It’s a stultifying summer day. As the sun cracks the eastern horizon, it blazes like an ‘atom bomb. Frank May, an American aid worker, is bracing for the sweltering heat after the district-wide blackout in a town in Uttar Pradesh. Sweat drips into his eyes, stinging them: ‘Everything is tan and beige and a brilliant, unbearable white’. Cutting through the air are wails of dismay, and sirens. Cries of distress ricochet off buildings. People are clustered on rooftops and doorways, ‘round-eyed with distress and fear, red-eyed from the heat and exhaust smoke, dust’. Brown faces are flushed red with heat. Metal surfaces in the sun scorch. Heatwaves bounce over them like ‘air over a barbecue.’ This is how American science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson opens his novel, The Ministry for the Future (2020), which figured on the list of Barack Obama’s favourite books of the year.