A book to haunt your dreams

“Camp Zero,” the setting 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 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 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 to create a better future for her mother. There’s Grant, an idealistic graduate, who travels to Camp Zero to work at the university Meyer is creating. There are the Diggers, working in the excavation, and the allfemale crew of a climate research station, a few days’ travel away.

There is, however, more to the camp, and the story, than 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.

It’s a powerful setup and Sterling brings considerable veracity to her all-too-realistic vision of the future 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 narrative closure to the storylines they’ve been following.

This is not to say that “Camp Zero” should be dismissed. This wobble doesn’t take away from Sterling’s powerful storytelling, the vividness of her vision and her creation of a world that will likely haunt your dreams.