Appleseed by Matt Bell

Appleseed
by Matt Bell
William Morrow, 2021

The core of Matt Bell’s new novel Appleseed is a familiar one. Bell (In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods) follows in the footsteps of science fiction New Wave movement’s J.G. Ballard (The Drowned World), and the more modern Kim Stanley Robinson (New York 2140, The Ministry for the Future) in the climate crisis subgenre. As is the case with many eco novels and in the world today, humanity’s failure to combat climate change is layered across every inch of this novel. However, Appleseed is so much more than similar stories of the past.

Appleseed is deftly structured across three distinct timelines, following two frontier brothers and their adventures in eighteenth-century Ohio, fifty years from now with a monopolistic company hoarding the world’s resources in a battle of morals against its creator, and a thousand years in the future in an ice covered North America and a lonely humanoid’s quest for companionship. The narratives are told in a fantastical way, a modern way, and a science fiction way. Appleseed’s publicity materials tout it as part speculative epic, part tech thriller, and part reinvented fairy tale. This genre bender’s three tales feel distinct, yet tie together fittingly in the end, and not overly so.

Bell’s passions helped shape his novel, particularly in the tale of the two brothers, which doubles for a retelling of the story of Johnny Appleseed, the American pioneer who introduced apple trees to Ohio and other parts of the country. Bell has professed an interest in Ohio before cars and roads, finding it whimsical. Indeed, the love of land and nature is ever-present throughout Appleseed:

Mostly this future waits its distant turn. In the present, there is the dark forest to navigate, there are nurseries to plant and land to claim with trees, trees they’ll one year sell to settlers surely following behind them. Every morning Chapman and Nathaniel roll their dew-soaked bedrolls, pack their one pot, Nathaniel complaining his clothes will never dry from the forest’s damp, Chapman leading his shivering brother onward, his hooves following the trails of other hooved beasts. Unlike Nathaniel, who slinks off to hunt whenever the opportunity presents itself, Chapman never eats the flesh of these animals. But neither does he fear starvation, not here in the bountiful Territory, its lands filled with bright bunches of berries, with undomesticated fruits and wild corn, with pale tubers hidden beneath the rich dirt.

Appleseed is no fast-paced read, with the three different timelines spread over such a vast time period, and with Bell throwing the reader into the deep end, expect to sit and ruminate with the novel. Some reader’s mileage may vary in terms of their patience, but seasoned genre readers will enjoy the pace if they stick with it.

Human beings have always and will always continue to impact earth. Bell’s narrative explores the best and worst of his characters, and what people could be. Ultimately, his characters attempt to do right by their planet:

It isn’t always possible to know what other story might be better for everyone. But it must always be possible to refuse to be a bit character in the wrong story someone else is telling, to refuse to do your part to enact the last chapter of a tale so destructive it’s about to cost the world.

A refusal to take up arms against the world, a refusal to take up the implements of labor in service of any story of limitless production but only incremental progress: surely there will always be at least this choice, surely even at the end it will remain meaningful whenever someone makes it.

Bell’s ability to bridge the connections between three distinct timelines and three separate genres in a way that is extremely readable and thought provoking is quite a feat. It would not be inaccurate to call this book a career achievement for many writers, but Bell is still early enough in his career, he just might surpass it. When adventurous readers wish to fulfill their Kim Stanley Robinson needs, perhaps they turn to Matt Bell.

Michael Feeney is a book reviewer and pop culture junkie from the Philadelphia area. He is an avid reader of fantasy and science fiction.