The Ministry of Time - Kalaine Bradley
Something that I’ve read about a bit is the role fiction can play in climate messaging. The research group I’m part of used to have a whole project dedicated to climate fiction, so I’ve read a fair bit of it. But something I often find is that the ‘climate’ part of climate fiction can be a bit heavy-handed. The characters are escaping an apocalyptic hellscape caused by climate change, society has been turned on its head, that kind of thing. In these ways, climate is one of the main characters, and often the villain or the victim. And it can be hard to read these stories without feeling the weight of the message pressing through.
But The Ministry of Time did something really interesting. It treated the changing environment simply as an environment that the characters live in. Britain, with increasing storms, hotter summers and warmer winters, acts as a backdrop to the unfolding story. A line that I have used before and I will use again: a story about climate, not a climate story.
What I liked about the novel was not that it ignored climate change, but that it let it sit in the background as one of the conditions under which everything else happens. The subtle foreshadowing throughout the book also means that, by the time it turns to ‘resource wars’ at the end, the shift feels earned. It does not read like the novel suddenly announcing its political message. Rather, it feels like a natural extension of the world it has already built.
More and more, that feels like an important lesson not just for climate fiction, but for fiction in general, especially contemporary fiction. Climate change is no longer a distant or specialist concern. It is one of the ordinary conditions of life: in the heat, in the storms, in the disruptions to seasons, in the background assumptions people make about the future. Fiction does not need to become didactic to acknowledge that. It simply needs to let climate into the world its characters already inhabit.
Maybe that is part of what contemporary fiction will increasingly need to do. Not always to make climate the plot, or the villain, or the moral centre of the story, but to recognise that it is already part of the setting. As climate becomes harder to avoid in life, it should become harder to avoid in fiction too.