Camp Zero by Michelle Min Sterling

Published by Atria Books on April 4, 2023

Camp Zero is a novel of climate change, sisterhood, survival, and the privilege that accompanies wealth. In the relatively near future, southern climates have become unbearable, forcing migration to the north. The true impact of global warming in the United States is only hinted at in a story that primarily focuses on northern Canada. We nevertheless learn that one American city — a new one, constructed to house wealthy Americans offshore to avoid the threat of rising sea levels — has prospered despite (or because of) climate change.

Damien Mitchell lives in the Floating City. He invented the Flick, a device that is wired into the brain to provide internet connectivity. Damien has not told the public of a long-term downside to using the Flick. Camp Zero might be sending a message about the downside of staring at smartphone screens all day long, but the damage caused by the Flick is measurable. Unfortunately, after Michelle Min Sterling introduces that story element, she does nothing with it. Doing nothing with story elements is a recurring issue in Camp Zero.

Rose is Damien’s client in the Floating City. Rose is a half-Korean sex worker whose true name is revealed in an anticlimactic moment late in the novel. Using the promise of a decent life for Rose’s mother as an inducement, Damien convinces Rose to travel to Dominion Lake in Canada, where a camp employs Diggers to dig holes in the frozen ground. Rose is instructed to use her talents as a working girl to spy on Meyer, the architect who believes he is building a new settlement for Americans who are fleeing from the climate crisis.

Rose joins five other sex workers who are collectively known as the Blooms. They are supervised by a woman named Judith who extracts their Flicks, a seemingly pointless exercise since Dominion Lake has no wireless connection. Whether the Blooms feel exploited or happy to have a job (or both) is unclear, as neither the sex workers nor Judith are developed in depth. Only two Blooms are of consequence to the plot. Rose’s background is presented as a sketch while Willow’s underdeveloped character ties into another part of the story. Since the Blooms eventually seize an opportunity to make a better life, a reader can infer that they are unhappy with their present lives, but the women are so insubstantial that I found it difficult to connect with their plight.

Dominion Lake was once an oil drilling town but jobs became scarce after the US finally banned oil. Life in Dominion Lake is primitive. The Blooms operate from an abandoned mall. Why the stores left so many goods behind when they closed is never explained.

Grant Grimley came from money. With the help of his parents, he survived a hurricane that devastated Manhattan, but his girlfriend was less fortunate, perhaps because Grant’s parents regarded her as unworthy. Grant went north, accepting an invitation to teach English at a newly built campus in Canada. The campus at Dominion Lake turns out to be something less than he expected. His students are Diggers who, with Meyer, are supposedly awaiting an influx of funding so they can build a bigger community. Why it was deemed wise to give Grant a useless job is never made clear.

The story of Dominion Lake is woven into the separate story of White Alice. White Alice is a research station within snowmobiling distance from Dominion Lake. Because it was once used as a military radar base, it supposedly establishes American sovereignty, giving the US a foothold in an area that has an untapped supply of rare earth elements. The White Alice story, compressed in time, begins before the Dominion Lake story but eventually catches up.

The all-female team at White Alice has replaced a team that either went mad or starved to death when its home base stopped resupplying the scientists. This was apparently an attempt to see how well scientists survive without food and fuel in the frozen wilderness. The result was predictable, leaving the reader to wonder why the experiment was carried out. That’s yet another question the story neglects to answer.

To assure that the experiment is not replicated, some of the new scientists visit Dominion Lake in a search for supplies. One of them comes back pregnant. They decide to make their own little colony at White Alice, collectively raising a baby who grows up to be a proficient raider as they steal oil and supplies from other towns. Sustaining the colony will require an influx of new blood — that is, new breeding stock. The men who might be suitable for the task meet varying fates.

Had the characters been given more depth, had the story addressed unanswered questions, Camp Zero might have been a strong entry in the growing subgenre of climate change science fiction. Sterling imagined interesting scenarios but did too little with them. While the story confronts the conflict between idealism and survival, its revelatory moment instructs us that “it’s a shit world, but it’s the only world we have.” As inspiration goes, that lesson is wanting. The novel did enough to hold my interest but not enough to realize its potential.

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