It’s 2049 in North America and society as we know it has collapsed. Because of rising temperatures, the south has become unliveable. The fossil fuel industry is no more.

One of the most sought-after places to live is’The floating city’ where the elite have cocooned themselves. Life is a struggle for everyone else.

In this book, Camp zero is based near the former oil town of ‘Dominion Lake’ where an architect called Meyer is determined to build a new community and establish a way of living in this new world.

Camp Zero

This is a book told from three perspectives. You have Rose, newly arrived at Camp Zero to work as a ‘Bloom’ and on a secret mission to help her‘employer back in the floating city. Grant has also travelled North on the promise of a job as a teacher at a ‘campus’ at Camp Zero, wanting to get as far away from his father as possible. And there’s a research building occupied by a group of women known as ‘White Alice’ who are there to monitor environmental changes - but we’re never quite sure when this particular storyline takes place.

These storylines do overlap and interweave, though to begin with it might seem like they are completely separate. The story and setup do take a while to get going but when they do ‘Camp zero’ has a good pace to it, eventually.

Flick

This is the second book I’ve read recently about the plundering of the world’s resources by unscrupulous investors. It seems to be becoming a popular genre and I suppose the best term to describe them is ‘Eco-thrillers’. With our anxieties about global warming increasing, it's a topic that will soon be moving into the horror category.

Even though living standards have deteriorated, in ‘Camp Zero’ people are still addicted to the internet. People use a device called a ‘flick’ which is basically an implant in your brain which you receive at birth and activate by flicking your ear. It means that users are never fully present, that memories are ultimately repressed, and it is the ultimate in data harvesting surveillance tools.

The scary thing is that it’s not so far fetched. It’s scarily close to some of the ideas explored in another book I read recently (Stolen Focus) where the ability to switch off your flick is a privilege enjoyed by the few.

Flashbacks

I suppose one issue I had with ‘camp zero’ was with the number of flashbacks, which sometimes clogged up the pace of the novel. I get that they were necessary, especially in telling the back stories of Grant and Rose, but some of them got in the way for me.

Some of the background characters came to the fore late in the book, always a bit of a bugbear with me. And I would have liked to know more about the other ‘blooms’. One thing the book isn’t short of are strong women, exemplified by some of the blooms and members of the White Alice camp.

Rose is a good character and I had sympathy for her because of her background. I didn’t particularly warm to the character of Grant and found it hard to care about his issues with his wealthy father. Although some events, later on, shone a bit more light on his distaste for his dad, they didn’t make me like him any more.

I probably enjoyed the White Alice story threads more than anything else in the book. There was a pioneering spirit to the group, and even though it was told from a slightly different perspective, I was eager to know what happened to them.

I liked the fact that we can recognise this world - it’s on the other side of a societal and energy collapse, but much of it was familiar. It wasn’t dissimilar in this way to ’station eleven’ which was about a post-pandemic society operating after most of mankind had died, but they are two different books. 'Station eleven' was about connection, about finding beauty in art to sustain us - ‘Camp Zero’ is more concerned with survival, and the importance of solidarity and working together in a small group. There’s a lot to be said for sisterhood and love.

Summary

I found ‘camp zero’ to be a solid dystopian sci-fi thriller. It’s well written, and has a good pace when it gets going, but I found it lost a bit of steam in the middle before picking up a bit again towards the end. It hints at some issues without fully exploring them and I didn’t find myself invested in the majority of the characters. I wasn’t overly fussed with the ending, as it seems to set events up for a sequel, and I’m not sure if the build up was worth it.

Thanks to Netgalley and John Murray Press for the Advanced Reader Copy.

Published on 30 Mar 2023

304 pages

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Book Review - Camp Zero by Michelle Min Sterling

Goodreads rating 3.28/5

My rating 3/5