The Ministry for the Future

Mary serves as the minister for the Ministry for the Future. Over the course of the novel, she transforms from a conventional, idealistic bureaucrat to a tough-minded negotiator who is not above using violence to force people to act. Mary’s friendships and professional relationships are the main reason that her approach to her work evolves.

At the start of the novel, Mary believes in the rule of law, diplomacy, and nonviolence as the path forward to address climate change. By the time Frank holds her hostage, she has come to believe that much of this work is futile, a fact that makes her susceptible to Frank’s argument that it is time to take more drastic action. Her subsequent conversation with Badim about starting a black wing reveals to her that she has been deeply naïve in believing that ideals and bureaucracy would be enough to effect change. She has the same realization when her time-consuming negotiations with the banks to set up carbon coin initially fails.

Having learned this lesson, she becomes a brutal negotiator who reminds members of the central banks that the ministry’s projects have the power to destroy them. She curses at them, shows her personal disdain for them, and threatens them. When the US Federal Reserve and the other central banks finally capitulate to her, she shows her statecraft by allowing them to maintain the illusion that they are still forces for the status quo despite their radical actions.

Mary’s actions, thoughts, and words characterize her, but the bulk of this characterization is devoted to showing her evolution in her professional role. However, near the end of the novel, Mary’s relationships with Frank and Art show her awareness that work has consumed her life, to the detriment of her personal happiness. Mary’s character arc ends while she is spending carnival with Art, an indication that she intends to spend her remaining years focused on personal happiness.

Frank enters the narrative as an idealistic aid worker in a clinic in Uttar Pradesh, India. The defining moment in his life is being the sole survivor when the heat wave strikes. Frank’s struggle is to overcome his sense of guilt that his privilege as a Westerner enabled him to survive when others did not. He tries many means—violence, service to refugees, and aligning his lifestyle with his environmental values—to redeem himself, but it is his relationship with Mary that impacts him the most.

During the heat wave, Frank makes several choices that contribute to his survival. He hides his water, for example, and he has access to an air conditioner and phone because of his role at the clinic. After surviving the heat wave, Frank begins to wonder why he survives, and although Frank accepts one of his rescuer’s comments that maybe it was luck, Frank intuits that his greatest advantage was being born in a country that made him physically more robust than the people who died around him.

Frank’s trauma, this guilt, and social isolation after the heat wave radicalize him. He tries to join like-minded people by volunteering for the Children of Kali, but they reject him because he is a white foreigner who is only useful to them as a person who can deliver their threats to people like him. Their rejection leaves Frank as a lone wolf who engages in acts of violence, such as killing Edmund and holding Mary hostage. Mary’s willingness to listen to Frank prevents him from killing her, however, an outcome that changes his life, especially because his strange relationship with her is the only one he sustains over the years. He becomes her sparring partner as they talk about the problems facing the planet, and she serves as a source of stability and connection to society over the years.

Still, he is a lonely, damaged man who seems incapable of overcoming his near-death experience, as his failed marriage to Syrine shows. Frank dies of cancer, and although Mary shows up every day to sit with him, he dies alone. His life is a cautionary tale that shows the futility of individual action and the importance of connection to survival.

Badim is Mary’s chief of staff at the Ministry for the Future and the founder of the Children of Kali. The bulk of his characterization comes in the form of his words and actions, but until he reveals that he is the founder of the Children of Kali, most of these actions are hidden.

Robinson hints that Badim might be more than a static character via the description of Mary’s frightened reaction to his “distant, intense, calculating, cold” (34) eyes after they meet about the ineffectiveness of the ministry in the 2020s. This is likely the moment when he conceives of the ministry’s black wing, which turns out to be the Children of Kali. Badim’s periodic meetings with Mary confirm that the black wing is operating, but the sparse details he gives Mary leave the reader to conclude that he is engaged in some actions that are illegal but not necessarily radical. His work in the ministry shows that he endorses Mary’s commitment to relying on the law to get some of their work done.

In Chapter 78, Robinson provides Badim’s back story—he was an outsider who engaged in petty crime but whose initiative and luck allowed him to gain opportunities unavailable to most of his peers. The shocking revelation that he founded Children of Kali deepens his characterization, especially the awful sense of guilt he feels over the many deaths he ordered. At the end of the novel, he is still bearing the burden of operating in the shadows, but now he has the burden of leading the ministry. Badim is full of contradictions. On the one hand, he is a hypocrite whose public face doesn’t align with the work he does with the Children of Kali. On the other hand, his use of violence makes him and the ministry more effective politically, raising the specter that it takes violence to achieve real change.

Robinson includes several chapters from the point of view of refugees and people trafficked for the sake of elites who make wealth from a capitalism that destroys people and the planet. One such voice is that of a woman who flees Syria and lives in a refugee center in Zurich for nine years before being released to establish a new life in a rural part of Switzerland. Robinson creates a character arc for her via her life story from the third and ninth year of her exile from Syria.

