A vision of a boomtown’s dystopic future after the oil runs dry
On a cross-country trip through her native Canada in 2011 — a year when the price of oil had risen above $100 a barrel — Michelle Min Sterling was struck by circumstances in Alberta. In a fairly remote small town full of young workers and new development driven by the fossil fuel industry, she found herself thinking, “What will this place look like in the future, when oil no longer animates the region?” Her imagination offered up a ghost town in the far north, once an extraction hub but now holding out the promise of a new, limited resource for a warming planet: cold. This futuristic setting became the seed of her debut novel, “Camp Zero.”
For the next 10 years, while working as a freelance editor and an adjunct lecturer in the Boston area, Sterling figured out the intricate plot of her novel. She knew it would open with Rose, a young woman who arrives at Camp Zero to join the Blooms, a group of women sex workers. Secretly, Rose has been tasked with monitoring
Meyer, the eccentric American architect whose brainchild project is the focus of the town’s many industrial workers, known as the Diggers. Sterling realized early on that she needed an interloper of sorts to bring in an outsider’s perspective, which prompted her to create the character of Grant, a young professor and do-gooder desperate to escape the burdens of a wealthy Bostonian lineage. The third strand of the plot came to Sterling by accident: While researching Cold War–era substations charged with detecting Soviet bombers coming across the Arctic Circle, she envisioned a similar substation run by women and set up in the far North to study climate change. “Blade Runner” and other genre-bending films inspired Sterling as she sought to define “Camp Zero”’s themes of feminism, climate change, settler colonialism, and technological dystopia.
Not unlike the Los Angeles of “Blade Runner,” the sense of a future not so far removed from the present is palpable throughout the novel, with places like Boston (where Rose used to work before heading north) feeling both familiar and irrevocably altered.
Michelle Min Sterling will be discussing “Camp Zero” with Tara K. Menon at Harvard Bookstore on Wednesday, April 12, at 7 p.m.
Shubha Sunder lives in Boston and is the author of the forthcoming short story collection “Boomtown Girl.”