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초록

This study analyzes Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020) as a work of climate fiction that interrogates the politics of life and death in the era of climate crisis. While many climate narratives remain tied to an anthropocentric perspective, The Ministry for the Future depicts heat waves, pandemics, migration, and ecological collapse as outcomes of the structural inequalities embedded in global capitalism and environmental governance. In doing so, it shows that climate disasters are not merely natural events but socially mediated phenomena that intensify existing injustices. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concepts of biopolitics and biopower, Giorgio Agamben’s thanatopolitics, and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, the study examines how the novel exposes the mechanisms through which climate governance selectively protects some lives while abandoning others. It highlights how climate-induced catastrophes such as deadly heat waves or floods disproportionately affect vulnerable nations and marginalized groups, thereby widening the divide between the Global North and South. The analysis also employs posthumanist frameworks-including Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman ethics, and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory-to show how Robinson dismantles anthropocentrism by granting narrative agency to nonhuman entities such as animals, ecosystems, and even the climate system. By foregrounding these more-than-human perspectives, the novel points toward an ethic of multispecies coexistence. Ultimately, this research argues that The Ministry for the Future operates as a literary experiment that critiques the socio-structural causes of death and disease, exposes the biopolitical violence of the climate crisis, and imagines a posthuman ethic for planetary survival. ©© 2025 ELLAK. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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