I think we’re already there, with the pandemic and with the fires and hurricanes — the level of extremity has brought a sense of general awareness that something is going to have to be done, and the sooner the better. That said, I think we’re on the brink of even worse events happening, as the book makes clear. It’s been a memorable year, a traumatic year — so this may be a stimulus to the start of some changes.

Fred was my PhD supervisor, and while I was working on my PhD, he moved from UC San Diego to Yale, and when that happened, he stayed on my committee — but the actual supervision shifted over to my undergraduate advisor.

I’m a novelist, I’m a literature major. I’m not thinking up these ideas, I’m listening to the world and grasping — sometimes at straws, sometimes just grasping at new ideas and seeing what everybody is seeing.

If we could institute some of these good ideas, we could quickly shift from a capitalism to a post-capitalism that is more sustainable and more socialist, because so many of the obvious solutions are contained in the socialist program. And if we treated the biosphere as part of our extended body that needs to be attended to and taken care of, then things could get better fast, and there are already precursors that demonstrate this possibility.

I don’t think it’s possible to postulate a breakdown, or a revolution, to an entirely different system that would work without mass disruption and perhaps blowback failures, so it’s better to try to imagine a stepwise progression from what we’ve got now to a better system. And by the time we’re done — I mean, “done” is the wrong word — but by the end of the century, we might have a radically different system than the one we’ve got now. And this is kind of necessary if we’re going to survive without disaster. So, since it’s necessary, it might happen. And I’m always looking for the plausible models that already exist and imagining that they get ramped up.

I’m very interested in both these examples. I’ve actually never been to either region, but I’ve got contacts in both. In Mondragon, they are aware of me as an American science fiction writer who likes them, because my Mars trilogy books are translated into Spanish and do quite well in Spain. With Kerala, I’ve been studying it for twenty, twenty-five years. Like, why is it different and how is it different? Could it be a tail-wagging-dog situation for the rest of India? And so on.

I did put places that I’ve been in the novel, because I needed some anchoring points — principally Zurich [where the titular ministry is headquartered]. My wife and I lived in Zurich for years, and I finally managed to put that into fiction, which was a great pleasure. But as for the rest of the world, and for these kinds of leftist precursors, or already existing leftist states that are at a regional or town level, I’ve often thought to myself, “Is there any reason that these can’t be taken as models?” Is there any real reason — since obviously there are ideological reasons; if you’re a defender of capitalism per se, then you would say these are outliers of sorts or too small to be relevant — but if you’re a leftist, you look at them and see the public support for what they’re doing, and you ask, “Why couldn’t that work at a larger scale?” Especially if you’re trying to imagine futures that are working better, which is what a utopian science fiction writer does, then you’re kind of desperate for real world-models.

Well, Bellamy’s is a good book to think about, because it had an impact in the real world. There were Bellamy clubs, and the whole progressive movement was energized by Looking Backward.

I’ve steeped myself in the utopian tradition. It’s not a big body of literature, it’s easy to read the best hits of the utopian tradition. You could make a list, I mean roughly twenty or twenty-five books would be the highlights of the entire four hundred years, which is a little shocking. And maybe there’s more out there that hasn’t stayed in the canon. But if you talk about the utopian canon, it’s quite small — it’s interesting, it has its habits, its problems, its gaps.

Famously, from Thomas More (Utopia) on, there’s been a gap in the history — the utopia is separated by space or time, by a disjunction. They call it the Great Trench. In Utopia, they dug a great trench across the peninsula so that their peninsula became an island. And the Great Trench is endemic in utopian literature. There’s almost always a break that allows the utopian society to be implemented and to run successfully. I’ve never liked that because one connotation of the word “utopian” is unreality, in the sense that it’s “never going to happen.”

