Book Review: APPLESEED by Matt Bell
I just finished Appleseed by Matt Bell last night and absolutely loved it—it’s definitely worthy of the praise it’s been getting. Honestly, I think it may be my favorite book of 2021, and if my not my favorite, then at least tied with Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander and S.A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears.
Appleseed is a sprawling epic weaving together strands of science fiction, eco-horror, fabulism, and even classic mythology into a truly sui generis whole. It is told through three interweaving, interconnecting timelines, each timeline shining a light on the beauty of the natural world, the damage done to it, and what its future may hold. We simultaneously follow two brothers—one faun, one human—as they traverse eighteenth-century Ohio planting orchards; a former bioengineer at the end of the climate-ravaged twenty-first century as he attempts to infiltrate and dismantle the “eco-friendly” megacorporation he helped build, and finally, a thousand years in the future in the midst of a new ice age, we follow a piece of biotech as it undertakes a journey to what may be the last bastion of human civilization. Each story connects to the other in ways that steadily become more apparent as you continue reading, with the complete, epoch-spanning story unfolding like a puzzle revealed as each piece is added to the whole.
That’s not to say this novel is all plot—perhaps what is most impressive about Appleseed is the way Bell centers the novel on his characters. It’s fascinating characters like Chapman the faun (I dare you not to fall in love with him), bioengineer-turned-eco-vigilante John Worth, and the far-future biotech creature known only as C, that keep us invested as we turn each page, jumping back and forth between past, quasi-present, and future. Most importantly, it’s these characters that allow us to really understand and internalize what we, as a species, have done to this planet.
Bell’s prose is beautiful, too. He writes long, flowing, lyrical sentences that are just a pleasure to read, and it’s not surprising that I was reminded of Ursula K. Le Guin’s sparkling prose, as Bell frequently lists her as a major influence. And while these wonderfully meandering sentences are certainly dense, they’re never a chore: each sentence is its own world, its own story to get lost in. Appleseed is very much a book that asks you to spend time with it, sit with it, soak it in. And what a gift that is, in our modern culture of now, more, now.
Like VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander, Appleseed is a timely novel in every sense of the word. It grapples with big questions about manifest destiny and stewardship; it dissects our culpability in the diminishment of the natural world, our tendency to consume by warping what we want into what we “need”; it questions why we allow those in power to keep that power when they’re only making things worse, and; it asks us what it means to be truly human, asks us to examine our relationship not only with the natural world, but with each other. If anything, Appleseed’s point is not that we don’t matter—the book, I think, argues unequivocally that we do matter, that what we do or don’t do matters—it’s that we’re not the center of the universe, and if we truly want to stop harming the world around us, we need to come to grips with that.
Ultimately, what I loved most about Appleseed is that it’s a novel filled to the brim with hope: hope for our world, hope for each other, hope for the future. And in these uncertain days, a book like this is truly a joy to read.
