Human Agency at Planetary Limits: Climate Emergency and Technological Power in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future

Abstract

Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020) represents a decisive intervention in contemporary climate fiction by reimagining human agency under conditions of planetary crisis. Rather than framing climate change as a distant dystopia, the novel situates the climate emergency as an immediate and ongoing catastrophe that demands ethical, political, and technological response. Drawing on ecocritical theory, Anthropocene discourse, and posthumanist thought, this paper argues that Robinson reconceptualizes human agency as technologically mediated and ethically constrained by planetary limits. The novel presents technology not as a neutral instrument of progress but as a form of power that simultaneously enables survival and raises profound moral questions. Through its experimental narrative form and its focus on institutional, collective, and nonhuman actors, The Ministry for the Future challenges traditional humanist notions of autonomy and foregrounds a new model of agency appropriate to the Anthropocene.