“It’s a plan or chaos:” Climate Migration Testimony and The Ministry for the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson’s epic science fiction novel The Ministry for the Future (2020) triggered a wide-ranging discussion and debate in multiple public spheres focused on its analysis of and solutions to the climate crisis. Yet some voices and stories included in the novel, specifically those of refugees, have been mostly absent from discourse about the novel. In The Ministry for the Future, climate migration testimony is a narrative form through which migrants, including refugees, describe their experience of departure, migration, arrival, encampment, release, and integration. The reader is confronted with a staging of voice through a protean narrative form that blurs the boundaries between oral history, social media post, memoir, diary, and auto-ethnography, and can be compared to the Latin American form of “testimonio,” which makes “subaltern experience and voice into something that matters” (Beverley xvi). The Ministry for the Future includes climate migration testimony to bring the voices and experiences of displaced people from the margins to the center of discussions of the climate crisis. In doing so, the novel critiques “refugee crisis” discourse and a global apartheid system that dehumanizes refugees and other migrants by subjecting them to a condition of protracted liminality in which temporary encampment becomes a permanent condition. By weaving climate migration testimony throughout the text, The Ministry for the Future creates a sense of urgency around the injustice of imprisoning refugees for indefinite periods of time, and proposes one possible solution, a Nansen-style passport, that could help facilitate the mobility and integration of displaced people. Given the rise of far-right, anti-immigrant and anti-refugee movements in the U.S. and UK, the representation of climate migration testimony in The Ministry for the Future makes a critical intervention in this historical moment.