Michelle Min Sterling's debut novel “Camp Zero” is a climate thriller that centers around a near-future settlement where the fates of several climate survivors become intertwined.
Sterling, who was born in British Columbia, Canada, now lives in Cambridge and teaches literature and writing at Berklee College of Music. Parts of her novel — which received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly — take place in fictionalized, futuristic versions of both her home country and Boston.
Ahead of her April 6 Brookline Booksmith event, Sterling spoke with GBH News about her novel, which comes out today, April 4. Excerpts from the interview are below, lightly edited for clarity. You can hear the full interview by clicking the play button above.
Haley Lerner: What inspired you to write this book?
Michelle Min Sterling: The inspiration of the book actually came from a trip I made to northern Alberta to visit my cousin, who at the time was working as a pipefitter in the oil industry. I was on this cross-country journey across Canada. When I visited him, it was during one of the peak periods of the oil industry.
I was struck with the setting and the idea of going to a remote place for work. I wanted to imagine what this place might look like 20 or 30 years down the line when oil was no longer being extracted, but a different commodity was being explored, specifically the idea of cold being a commodity. And that became the premise for the novel. And so the novel is set in 2049, and it begins with a group of workers arriving in this work camp in northern Canada.
Lerner: The version of the future in your book is not far from our current reality, as it’s less than 30 years away. What made you choose this time period?
Sterling: I wanted it to be set in the near future as opposed to the distant future so there was a level of tangible feeling for the reader in terms of the setting and references. It is very much about a lot of the challenges we face today with the climate crisis, and about conversations around income inequality, and work, and the sort of desire to find a home as well. I hoped that familiarity would allow readers to kind of imagine the world they live in today within the context of this novel.
Lerner: You live and work in the Boston area, and multiple characters in this book started their journeys in Boston. How did living in Boston affect the way you wrote this book?
Sterling: It was huge, I immigrated here from Canada and went to grad school here. The idea of kind of returning to Canada through the lens of people who are from Boston was incredibly inspirational for me.
There are passages in the novel that imagine Boston after a really ferocious hurricane and we see these iconic settings — like the Boston Public Library, the public garden — within the post-climate crisis moment.
Lerner: How did growing up in Canada affect the way you wrote this northern Canadian settlement and how you portrayed it as this essential place where people could migrate when things got too warm?
Sterling: I wanted to play with some ideas of what Canada represents from the perspective of Americans, which is the idea of it being a somewhat remote place. I remember hearing people joke about fleeing to Canada in times of political stress or political turmoil as well. Of course there's a historical precedent too, when you think about draft dodging during the Vietnam War. A lot of Americans actually did flee to Canada in order to find a different life and a different future.
So I think there is already a kind of baked-in idea within the American consciousness of Canada as a possible refuge, even if it's not necessarily a place people will end up in.
Lerner: You explore class and the way it affects different people’s realities during the climate crisis. Can you speak to that?
Sterling: I think that the climate crisis is something that's collectively experienced. How one is impacted, of course, depends on access to privilege in terms of generational wealth. The character Grant — who's from a very prominent and extremely wealthy Bostonian family — he's more or less inoculated from the ravages of the climate crisis because he has his family taking care of him. I wanted to contrast that with other characters in the novel who have to kind of find their own way through this predicament and this problem and how work and labor becomes a way to do that.
Lerner: How is this novel a warning to the dangers of climate change?
Sterling: I wanted the climate crisis to be an omnipresent setting as opposed to a catalyst or a plot device of the novel. These characters are responding to that reality. And part of that was dripping in small details of air being a commodity, it is a party favor.
Lerner: Overall, what do you hope readers take away from this book?
Sterling: What I want readers to take from the book is to think about their own relationship to the environment, the earth itself, what it means to be part of a collective, what it means to care for our environment, to be part of a community, but also about how our actions today impact the future.
Michelle Min Sterling will be at Brookline Booksmith on April 6 at 7 p.m. in conversation with Shubha Sunder. More information can be found here.
