Rebecca Campbell talks to Debbie Bateman about her latest novella.
1. In Arboreality, your recently released novella, we travel through the personal lives of several people, each at a different stage of the climate change affecting their near-future world. The through-line connecting their lives is the resilient and life-saving force of trees. How did thinking about trees help you shape this story about climate crisis set on Vancouver Island?
Trees are history made material. Their rings are climate records; they live on as nurse-logs; they sequester carbon. They’re the visible manifestation of huge ecological networks: the mycorrhizal webs that support them underground, the huge nutrient flows from the deep ocean to the tops of trees by way of salmon runs. When you’re a kid growing up under them, they seem permanent, but they’re vulnerable. The smell, the touch of the bark, the objects we make from them, the heat they give off when they burn—these are key to my sense of place. But I also see the south coast of the Salish Sea changing: red flags on the drought-stressed cedars, the fungal infections that killed off so many arbutus trees.
Trees live at a different speed than we do. I wanted to evoke that difference in Arboreality. In Hydriotaphia, Sir Thomas Browne describes the narrowness of the human scale through the figure of a tree: “generations pass while some trees stand, and old families last not three oaks.” To measure our lives in trees is fascinating, and came to me naturally: their lives enclose our own, after all, in the houses we build and the books we read and the air we breathe.
2. Interspersed throughout the personal narratives, you have included short passages that shift into a fast-paced objective point of view. You report trends in climate change and offer brief clips about moments of trauma in people’s private lives in a way that reminded me of the news. Why did you choose this strategy? And how did creating these news-like passages affect your creative process as you were discovering the story?
It’s hard to write about climate change because of the problem’s scale. How do you write about something so much larger than an individual perspective, and involving a system vaster and more dynamic than we can hope to understand? These fragments were my attempt to think—and write—ecologically, to think beyond what an individual can know or see within the confines of literary fiction as it is now written, which tends to focus on the specific, telling details, described from an individual’s point of view.
I love nineteenth-century novels, especially the really sprawling ones, like Middlemarch or War and Peace, and I bet Eliot or Tolstoy would have found a way to write this story in a single, sweeping narrative. But I am not, alas, a nineteenth-century genius, and I find it hard to imagine an omniscient narrator, and I’ve fallen into the limited third-person perspective that seems to be the standard voice of literature now: close, intimate, and familiar.
But unless your characters are all ecologists, they aren’t going to grasp the scale of the world in which we live, neither the micro- nor the macroscopic. I certainly don’t. The omniscient fragments in Arboreality are my attempt to write from outside the third-person limits of most of my fiction, and so try to grasp at the massive scale of the problems we face. Another way of putting this is to say that I wanted to think ecologically, rather than individually.
3. Another writer might have broken the personal narratives into linked short stories or added content to meet the length expected for a novel. You chose instead to give us a form we don’t get to read often enough. What drew you to the novella form for this particular piece of fiction?
This is where genre expectations are important. Novellas have always been an important part of science fiction, probably a holdover from its origins in pulp magazines. They’re still published regularly in periodicals, and markets for them are growing at both major and small presses.
Readers like novellas, and they are of an appealing length for writers. The novella maintains some of the focus of the short story, but allows a writer more space to explore the world they’ve created, something that’s particularly important in a genre obsessed with world-building.
Arboreality is one of two novellas I’m publishing in 2022 (the other is The Talosite from Undertow Publications). After years of writing short fiction, I found my stories growing longer and more elaborate, so this form was the next natural step for me. I was also inspired by novellas that combined the focus of the short story with a sense of breadth, as though we are only seeing a fraction of a much larger world that is more compelling because it’s incomplete. On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan and Great Work of Time by John Crowley in particular let me see how flexible and evocative the form can be, despite its brevity.
4. The fictional future you have created is not so different from now. It is a reality that could happen and soon. Markers of what some might call life as normal take on a fresh meaning when they happen in the middle of severe climate change. While one character is carefully planting indigenous trees and bushes in the hope of preserving the world, his neighbour continues to mow his lawn and use pesticides. The collision of realities even as the world is in crisis feels deeply human. I think it makes the story not only hard-hitting, but also more credible. What were the challenges and rewards of setting a piece of science fiction in the near future? Did you deliberately look for ways of highlighting the absurdity and painful irony of human choices?
I love historical fiction because it reminds us of how little we really know about the world we live in, and how rapidly it can change. I think near-future science fiction can also create that sense of dislocation, and reveal the limits of our perspective. I love the juxtaposition you identify here, and the tension between what we think we know, and the true nature of the world.
I don’t generally write about people who change the world. I’m even dubious about how much agency an individual has given the myriad forces working upon us. This makes it difficult for me to write traditionally active characters of the kind that drive most science fiction.
I hope, though, that if I step back and imagine our little impulses and decisions in a larger, ecological context, I can tell a story that’s about struggle and evolution even if it’s not dynamic in the way science fiction usually is. It might not be about saving or ending the world, but it could be about community, resilience, and growing insight.
