Book Review: Michelle Min Sterling tackles uncomfortable prospects with Camp Zero
Michelle Min Sterling Author of Camp Zero Picture: Benedicte Gyldenstierne Sehested
- Camp Zero
- Michelle Min Sterling
- John Murray, £16
What if our climate goals aren’t reached by 2030, and the warming world keeps on turning? A world where wildfires, frequent hurricanes, blistering summers and an outlawed fossil fuel industry leave the survivors dreaming of the clean air of the arctic cold. A work of speculative fiction, Michelle Min Sterling’s debut novel,
The novel opens in 2049 in Canada, where a young woman is shown her new lodgings in a derelict shopping mall in the former oil mining town of Dominion Lake. As part of a group of Blooms, or escorts, hired to entertain the men working on building the eponymous camp, she is given the name Rose. Having left the Floating City, an offshore enclave for the wealthy, Rose has been charged with spying on the architect of the camp in exchange for a safe place for her Korean mother to live.
Rose’s story is intertwined with that of Grant, an idealistic young man, determined to get away from the toxic legacy of his industrialist family. He thinks he’s been hired to teach at a university, only to discover on arrival the campus hasn’t been built, and his job involves teaching the desperate workers. Camp Zero is a cover for yet more mining of the frozen, pockmarked land.
The secondary story of nearby White Alice, a cold-war era research station, runs alongside the goings on at the camp. A group of highly trained female soldiers, with specific professional training, are sent to the station for three years only to discover another deception encoded in the archives of the project.
It becomes apparent that their past tense narrative is set in a different timeline. Told in the first person plural, the biologist, botanist, cartographer, engineer, geographer, meteorologist, programmer, and security specialist, over time grow from strangers, into friends and beyond. They become a unit, a Greek Chorus. With their mission abandoned, they take matters into their own hands to survive and create a new world in their own image.
As time passes, and the oil industry dries up, the women of White Alice are forced to take drastic measures to keep their dream alive, setting them on a collision course with Dominion Lake and eventually Camp Zero.
For me, the story of White Alice was the most effective and compelling part of the novel. Original in its telling, with a feminist slant, it could have been a novel in itself with more time given over to exploring the relationships and fleshing out the individual characters, rather than skimming over details.
The press notes for tell us that this is the lead title for the publisher for 2023, that the novel was sold for six figures in a bidding war and it is akin to the bestseller . While the setting is vivid and close enough to our reality to make it a deeply uncomfortable prospect, it is not as well written or original as Naomi Alderman’s novel, which was recently adapted for TV and due for release on Amazon Prime in May.
This novel relies too heavily on backstory or flashback, and there’s a sense that some of the more interesting action happens off-screen or thirdhand. We don’t stay long enough in the ‘now’ of each character. The end has been set up for a more explosive continuation, with Camp Zero perhaps the blueprint for a world that will lead to a more action-packed sequel, with less necessity for exposition.
