Appleseed

4 stars at least. John Clute is more noted for his sf criticism than for his fiction. but lock early Samuel Delany, R.A. Lafferty, and Rudy Rucker in a room together, and this hallucinatory tall tale might result. yes, there are characters, in fact there's a hero and a villain; there's even a plot. but it's demanding to read, reveling in settings and language the far future might really throw up in a universe where earth is long gone and homo sap has almost been superceded by AIs and versions of nanotech. persevere: it's a tour de force, and John Clute's ultra-literate brain is worth following down more than a few rabbit holes of archetype and even art.

I read this book because a friend listed it as one of their all-time favourites. I spent so much of it trying to see why, but finally failing.

The book is confusing. It reminded me of being a child, without a full vocabulary and not knowing all the tropes that authors use. If you want to feel like a 7 year old reading the Hunger Games, try reading Appleseed. I had a few theories about this. The first is that it's hard scifi, and I haven't read a lot of that, so I'm missing a shared framework. The second is that it's very American (Johnny Appleseed, Wizard of Oz, that flavour of American that doesn't quite make it across the atlantic) so I'm missing another shared framework. The third is that it is just poetry, the author doesn't care show more about sense, but is just trying to explain something transcending, something that our current vocabulary cannot capture.

The themes of the book feel sometimes sublime, sometimes ridiculous. Humans are SpecialTM in the universe, in a way that is interesting but also reeks of Mary-Sueism. There are definitely echos of Northern Lights, a universe where God is Evil and we should be seeking the tree of knowledge and defeating him, and Hot Sex is the key to doing that. But at least in Northern Lights I understood what was going on. show less

When I finished this book I was too dazed and worn out to give it anything like the kind of review it deserved. I ended up just resorting to the worst reviewer's cliche in the book -- "what was this guy on?"

I still don't feel like writing a real review, but in lieu of that I can at least throw some quotes at you. Quotes are specially informative here because what distinguishes this book from all the other science fiction I've read isn't plot or characterization or worldbuilding -- all pretty good, mind you -- but its use of language to disorient and dazzle the reader. I've always been confused by the preference many science fiction writers and fans have for plain, unadorned language -- isn't science fiction all about going to new and show more strange places where people may think, and thus talk, differently? The future will break the world apart into categories along different lines than the present, and those categories will be embodied in words. Well, Appleseed's style is anything but plain, and it is one of the only works of science fiction I've read that really sounds like the future. The future sounds like this:

A timorous sibling tched softly within striking distance of the breakfast head of the Harpe in command of the great ark in orbit around Trencher with its stuffing of deep-sleeps snoring through their brainchip tasks. The sibling masticated with tiny nibbles the real-paper printouts in its glutinous ticklers, which it extended, perhaps hoping to donate an extensor limb. The commanding officer -- a grown sibling of Opsophagos -- took the printout in the mouth of its slack-eyed famished breakfast head, read the co-ordinates displayed, pulled down a three-horned screen and punched out the designated location. Chip-sluggish, the screen cleared, in time to reveal Number One Son wobble bare-arsed into the homo sapiens braid. Controlling their aversion to sigilla, the commanding officer began to jubilate.

They almost ate himself alive with joy.

Or sometimes like this:

Flitting from the stories that held them, other masks exfoliated themselves for the nonce to become memes, hiked themselves through the grouting slots, janiform and doppenganger-pale from the prison of the dance of tiles, and into the gimbal-shot free space of Glass Island, where they loured over the scene from fittings atop brass herms, shot antic bat glances around toggles, crouched over a braced scroll beaded with the sweat of attar, through which the Prime Copy of the Universal Book might be accessed ceremonially and at points of crisis.

Or like this:

--Upsydowndaisy lamentoso, death-bound froggies! whispered the transitus tessera out of the mouths of all the magi and the sages and the kings and queens and lower cards of conclave space in one single voice as though they had all suddenly remembered at the one same time the one same thing to say. The memory theatre of the conclave space of Tile Dance had not spoken ensemble for a Trillion Heartbeats, since before homo sapiens began to talk right, since before the Caduceus Wars.

What you think of these passages is a pretty reliable determinant of what you will think of the whole book. If you are the sort of SF fan who won't be able to enjoy the book unless you can determine precisely what each of Clute's funny words means and what basis it has in real science, then you won't like Appleseed. (I'm still not clear on whether there's a difference between "flesh sapients" and "flesh sophonts," and it took me a long time just to figure out that "sigils" and "sigilla" are different things in Clute's world. Which they are, by the way. Caveat lector.) On the other hand, if these quotes make you hungry for more psychedelic future-speak, Clute is your man. This is not a book that science fiction fandom received with a great deal of warmth, but it is nonetheless a book that should probably be read more often than it is.

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Original "review":

John Clute must be on some pretty fantastic drugs.

Also, was I imagining it, or was a lot of that book some sort of twisted parody of Stranger in a Strange Land? Maybe it's just a consequence of having read the two in close proximity. show less

I've read this book, twice, just after the original hardback publication. Then I lent it to someone (bah!).

I won't describe the plot, I've forgotten to much of it. So why write this review? Well... there's Clute's alien talk.

The first time I read the talk, I thought ... what is this bollocks? Explanation marks and pointless words, why is it there?

But something nagged me, so I went back and read it carefully, and I realised what he'd done. Unlike most scifi novels, even the best, Clute's made an attempt to deal with the detail that alien minds are likely to think in alien ways. Since language and thought are deeply interconnected, it follows they'd talk in different ways too. Clute's made an attempt to reflect that.

So I went back through show more the prose, but read it as poetry. And it works. I wouldn't award it the poem of the year medal, but, equally, it's not another redraft of the boring mainstream. It reflects a different way of seeing things, and it's good to see this in a scifi book. It makes the book an original.

Read this book for the prose. I'm confident it's got a lot more good things to it, and I'll tell you about them, if my copy is ever returned to me... show less

Far-future science fiction that dumps ideas out on every page and makes your brain boggle. Wonderful, wonderful reading. Post-humans. Post-AI.

Exuberant, densely-written, and contains some good ideas but Clute's sheer joy in language for its on sake can oftern obscure what's going on. Perhaps a bit too genre-referential at times, too. Fun if you can stick it, though.

I tried to read this and got to page 54 before I surrendered. I've only not finished about three books in my life, this is the only I couldn't finish due to not understanding what the hell was going on!