Arboreality

by Rebecca Campbell

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781777682323
Publisher:	Stelliform Press
Publication date:	09/29/2022
Pages:	126
Sales rank:	360,214
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Rebecca Campbell is a Canadian writer of weird stories and climate change fiction. She won the Sunburst Award for short fiction in 2020 for "The Fourth Trimester is the Strangest," the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 2021 for "An Important Failure," and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction in 2023 for Arboreality. NeWest Press published her first novel, The Paradise Engine, in 2013.

Editorial Reviews

06/27/2022

In a series of six interconnected speculative shorts, Campbell (The Paradise Engine) offers a bittersweet elegy to contemporary life that segues neatly into speculation about the impact of the coming climate crisis on Vancouver Island. The opening tale, “Special Collections,” offers both an impassioned defense of the humanities and a through line for the other stories: the books that English professor Jude and librarian Berenice preserve from a collapsing university library offer means of survival, points of connection, and moments of hope for characters in subsequent stories. Another recurring subplot is the construction of a violin from secretly scavenged materials transported to and from Vancouver Island. Campbell doesn’t shy away from the worst possibilities of apocalyptic ecological collapse, especially when it comes to pandemics, failing healthcare systems, and humanity’s inability to preserve or recreate its current mode of life after sea levels rise, but offers a surprisingly hopeful and joyful vision of the future, of “lives lived in the branches and among the leaves” of arbutus trees grown into living furniture and buildings. This compassionate cli-fi mosaic is sure to please genre fans. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

The 2023 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction winner and a Philip K. Dick Award Finalist.

"Campbell doesn't shy away from the worst possibilities of apocalyptic ecological collapse … but offers a surprisingly hopeful and joyful vision of the future … This compassionate cli-fi mosaic is sure to please genre fans." - Publishers Weekly

"I have yearned for a story like this one – ordinary people finding slow, small ways to repair not the whole damaged world, but their own small corner of it … I couldn't love it more." - Molly Gloss, author of Wild Life and The Hearts of Horses

"You'll see the world differently after reading this slender book – I dare you to come away unchanged." - Amanda Leduc, author of The Centaur's Wife

From the Publisher