126 pages
English language
Published 2022
An expansion of the 2020 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winning story. Arboreality is a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award and the winner of the 2023 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.
A professor in pandemic isolation rescues books from the flooded and collapsing McPherson Library. A man plants fireweed on the hillside of his depopulated Vancouver Island suburb. An aspiring luthier poaches the last ancient Sitka spruce to make a violin for a child prodigy. Campbell's astonishing vision pulls the echoing effects of small acts and intimate moments through this multi-generational and interconnected story of how a West coast community survives the ravages of climate change.
This is engrossing: the author doesn’t flinch about the effects of climate change but people and nature adapt. You don’t have to fix the world to make things better.
Arboreality is a collection of loosely connected stories set on an ecologically devastated near future Vancouver Island. Campbell offers up the full effects of human greed and short-sightedness but also human and natural resilience. A quick read. Recommended.
