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 received the Robert A. Heinlein Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society for his body of work. Prior to The Ministry for the Future, his latest 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). While 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, 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 that bridge-time to a future when the effects of climate change are mitigated and the Holocene extinction halted.