When sci-fi bumps into reality

I am currently reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 novel The Ministry for the Future. The book is set in a hypothetical near future Earth dealing with severe climate change problems. The Ministry in the title is an international organization charged with implementing potential means of reducing the factors creating the dangerous climatic conditions. These include stabilizing ice melt in Antarctica, seeding the atmosphere with chemicals to reduce sunlight, and creating an international monetary system that rewards carbon sequestration. 

But the startling method (not at this point in the book used by The Ministry) is the violent targeting of both technology that uses fossil fuels and technology/carbon moguls. Drones bring down commercial aircraft and private jets burning fossil fuels. “Elites” are brought into re-education camps to be informed about climate change. And the worst fossil fuel advocates/profiteers are assassinated. 

Pro-environmentalists as assassins? The thought never occurred to me before reading this novel. But is this about to happen?

The murder of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson by an individual who was angered at insurance company policies and actions echoed Robinson’s speculation of unpopular/misguided/profit-over-good individuals being targets of social or political movements or philosophies. The shooting of Thompson was targeted and for a specific purpose it seems.

The Ministry for the Future is in the “hard” science fiction genre, much of the speculation it contains solidly based in current research and reality. And it opens the question “just how far should we go to reduce the existential threat of climate change?”

Reactions to the death of Thompson also make many of us ask “just how far should we go to reduce the health threats of the profit-based health care insurance system*?” 

Personally, I would never advocate any violent solution to any problem, no matter how serious. But perhaps having a loved one suffer or die or go homeless due to a denial of service by their insurance or cost of treatment does make one think.

Anyway, I do love it when science fiction predicts with some degree of accuracy. Or maybe I should just be frightened.

* Are there some systems that should never be profit-based, but only run for the common good? If so, I would put both health care and education at the top of that list.