“But aren’t our systems just software, so to speak? And software is a technology. Without the software, the hardware is just lumps of stuff.”

The quote is from a dialogic interlude in Robinson’s eclectic assemblage of a novel. It’s kind of novel but not in the ordinary sense. The main characters are mostly bureaucrats and the plot often consists of descriptions of policy implementations, woven into a broader speculative narrative of climate change.

Something about climate change fundamentally resists narrative. It is everywhere and nowhere – what Timothy Morton has called a hyperobject. We can see its effects but only by contextualizing them against the backdrop of all that we consider normal. So the way that the novel tells its story through a loose aggregation of threads seems apt. But the aggregation constantly begs the question of the underlying mechanisms.

Robinson is interested in the whole machine of social and economic causes behind climate change. As a result, he doesn’t shy away from passages that sound more like journalism or polemic or geoengineering than a science fiction novel. Soil carbon sequestration methodologies and engineering schemes to pump glacier water are Robinson’s version of whale anatomy.

But aren’t our systems just software, so to speak?

The quote above is indicative that Robinson’s white whale isn’t just climate change, it’s late capitalism. Or rather, Robinson is more interested in how “our systems” drive climate change than any specific solution. After all, climate change is a problem with a relatively straightforward solution.

The novel opens with a harrowing account of a heat wave that kills millions in India. The sole survivor is an American whose experience leaves him suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder – his struggles to return to normal life after his experience serves as a kind of low key allegory of planetary conscience. To what extent Frank can be reabsorbed into the social fabric is essentially the question of whether society can actually process the message that he represents.

When global consciousness is inherently fragmented, what does it mean to try and wake it up? Getting one (or even many individuals) to recognize the urgency of the crisis is not enough. Ultimately, it’s the system that needs to have its moment of clarity. But how does that happen? And how does one tell its story?

It’s true that there’s something about this book that is difficult to read. It’s not a traditional novel. A traditional novel tends to tell the stories of individuals – their struggles, transformations, their arcs. But no individual matters all that much in the face of climate change, so that kind of story would not be appropriate. I liked Mary Murphy, and to a lesser degree Frank, as well as the other minor characters that made their appearances in The Ministry for the Future. But they were all just supporting characters to the main character, our systems.

The analogy between systems and software is interesting to me. The chapter in which the analogy occurs is an odd dialogue between an interviewer, who wants to “discuss the question of whether technology drives history.” The interviewer’s interlocutor is dismissive of the premise – it’s not technology but human intentions that “drive history” and technology just provides means to accomplish human ends.

That is the tension of how we understand technology, whether it is merely a means to an end or whether it is an end in and of itself. If it is true that social systems (government, culture, religion) are just software, we might be able to change the direction of history by changing the software.

As a software engineer, I see a number of problems with this mental model. Software is entrenched in an ecosystem of dependencies. Its inherent complexity is tied to how it must constantly change for a variety of reasons. (One day I plan on writing more about this!) The idea of a “top-down” restructuring of social systems is difficult to imagine, precisely because there are so many interrelated systems.

Robinson’s novel is also hopeful that a “bottom-up” change is possible when facilitated by the right incentives. (Cynically, it seems to reinscribe the profit motive of capitalism in the new form of carbon coin. But maybe that’s the point – that capitalism itself isn’t fatally flawed once we’ve made the right adjustments.) It ends with the image of people coming together to celebrate as the earth has been renewed, with relationships rekindling and music bursting out of the streets. We need more works of art that give us ways to imagine a future in which problems like climate change can be solved.