psocoptera | Arboreality

Arboreality, Rebecca Campbell, 2022 novella. This is an expansion of her 2020 novelette "An Important Failure" (online at Clarkesworld here), which I loved and Hugo-nominated. Climate change, and grief, and adaptation, and hope, and the pursuit of beauty. The kind of deep, serious grappling that was totally absent from Lost Cause - what might it be like as communities (in this case, Vancouver Island) become cut off from the parts of the world where industrial civilization survives. (In this case partially a Retreat to the North and partially a Retreat to the Midwest scenario. The identity shift as the island residents stop thinking of themselves as Canadian really hit me when I caught it.) What kinds of people might choose to stay rather than leave and what might they do, trying to live good lives, and what it might feel like to be doing everything "right" but still know that climate impacts were going to keep getting worse.

"... but wanted to know... That the city wasn't dead, just smaller than it had been, and ready to be revived when the world stopped ending." "A hundred years ago the world was huge and rich and full, like nighttime in California." "No matter how small their lives had become, no matter how light their step or how many tons of carbon the Canadians sequestered, the sea was still rising. ... It had happened and it was happening and it would happen."