I really wanted to like The Ministry for the Future. The idea of interweaving real climate science and global politics into a near-future sci-fi story about the dangers of climate change and the hope for a better world was really compelling. The book started off with a genuinely frightening story of an imagined heat wave hitting India and killing millions, told in the first person by a person trying desperately to survive as the heat climbs and infrastructure fails.
After that promising start, the story quickly gets bogged down in a mix of very technical prose and uncompelling story lines as the global community gradually finds ways to alleviate the effects of climate change. Included in as key solutions are inane ideas like a digital currency used to convince oil-rich countries to stop drilling for oil and a distributed, open source social network that is way better and more ethical than Facebook but somehow still reaches a global scale. If these are the best ideas we have to combat climate change, we are in deep trouble.