Kim Stanley Robinson (who is a man named Kim – I covered this before) has a new book called The Ministry for the Future. In this article, Kim Stanley Robinson not only admits to being a socialist, but a “post-capitalist”. Basically, his plan is to get rid of capitalism and replace it with something much, much better. Something beautiful. And in this book, it sounds like he shows us what he thinks that could look like. It can’t be any less entertaining than Ralph Nader’s book Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us. (I’m just saying that was a book about serious ideas, that didn’t translate into a particularly entertaining work of fiction. Similarly, Kim Stanley Robinson can occasionally be heavy on ideas and world building, and a little lighter on engaging plots and characters, at least from my perspective. He has an astonishing first-class imagination though.)

I like it when authors talk about other ideas, authors and books that have interested them. He mentions a couple real-world economic systems that could be described as post-capitalist – the Mondragon system of the Basque region (which featured in his book 2312, as I recall) and another system in Kerala, India. He mentions Robert Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887 and Thomas More’s Utopia. He talks about a number of his own books including New York 2140, Aurora, and Red Moon. He also mentions a movie (later a TV show?) called Snowpiercer that I hadn’t heard of, but the summary sounds intriguing:

In a future where a failed climate-change experiment has killed all life except for the lucky few who boarded the Snowpiercer, a train that travels around the globe, a new class system emerges.

IMDb

In a parallel universe where I have time to read and watch dumb movies, I will get a pizza and a six pack this weekend and settle in with some of these!