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In The ministry for the future, Kim Stanley Robinson describes the work of an organization created under Article 16 of the Paris Agreement to defend the cause of all living creatures, present, and future, unable to speak up for themselves. Based on the organization’s action, the book describes, in short chapters mixing narration, presentations of technical points, and evocations of various ‘actors’, an imaginable trajectory towards a decarbonized world, shared by both humans and non-humans, and far less unequal than the current one. The book is not a foresight essay, but a true novel whose characters are the protagonists of collapses and emergences converging towards a new world whose partly providential aspect is clearly emphasized. Neither is it a science fiction book in the strict sense, since all the means used to bring about the proposed future exist and are documented, even if some of them are highly speculative. Although a novel, we believe it is of interest for Natures Sciences Sociétés, beyond simply providing relevant material for sociology or philosophy, as many science fiction novels do. It suggests a world in which we might live and how it might be built by adopting a resolutely multi-centered and multi-disciplinary approach, taking account of the viewpoints of a wide typology of players and mobilizing knowledges and technologies from a wide range of disciplines. It also makes it possible for a scientific journal to overcome a barrier: by deciding what a desirable future could be, it enables to set a body of work within a coherent vision, to raise the issue of the plausibility and legitimacy of the means proposed and the trajectories described, and to question the conditions for success of the targeted project. Finally, it postulates that thinking the future as already defined, with nothing to expect from it but the present, is mortiferous. Science fiction and utopias remind us that there are unexpected futures to hope for, but also that these futures will be defined by the constraints, particularly thermodynamic ones, exerted on the Earth and its inhabitants. They also remind us that it is up to science to help create the opportunities for these unexpected futures and to explicit the constraints. For these reasons, we conclude that The ministry for the future clearly demonstrates the value of fiction, science fiction in particular, as part of the process of thought and research-action at the service of the interdisciplinary project around nature and society promoted by NSS.