Characterization of the Crisis: Ecological Agency and Intermedial Representation in Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future”

This thesis applies an intermedial ecocritical perspective to analyze eco-agency in the narrative structure of Kim Stanley Robinson’s cli-fi novel The Ministry for the Future. It claims that Robinson uses characterization as a primary intermedial strategy and mediates an abstract systemic violence of climate change – the concept described by Rob Nixon’s “slow violence” – and transfers it emotionally engaging and politically mobilizing through feeling. The thesis applies the three-step intermedial analysis by Bruhn and Salmose to examine how the novel remediates – that is, it incorporates in new media – including characters, scientific data, models of economies, and policy discourse into a polyphonic narrative. The analysis illustrates that the characters—Mary Murphy, Frank May, and Badim Bahadur—embody three modalities of ecological agency: institutional, traumatic, and tactical. Their interconnected narratives further enhance reader engagement through focalization and strategic empathy, simplifying the incomprehensible ecological crisis into affective drama. Ultimately, the argument here is that the novel, by intersecting intermediality and character-driven climate narrative in its mode of representation, interprets science in the capital as participating in a globally situated ecology-of-mind and collective like-mindedness.