The Ministry for the Future is a climate fiction novel by American science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, published in 2020. Set in the near future, the novel follows a subsidiary body, established under the Paris Agreement, whose mission is to act as an advocate for the world's future generations of citizens as if their rights were as valid as the present generation's. While the ministry pursues various ambitious projects, the effects of climate change are determined to be the most consequential. The plot primarily follows Mary Murphy, the head of the titular Ministry for the Future, and Frank May, an American aid worker traumatized by experiencing a deadly heat wave in India. Many chapters are devoted to other (mostly anonymous) characters' accounts of future events, as well as their ideas about ecology, economics, and other subjects.

With its emphasis on scientific accuracy and nonfiction descriptions of history and social science, the novel is classified as hard science fiction. It also belongs to the growing body of climate fiction. Robinson has previously written other climate fiction novels, such as 2312 and New York 2140. The Ministry for the Future also includes elements of utopian fiction, as it portrays society addressing a problem, and elements of horror fiction, as climate change threatens characters.

At the time of the novel's publication, American science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson was 68 years old and living in Davis, California. He had previously written 20 novels, and he had received the Robert A. Heinlein Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation's Award for Imagination in Service to Society for his body of work. Before The Ministry for the Future, his most recent novel had been Red Moon, published two years earlier. With The Ministry for the Future, Robinson was seeking to return to the climate fiction genre that he had previously written in with 2312, New York 2140, and the Science in the Capital series (Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, Sixty Days and Counting).

His previous climate fiction had approached the topic from an aftermath point of view; with the new novel, he sought to write with the near future as the starting point, and with existing real-world technologies, economics, and societies—and then to push the narrative further into the future. This approach is reflected in the book's dedication to Fredric Jameson, Robinson's doctoral supervisor, who wrote that "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism." Whereas many science-fiction and climate fiction stories illustrate future societies as end products of a future history, Robinson was seeking to write about a bridge time to a future when the effects of climate change are mitigated and the Holocene extinction is halted.