It was getting hotter. Frank May got off his mat and padded over to look out the window. Umber stucco walls and tiles, the colour of the local clay… [he] took a deep breath. It reminded him of the air in a sauna. This, the coolest part of the day. In his entire life he had spent less than five minutes in saunas, he didn’t like the sensation …
Here there was no escaping it.
The opening chapter of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future paints a harrowing scene of a near-future heatwave which triggers millions of excess deaths. The protagonist Frank witnesses the extremes that humans will go to for survival: stealing air conditioning units and wading into the town lake to find any way to cool down.
Frank survives – he is a fit, western aid worker. Others, particularly the young and the old, are not so lucky. The story follows Frank’s guilt at having lived and his subsequent actions, alongside global attempts to manage the fallout of such a disaster. While the novel is dubbed climate-fiction, much of what it describes could well come to pass. In parts of the world, it already has.