So we have to fill in this trench. When Jameson said it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, I think what he was talking about is that missing bridge from here to there. It’s hard to imagine a positive history, but it’s not impossible. And now, yes, it’s easy to imagine the end of the world because we are at the start of a mass extinction event. But he’s talking about hegemony, and a kind of Marxist reading of history, and the kind of Gramscian notion that everybody’s in the mindset that capitalism is reality itself and that there can never be any other way — so it’s hard to imagine the end of capitalism. But I would just flip it and say, it’s hard to imagine how we get to a better system. Imagining the better system isn’t that hard; you just make up some rules about how things should work. You could even say socialism is that kind of utopian imaginary. Let’s just do it this way, a kind of society of mutual aid. And I would agree with anyone who says, “Well, that’s a good system.”

The interesting thing, and also the new stories to tell if you’re a science fiction novelist, if you’re any kind of novelist — almost every story’s been told a few times — but the story of getting to a new and better social system, that’s almost an empty niche in our mental ecology. So I’ve been throwing myself into that attempt. It’s hard, but it’s interesting.

There is a polemic for sure. First, I would want to make a distinction between economics and political economy, because by and large, economics as it’s practiced now is the study of capitalism. It takes the axioms of capitalism as givens and then tries to work from those to various ameliorations and tweaks to the system that would make for a better capitalism, but they don’t question the fundamental axioms: everybody’s in it for themselves, everybody pursues their own self-interest, which will produce the best possible outcomes for everybody. These axioms are highly questionable, and they come out of the eighteenth century or are even older, and they don’t match with modern social science or history itself in terms of how we behave, and they don’t value the natural biosphere properly, and they tend to encourage short-term extractive gain and short-term interests. These are philosophical positions that are expressed as though they are fixed or are nature itself, when in reality they are made by culture.

Political economy is a kind of nineteenth-century thing, a more open-ended idea where we could have different systems. And that accounts for a lot of the struggles of the twentieth century. But capitalism likes to pretend that it’s nature itself, and that’s what economics is today, largely.

Take the term “efficiency.” In capitalist economics, that’s just regarded as almost a synonym for “good,” but it completely depends on what the efficiency is being aimed at. You know, machine guns are efficient, gas chambers are efficient. So, “efficiency” as such does not mean “good.” It is a measure of the least amount of effort put in for the most amount gotten out.

One of the things you’re seeing during the pandemic is that the global system of creating masks is efficient, but it is also fragile, brittle, and unreliable because redundancy, robustness, and resilience are all relatively inefficient, if the only rubric of efficiency is profit.

Capitalist economics misunderstands and misjudges the world badly, and that’s why we’re in the mess we’re in — caught between biosphere degradation and radical social inequality. These are both natural results of capitalism as such, a result of the economic calculations we make under capitalist axioms.

Distinctions have to be made here. Quantification is really part of science. Social science has some tools for understanding and generalizing from the particulars of individuals to what the group might want.

Twenty-five years ago, I might have said, “Economics, we have to throw it out.” That doesn’t hold for me anymore. Economics has a set of tools. And social science tools, working with the right axioms, could make for a socialist economics. There could be a post-capitalist economic system. But what you’re then talking about is a different political economy.

That’s one of the things The Ministry is about. Can you morph, by stages, from the political economy that we’re in now, which is neoliberal capitalism, to what you might call anti-austerity, to a return to Keynesianism, and then beyond that to social democracy, and then beyond that to democratic socialism, and then beyond that to a post-capitalist system that might be a completely new invention that we don’t have a name for?

This is why I hold myself to calling it “post-capitalism,” so as not to try and define it by any of the nineteenth-century political economies. I think many of the solutions can be found in socialism, but I don’t call myself a socialist. I would want to keep it a little more open to the idea that we have to morph capitalism as such, and that we might shove it to the margins, where we might have a market for the non-necessities. I think the market itself has to be reexamined, and this is so fundamental to the way that modern society works that it’s frightening, and, for me, it’s better to think in a stepwise fashion and to imagine society from where we are now transforming to an undefined better political economy.

Carbon Quantitative Easing is not my idea. I really am just a listening facility here, trying to amplify ideas. That one is out there. Recently, even Lawrence Summers — who was the treasury secretary for Bill Clinton and a neoliberal of the first order — and his think tank have been putting out stuff about some kind of CQE. So it’s been spreading quickly as an idea, and I’m glad.

