Slow, Complex, Dull? Climate Boredom and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future

Abstract

The article discusses the phenomenon of climate boredom via Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. Based an embodied understanding of boredom—particularly as a literary effect—I considers the novel’s potential to bore through its slow narration of the politics, economics and administration of global carbon sequestration. I posit that the novel’s willingness to bore arises from and resonates with the ways in which it imagines that climate change might be at least somewhat successfully managed. Furthermore, I argue that this may represent a purposeful shift from cli-fi’s perhaps too familiar spectacularizing of climate change’s effects, and that the often delayed, backgrounded or distanced action of the novel serves to redirect interest to the slow, complex and often dull work of climate change’s solving which, while hardly positive, may be more workable than a paralyzing boredom that can emerge as means of distancing climate change. In analyzing Ministry through boredom, I also seek to establish a connection between the phenomenon of climate boredom and critical discussions of literary slowness and complexity, particularly as they are positioned in relation to imaginings of the Anthropocene. Moreover, I want to interrogate this championing of difficult texts in relation to their ostensible aim, which is to shift, inflame and nuance public consciousness on the issue. This article, then, pays particular attention to the ‘caveat’ reader, the bored reader who puts down the text, and thus attends to boredom also as a risk of slow and complex literature.