5. Can you reflect on any social contexts that might have been inspiring or generative for this work?
I’m terrified of climate change. I’m very much a child of the cold war, with all its nuclear apocalypses, and obsession with The End of the World as We Know It. So much of the book came from climate grief/fear/anxiety, which is a pretty common emotional reaction to our moment.
However, I’m also moved by Stelliform Press’s mandate to publish climate change fiction that does not default to the apocalyptic narratives I mention above. It’s important that we imagine change and resilience, even while we’re facing the truly appalling consequences of the way we live. I am reminded of the observation (attributed to several thinkers): “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than an end to capitalism.” But I have come to see that as a challenge, rejecting what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism” or the tendency to foreclose on all futures that don’t continue the debt and exploitation and isolation and consumption defining our lives. Being that cold-war kid, I would probably surrender to that gloomy realism. But we can’t find a new way of being in the world if we don’t first imagine it, and Stelliform challenged me to do that.
6. How do you think the work responds to the questions it raises in the context of the time and place the characters are situated in? How do you think the questions and responses in the book relate to the time and place of the intended readership?
I thought a lot about how insulated we are from the consequences of our consumption, whether by race, or class, or geography, and who we might become if we lost that insulation. I also thought a lot about nostalgia. My characters survive “the fall” (or at least, the transformation) of our civilization, and make their way in a new kind of world. But many of them remember the world before, and our world persists as a kind of haunting. It was a way to talk about all our freedoms and pleasures and opportunities at a distance, to imagine their consequences.
7. What kind of research did you have to engage in order to create the story world?
So much research. I spent a few memorable days trying to figure out how heat kills, precisely, whether you’re an elderly woman in a shoe-box apartment during a heat dome, or a barnacle in a tide pool. I read lots about tone wood and the construction of violins. There were a few months spent reading about carbon sequestration technologies, and there are references to them, but the more I worked on the story, the more I realized that my characters weren’t as affected by climate-tech or biohacking carbon sequestration as they were by social technologies. I wanted to think about other ways people could organize themselves, away from the suburban model of single-family dwellings in perfect isolation and long commutes. That led me to think about alternate social structures and Indigenous land management techniques. This in turn led me to consider ocean gardens and forest permaculture and controlled burns and pre-contact land management techniques. Like a lot of near-future science fiction, the story and the research happened in collaboration, with each guiding and illuminating the other.
8. How did you arrive at the structure of the work? Did you have a structure in mind when you started? What other structures or shapes did you consider? What drove your choices related to structure: efficiency or something else like style, urge for innovation, compulsions of the genre, and/or compulsions of a literary movement your work aspires to connect with?
The structure was largely dictated by the material I wanted to explore, which resisted clear narrative through-lines. I knew I wanted to capture—or at least gesture toward—the complexity of the changes we face, and that I wanted to put them in a historical and even planetary perspective. Fragmentation, mosaics, and changes in point of view seemed like the best way to evoke the disjunctures that we’re facing. It also allowed me to naturally move between the very grounded, specific experiences of characters, and the larger patterns and “flows” of the world to which they belong: weather, climate, empire, economics. As a genre, science fiction is well suited to this kind of oscillation—almost as well suited as poetry—because readers expect a certain amount of world-building outside the immediate perspective of their characters.
9. Are there threads of the story that were not told? Were there ideas that you couldn’t use? Were there threads you had to keep for a later work because of editorial reasons or plans for a sequel?
There are so many stories in my “extras” file! But I think that’s inevitable when you’re trying to write a mosaic narrative, since you don’t really know which fragment will find a place in the final text until you pull them all together. I imagined this as a fractured novel, one that had been chopped up and stuck back together in this disjointed form. I also imagined that the story would be unified by another kind of order, less narrative than ecological: a web rather than a chain. The connections aren’t causal, precisely, or even generational. The connective tissue is the huge, natural system to which my characters belong. And a lot of that system is invisible, so my “extras I can’t stand to delete” file is inevitably going to be huge.
10. Other than finding the most effective way of telling the story, were you conscious of any particular literary ambitions such as developing a distinctive voice or narrative style, or disrupting standard reader expectations of the genre?
My goal is always to evoke ecological complexity, and the systemic consequences of climate change. As I mention above, I don’t think I can contain that complexity in a single character’s point of view. Instead, I settled on a kind of oscillation between scales, from the microbial to the planetary, and from the intimate space of a household to the communal, national, and planetary. It’s hard to think across those scales, to imagine how they interact, but I wanted to evoke the kind of vertigo you can feel when you try to imagine just how huge and wonderful the world is, when you come to realize how you fit into a system so vast, your mind fractures when you try to grasp it.
Rebecca Campbell is a Canadian writer of weird stories and climate change fiction. Her work has appeared in many magazine and anthologies that promise to collect the year’s best science fiction, fantasy, and/or horror. She won the Sunburst award for short fiction in 2020 for “The Fourth Trimester is the Strangest” and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 2021 for “An Important Failure.” NeWest Press published her first novel, The Paradise Engine, in 2013. In 2022, Stelliform Press published her climate change novella, Arboreality, and Undertow Publications published her First World War horror novella The Talosite. She mostly uses her PhD in Canadian Literature to make up sad ghost stories.