As the dust settles on a reconfigured America recovering from an environmental collapse, twelve-year-old eternal optimist Tristan Weekes thinks the eco-totalitarian organization WORLD is doing a great job healing the planet. He lives in Canland-an agrarian California desert-greening project absent many of today's common technologies-where heatwaves, food shortages, and a refugee crisis divide society. Tristan, however, has a rare and life-defining medical condition called analgesia, which prohibits him from feeling physical pain, and leaves his brain's stress centers undeveloped in the face of every surrounding danger.

Determined to demonstrate his competence, Tristan has adopted the philosophies of the people he loves most: his older brother, Dylan, a drug-addicted satellite hacker, and his mother, Helena, a powerful population control-extremist. Meanwhile, his high-ranking father's two-year-long departure on a classified WORLD research assignment has strained their family's sense of duty to one another. But when a series of cataclysmic events forces Tristan to think for himself, he must face the secrets his family keeps, the truth about his own involvement in the horrors enacted by Canland and WORLD, and decide whether to save himself, his family, or the orphans of Canland.

In his fiction debut, Daniel Vitale explores the fate of our planet, the responsibility of family, and the duty of science, all through Tristan's uniquely endearing voice, as Orphans of Canland asks one of today's most pressing questions in fiction: What does it mean to belong on Earth?