But in the years since I wrote New York 2140, I learned more about the central banks and realized that nationalizing the banks, which happens in 2140, wouldn’t be going far enough. It would be great if all banks were owned by the people, and if banks were not private profit-making enterprises, that would be great — but it would only be one step along the way; it would not be enough. Because, at this point, central banks are only concerned with stabilizing money and maybe helping employment levels, and they will not do anything else unless they are under enormous pressure. They need to be changed, and that’s a lot of what this novel’s about.

Changing the way we regard money, that would be a step toward post-capitalism right there. If money was created from scratch but not given to the banks to loan to whatever they wanted but given to decarbonization projects first, then flowing out into the general economy — the first spending money by governments, which make money in the first place, would be targeted toward decarbonization efforts. This strikes me as a good idea, a necessary idea.

Because saving the biosphere doesn’t make a profit in the capitalist order, we will never do it, and we are therefore doomed. So a very fundamental reform of how we regard money itself is absolutely necessary. I’m saying that a post-capitalist political economy that regards money as created for the public good and is spent on that first — and then trickles into the general economy — is a fundamental shift, and without it, we’re in terrible trouble.

Well, maybe so, but I would say the Left has to fight fire with fire. Right-wing ideas are also conceptions of globalization, in terribly poor disguises as being nationalist. But the nationalist system is embedded in capitalism; it’s just completely international and global. These right-wingers, if they could make an extra dime an hour by selling out national citizens by sending their industries to China or India — they’d do it in a second, and they already have. So they need to be called out for being completely inconsistent and hypocritical. And the Left needs to be much more aggressive on that, and say the problem is not globalization per se; the problem is bad globalization, which is capitalism, as opposed to good globalization, which is mutual aid and cooperation among the nation states by way of international treaties and things like the UN.

The Paris Agreement is crucial. It’s a major event in world history. It could turn into the League of Nations, in which case we’re screwed. Or it could turn into something new in history, a way to decarbonize without playing the zero-sum game of nation against nation.

So all this needs to be fought at the level of the discursive battle, and no concessions can be made on that point. I mean, right-wing thinking is supremely hypocritical and convoluted and self-contradictory, and that needs to be pushed on and pointed out at every chance — these supposed nationalists are also going to sell you out. This discursive battle, it’s very important.

Well, since there are 106 chapters — I guess that I could have made it 107, and I could have talked about that. But maybe the absence does speak louder than words. All of those things are fantasies, and billionaire fantasy trips are not going anywhere.

In Red Moon and Aurora, I’ve made my statement about what’s possible and what isn’t. Because in the capitalist world, you have to make a profit, and even the billionaires don’t have enough money to properly fund these ventures on their own. So they talk about asteroid mining — that’s bullshit. They talk about Helium-3 mining on the moon — that’s bullshit. There is no profit in space. It’s just a fantasy of our culture right now, because everybody’s been convinced by science fiction writers [laughs], and they’re not paying attention to the numbers game, I guess.

I believe in space science. I’m totally in love with NASA, and with public space science, as part of government. There’s this saying of NASA’s, “space science is Earth science,” and I totally believe that.

Yes, exactly. Aurora is my statement about leaving the solar system and that whole idea that humanity is destined for the stars. I try to put a stake in the heart of that idea. But the moon, Mars, the asteroids — that’s more local. But it’s not profitable. So, you’ll see China on the moon [as in Red Moon], you’ll see an international presence there. I’m confident it will be just like Antarctica. And Antarctica’s interesting. There’s a couple thousand people down there every summer. It’s not exploitable; there’s no profit to be made down there. And nobody’s interested. Like, if I say to people, “Oh, I went to Antarctica,” it’s like, “Who cares?”

Yes, I have been there twice. I have a whole novel about it. Sea level rise is so imminent that Antarctica will be important. And this idea of sucking out the water from beneath these glaciers to slow their melting and sliding into the ocean, this is an idea that glaciologists have, really an individual glaciologist. And when I ask their colleagues about this plan, they say, “Yeah, we have the technology.”

