America, 2049:
Summer temperatures are intolerably high, the fossil fuel industry has shut down, and humans are implanted with a ‘Flick’ at birth, which allows them to remain perpetually online. The wealthy live in the newly created Floating City off the coast, while people on the mainland struggle to get by. For Rose, a job as a hostess in the city’s elite club, feels like her best hope for a better future.
At a Cold War-era research station, a group of highly-trained women with the code name White Alice are engaged in climate surveillance. But the terms of their employment become increasingly uncertain.
And in a former oil town in northern Canada called Dominion Lake, a camp is being built: Camp Zero. A rare source of fresh, clean air and cooler temperatures, it will be the beginning of a new community and a new way of life. Grant believes it will be the perfect place to atone for his family’s dark legacy.
Everyone has an agenda. So who can you trust? Could falling in love be most the radical act of all?

‘Camp Zero‘ provided a depressingly plausible vision of life in 2050 that I’m glad I’m unlikely to live long enough to see.

What made it both plausible and depressing is that this isn’t an apocalyptic tale of dramatic destruction but rather a continuation of both the slow erosion by climate change of the way of life that people at the start of the twenty-first century took for granted and the widening of the gap between the choices available to the very wealthy and the choices the rest of us have to cope with.

What made the novel engaging was its focus on three sets of people trying to build lives for themselves in the midst of this slow-motion disintegration and whose paths are all converging on Camp Zero, where Americans have hired men to build a new campus in the far north of Canada, next to a long-abandoned small town. One story follows Rose, a sex worker at the camp, who has a secret agenda. One story follows Grant, the son of a leading member of the wealthy elite, who, following a trauma, has fled his family and its wealth to take up a job teaching job at the still-under-construction campus. The third story follows an all-female group of scientists in the American military who have been sent on a long-term mission to White Alice a polar DEW station in Northern Canada left over from the Cold War.

The converging storylines were strongly differentiated from each other in terms of style, perspective and possibly timeline. This made for a richer reading experience both because each storyline captured my imagination and because I kept speculating on how the stories would converge. I found the White Alice storyline to be the most intriguing, partly because the storytelling had the resonance of an oft-repeated oral tradition and partly because I couldn’t see where it was going.. The Rose storyline was the most engaging, partly because of Rose’s determination to make the most of the opportunities available to her and partly because of the contrast between her experience in the Floating City, a high-tech enclave for the wealthy built off the coast from Boston. I liked Grant’s storyline the least, but that’s probably a sign of how well-written in was. I found myself being increasingly annoyed by his self-indulgent guilt, his naivety and his refusal to see what was right in front of him.

What kept me turning the pages at first was my desire to know what the women in White Alice did to survive and why Rose was really at Camp Zero and what Camp Zero was really for. As the story continued, I became more interested in Rose as a person and I began to distance myself from the insider’s narrative of White Alice and reassess what the women were doing and the group identity that they had built.

I liked the way technology was treated in ‘Camp Zero’. The near-future 2050 technologies are described as clearly as in any Science Fiction novel and are all reasonable extrapolations of existing tech. Yet, it’s clear that they are a distraction from the problems of the emerging world rather than a solution to them. They enable the rich to extend the lifespan of an unsustainable way of life and they pacify the rest by enabling them to escape into a virtual world that dulls their awareness of the external realities.

One of the main themes in ‘Camp Zero’ is the difference between male and female agendas. The two dominant males in the story: a tech billionaire and a former climate campaigner turned ‘Let’s rebuild from the ruins’ visionary are driven by ego to reshape the world in their image. They devote their energies to overwriting the current reality with their vision of how the world should work. Rose and the women in White Alice, in their different ways, have understood that the world has changed, that things are bad and that they’re not going to get better. They devote their energies to finding a way to survive and to have the best lives they can create for themselves and the people they care about. The men and the women are both ruthless in the pursuit of their agendas. They both practice deception, use violence and seek advantage in any situation.

I liked that ‘Camp Zero’ never lost its focus on the people in the storylines it followed. It also never devolved into either melodrama or Happy Ever After escapism. The storylines converged and produced a resolution of sorts but, as in real life, each resolution poses new challenges rather than a conclusion.

My favourite lines from ‘Camp Zero‘ come from the last chapter when two women are talking. One says, “But it’s a shit world isn’t it?” The other replies, “Of course it’s shit. But it’s the only world we have”. That, I think, is an accurate summary of our collective future.

I recommend the audiobook version of ‘Camp Zero’. It’s told with multiple narrators and it’s very well done. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.