Review: APPLESEED by Matt Bell
Epic. Urgent. Wholly unique.
Appleseed by Matt Bell is an incredibly audacious and timely novel executed with both artistic and technical precision. Bell is fearless with taking risks that challenge readers with mass extinctions, the death of mammals, a dystopian near future, and a barren far future in a second Ice Age. Every loss comes with the painful truth of our culpability.
Structurally unique, the novel consists of three main timelines and POVs that stand alone and alternate in threes. Bell mixes realism based in hard science and the fantastical borrowed from myth. First, there is Chapman the faun, clearing the pristine woodlands of the Ohio frontier with his brother to plant apple orchards. Second is the engineer John Worth returning to a dystopian Ohio 50 years into the future. Third is bioprinted cyborg faun C-432 that is soon recycled and re-printed as C-433—the last of the C’s living a thousand years from now on a glacial sheet of ice under a clotted, white sky.
Bell’s rich imagination is described in beautifully-crafted language. His words are profound and squeeze your heart in a vise. Appleseed is an elegy to the world we are losing. Read this book. You will never forget it.