During the third year in the camp, the character experiences ambivalence about the Swiss volunteers at the camp because they support her with her labor but also refuse to see her as anything other than an object of charity. Their blindness allows them to avoid thinking about how the economic system that benefits them disadvantages the character. Her sense that she is an outsider is confirmed by the fencing around the camp.

When the character finally leaves the camp, she realizes that she has no desire to return to Syria because the experience of being a refugee has changed her too much to return home, an outcome that shows the human cost of global capitalism and its destructive impact on countries that went through the process of decolonization. She settles down in a rural town to eke out a living running a restaurant and learns a formal version of German to attempt to assimilate to Swiss culture. Her willingness to learn German and recognize even in anti-immigrant nationalists the need for dignity shows that the trauma of being forced to leave her country and live in the camp hasn’t diminished her ability to feel a sense of connection, even to people who are different from her.

Griffen is the quintessential scientist, a man who is willing to sacrifice his personal relationships because he loves doing research in the Antarctic so much. He is idealistic but also increasingly pragmatic as he angles his research to applied science on how to stop sea level rise using the existing funding available to him. His voice in the chapters on his research is exuberant and profane, especially as he experiences some early successes that look like they might save people and beaches from catastrophic sea level rises. He dies after a reckless failure to follow protocols designed to protect him from the harsh weather conditions in the Antarctic. His death shows the indifference of nature to people intent on protecting nature.

Tatiana leads the legal efforts of the ministry to force international and national courts to deliver climate justice to the people. She is Russian but has spent many years abroad working in diplomatic settings now that her work has made her an enemy of the government in Russia. Much of her characterization comes in Chapter 83, in which she meets with an old friend from Russia. Her speech is profane and harsh but warm. Her friend describes her as an aging beauty whose more cushy life in Zurich has allowed her to maintain her physical beauty. After her death, Mary characterizes her as “[t]heir tough one, their warrior” (448). Tatiana is a relatively slight, static character whose role is secondary in comparison to that of other characters. Her death, however, leads Mary to embrace violence overtly when Mary agrees with Badim that he should kill the people who assassinated Tatiana.

Janus Athena is one of the ministry staff who works on the economic challenges to addressing climate change. They serve as one of the main characters who encourages Mary to engage in the project of killing capitalism with carbon coin and carbon taxes. Their characterization is always through the lens of Mary’s point of view. Mary sees Janus Athena as an object of curiosity due to their refusal to conform to a specific set of gender norms, and Mary also sees Janus Athena as a person whose commitment to numbers and rationality makes them almost inhuman. Janus Athena sees this rigorous rationality as one of their strengths, however.

Minister Chan is a character who starts out as China’s central bank representative and ends as the de facto leader of the bankers as they shift to a carbon neutral and then carbon negative economy. Her obvious amusement over Mary’s theatrics as she bullies the bankers encourages Mary to take a tougher stance with the bankers; in addition, the kind of economy Mary posits—a post-capitalist one in which banks are controlled by the government, the ability to profit from investment is strictly limited, and resources are collectively owned—is close enough to what China aspires to that Minister Chan becomes an ally.

In contrast to Mary, Jane is the cautious, conservative chair of the Federal Reserve in the United States. She only appears in the novel in her role as chair. Initially, Jane is a stolid person whose narrow focus on monetary policy prevents her from seeing that catastrophic climate change makes concern over such policies shortsighted. She bows to Mary’s charisma and the reality of collapsing economies and governments, which eventually lead her to endorse radical policies while not admitting that these policies are radical. Robinson uses this character arc to show that the war for Earth can only be won if people who control financial systems understand that unregulated capitalism is incapable of saving us from climate disaster.

Chandra appears in the early chapters of the novel as the head of India’s delegation to the Ministry for the Future. She is a relatively static character whose choice to move ahead with dumping sulfur into the atmosphere to stave off another heat wave in India shows the increasingly nationalistic Indian response to climate change. In the world of the novel, her desperate act is a violation of the Paris Climate Accord, but it serves to highlight the lack of climate justice that results when low-to-middle income countries are made to bear the brunt of both carbon emissions and the efforts to lower these emissions. She leaves the narrative once an even more strident representative replaces her.

Art is Mary’s love interest at the end of the novel. He is a co-op mate of Frank’s and an airship captain who prefers to spend his time looking at animals instead of socializing with people on the ground. A shy but passionate man, Art doesn’t become Mary’s lover until she broaches the subject. Art’s entrance into the narrative at the end is confirmation that Mary will spend her remaining years building personal relationships instead of focusing all her energy on work. Her willingness to focus on love shows that she and the ministry have won many initial battles to save the planet.