The question is whether the bottom [of the glaciers] is configured correctly. In other words, the earthy form of Antarctica that the ice is resting on may or may not be conducive to sucking water out. So it’s an open question whether my save-the-sea-level section of The Ministry would actually work… it’s probably the most speculative part of the novel, to suggest that that could be done and that it would work. That would be extremely useful geoengineering, but as of now, no one is confident that it would actually work, because we don’t know enough about what the bottom is like. So the Antarctic strand of the novel is a bit of wishful thinking.

I know just what you’re talking about, this kind of third rail sensibility. I would say that conditions have changed such that we are now obviously actively experiencing climate change. I can see that a standard leftist analysis of this is that it’s just more capitalist excuse-making. But what I’m saying is, we’re doing it already, it might become necessary, and anyway, a nation like India, if they get hit by a heat wave, they’re not going to care about any kind of leftists clutching their pearls. Many leftists are fairly well off, well off enough to have a political philosophy that wants things to be better for everyone, partly, like in my case, so I don’t feel like a ridiculous aristocrat but just a precursor of what everyone will have later on.

What I want to say to all my leftist readers is, get over it. We’re in an all-hands-on-deck situation, where every possible thing that has ever been suggested to escape the mass extinction event is going to be on the table. And these theoretical arguments — it’s just another capitalist ploy, it’s a silver bullet, it’s a fantasy — well, some of that’s true and some of it isn’t. So there is no excuse for ideological rigidity about something this important. As a leftist, I would say to other leftists: Get over the prejudice against the term geoengineering and look again at the situation that we’re in. We need to decarbonize. Anything we do at scale to achieve that is a form of geoengineering.

Here’s one thing I’ve been saying to open eyes around geoengineering: women’s rights are a geoengineering technology. Here’s why: when women have developed and achieved rights, because we need to get to post-patriarchy as well as post-capitalism, the population replacement rate — a steady population is like 2.1 kids per woman — drops naturally from their own life choices to a rate of like 1.8 or 1.6. So, if you start talking about women’s rights as a geoengineering method, that takes it out of the techno-silver-bullet land, which is where we’re stuck right now. Because right now, when a leftist hears “geoengineering,” they think about an oil company pulling the wool over our eyes, suggesting we can keep burning carbon if we just throw dust into the atmosphere, and how we could end up in some kind of Snowpiercer or other extreme, far-fetched situation. So it serves as an allegory about things that could go wrong.

But I want to argue that humanity is now a major player in Earth’s biosphere, and anything we do to help Earth’s biosphere at scale — in other words, the whole civilization doing it on purpose — could be defined as geoengineering. And then you get software as well as hardware solutions.

So law, justice, post-capitalism, women’s rights, post-patriarchy — all these things could be defined as forms of geoengineering, and at that point, the term kind of falls apart. What we’re really talking about is civilization, as such, as a form of biosphere management. So this is what I’m going out there with over and over on this point, because there’s too much hardening of positions, and these positions are being taken on the basis of the situation as it existed in about 1980 or maybe 1990. The positions are behind the curve of the realities. So, as a leftist science fiction writer, it’s my responsibility to be politically incorrect in provocative ways.

We’re in a science fiction novel, as a culture. Science fiction is the realism of our time, as I’ve been saying over and over again. It’s the best way to describe the world that we’re in.

I read widely, I’m open-minded. As a writer, I chose science fiction consciously because it best expresses the realism of our lives today. Since the pandemic, everybody wants to hear what a science fiction writer has to say. Of course we don’t have the solution, and of course we can’t predict the future, but what I think is happening is people are realizing climate change is already here, it’s hammering us, and that we have to think more like how science fiction writers have been thinking for decades now.

This year, I’ve seen a bump in interest that’s doesn’t have to do with me personally. It has to do with science fiction as a genre. Now, you don’t see everybody interested. There’s a crowd of people who like to stay in a previous structure of feeling, to use Raymond Williams’s term. But that structure of feeling is now inadequate, and essentially reactionary. Now you’re in a science fiction world, and so what are you going to do? Maybe you’re going to read more science fiction!