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.

At the time of the novel's publication, American science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson was 68 years old and living in Davis, California.

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).

While the narrative includes chapters of nonfiction history and descriptions of events from the perspectives of other characters and objects, the plot follows Murphy as she seeks to convince central banks of the threats to currency and market stability posed by the effects of climate change.

[3] In Antarctica, various countries cooperate in a geoengineering project to drill to the bottom of glaciers and pump meltwater up to slow basal sliding while the program incentivizes multiple other simultaneous efforts like carbon farming, sail-driven container ships for cargo and airships for personal transport.

Various chapters also take the form of meeting notes, an encyclopedia article, a prose poem, a Socratic seminar, and explanatory essays, among other styles of writing.

His editor at Orbit Books, Tim Holman, encouraged Robinson to try an alternative approach that resulted in various modes of writing, principally unnamed characters providing eyewitness accounts but also could take the form of an essay, drama, dialogue, radio interview, riddle, etc.

[4][5] Robinson, in an interview with Amy Brady, editor-in-chief of the Chicago Review of Books, described his approach as heteroglossia or polyvocal, in which the form follows function.

[6] With climate change and the Holocene extinction looming in the background, as characters variously seek to halt it or fall victim to it, the reviewer in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette described this narrative as "a good old-fashioned monster story."

[20][25] The review in the New Zealand online newspaper The Spinoff stated, "The book is many things, but it is never boring ... indulges wild tonal shifts ... relentless, pacy, utterly absorbing story of our near future.