‘Camp Zero’: a book to haunt your dreams as our world gets hotter

“Camp Zero,” the setting (and title) for the debut novel from Vancouver Island-born writer Michelle Min Sterling, is the end of the line. Both literally and figuratively. The small town on the shore of Dominion Lake in Northern Canada died when fossil fuels were outlawed, and “‘the rigs stopped drilling.’” Now, it’s a spot on only the most detailed of maps, beyond the reach of maintained roads, a ghost town. It’s also a symbol of a fallen world: as we read, it’s 2049, and the world has heated to a perilous degree. Fossil fuels are outlawed (too little, too late) and the wealthy live in Floating Cities, moored offshore, while the rest struggle for survival.

It’s a bleak portrait of a world, fewer than three decades away.

But Camp Zero is also a symbol of hope. An American consortium has begun redeveloping the former resource-extraction area, a project helmed by a visionary architect, Meyer (author of books with titles such as “Utopia in the Anthropocene”). It’s as that symbol of a possibly better future that the camp, and the novel, begins to draw people in. There’s Rose, who has come to the camp as a sex worker (a “Bloom”) to create a better future for her mother. There’s Grant, an idealistic university graduate, who travels to Camp Zero to work at the university Meyer is creating. There are the Diggers, working in the excavation, and the all-female crew of a climate research station, a few days’ travel away.

There is, however, more to the camp, and the story, than initially meets the eye. There’s no building, so far, but a lot of digging, and a lot of questions. There are also a lot of concealed motivations. Rose, for example, has been sent to the camp by a former client to report back on Meyer and his plans; her reward will be a home for her mother and herself in the Floating City. Grant, meanwhile, is less idealistic than he first seems, more concerned about distancing himself from his family and their reputation than he is in creating a better future.

It’s a powerful set-up, and Sterling brings considerable veracity to her all-too-realistic vision of the future (the housing for the Blooms within an abandoned shopping mall, for example) and to her insights into all of her characters. This is a dystopia both environmental and human. The suspense builds gradually, excruciatingly, as the various storylines begin to come together, as questions begin to be answered.

It’s as the storylines converge, however, that “Camp Zero” wobbles. Instead of shocking the reader, or at the very least surprising, the revelations seem self-evident, connections almost predictable. Much of the significant action late in the novel takes place off the page, recounted rather than depicted, denying the reader, in some cases, narrative closure to the storylines they have been following.

This is not to say that “Camp Zero” should be dismissed: many (if not most) books wobble in the home stretch. This doesn’t take away from Sterling’s powerful storytelling, the vividness of her vision, and her creation of a world which will likely haunt your dreams.

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