Kim Stanley Robinson, author of one of the most famous novels on climate change, says he has done more than 600 speaking events since The Ministry for the Future was published in 2020 — but he won’t read the first chapter out loud. 

In those opening pages, a prolonged heat wave grips a large swath of northern India. Told from the perspective of an aid worker named Frank, the book starts with a breakdown of the electrical grid, generators that run out of fuel and high temperatures combined with high humidity that lead to death everywhere. Unable to get relief, people die on rooftops, on the streets and in a lake. In the end, the heat kills 20 million people. 

“I just have this instinctive sense, no, this is too harsh,” said Robinson during an interview with The Associated Press last month. “This is too … I’m not willing to read this one aloud.”

— “Kim Stanley Robinson won’t read aloud his climate disaster scene from ‘The Ministry for the Future’, Associated Press

Curator’s Note: That opening chapter is, hands down, the scariest chapter I’ve ever read.