrator is the sun because it identifies itself as something that “keep[s] [us] alive” and “spin[s] outside the sky” (13). As the sun, Robinson warns his readers that although the sun now “feed[s] [us]”, it will “someday… eat [us]” (13) which if anything, is an allusion to the effect of the sun’s heat to earth’s ever-growing climate change. 

Like a letter to society, each personified narrative is catered towards certain readers so the degree of imminent danger is clearly reciprocated. For example, there is the market that claims it is “so large that [it] ate the world” (192), a warning targeting specifically those readers in a capitalist society. Then there is the voice of the photon who has a lighter tone that is more approachable for certain types of readers. However, it still has the dire effect because it states topics as very matter-of-fact. The narrator, a photon, relates itself as immortal and immutable and unable to control its course as it “bang[s]” (236) across earth and atmosphere and inevitably affects climate change. With these subjects, Robinson tells his readers to watch for these things because they are the key players to earth’s growing disaster.

Robinson is demanding in his novel. As he personifies history in chapter seventy-seven, he declares, “now make me good” (385), his direct order to society to save the earth. The biggest key to Robinson’s vision is in the last chapter where he creates a second point-of-view personification of an unrevealed subject. It is “a thing” (491) which means inadvertently, it could also be just about anything. The biggest question is the identity of Robinson’s last subject which is neither alive nor dead, conscious or unconscious, not a mother but also many mothers (491). Robinson’s order, “now find me out” (491) reveals that the subject prompted in this chapter is what society might call the “cure” to climate change. This order orbits Robinson’s claim to the perpetual demise of the world as society knows it, but also submits to hope of a resolution or a subject that combats all the other personified forces.