Volume-XII, Special Issue, April 2026 |
Petro-Melancholia: Loss, Climate Anxiety, and Fossil Futures in Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future Debolina Chaulay, Research Scholar Department of English, Gauhati University, Guwahati, Assam, India |
Received: 07.04.2026 | Accepted: 09.04.2026 | Published Online: 10.04.2026 | Page No: 354-359 | ||||
DOI: 10.29032/ijhsss.vol.12.issue.specialW.303 | |||||||
ABSTRACT | ||
Published in 2020, The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson is a celebrated climate fiction work, acclaimed as policy realistic, institutionally optimistic, and its belief that catastrophe is yet avoidable. This essay takes the novel in another perspective. It posits that, below the horizon of techno-institutional optimism, the novel implants a system of petro-melancholia: an intense affective sense of fossil fuel culture that can not be easily legislated out of existence. The paper is based on the ideas of Stephanie LeMenager about petro-melancholia, the framework of solastalgia by Glenn Albrecht, and the theory of slow violence by Rob Nixon, which leads to the discussion of ways in which the novel embodies loss, grief, and climate anxiety as the key circumstances of the fossil fuel age. It also contends that even the optimism of the novel itself, its dependence on carbon markets, geoengineering, and institutional reform, recreates a techno-centric and human-centric logic which ecocritical scholarship has recognized as a problem. The Ministry of the Future laments fossil futures when it suggests an end to them. | ||
Keywords: petro-melancholia, climate fiction, The Ministry for the Future, solastalgia, slow violence, ecocriticism, Anthropocene, techno-optimism |