Are evolution and its abundances the expression of the world’s will, or only the artifacts of its indifference?
Appleseed is a sprawling epic weaving together strands of science fiction, eco-horror, fabulism, and even classic mythology. It is told through three 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.
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.
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.
David's Book Reviews 