This book starts out mad but somehow manages to twist itself into even more total insanity for the end.

This book should be titled info-dump because that's what every second of it was. I dreaded the outpouring of barely significant info on how the current world came to be disguised as John's recollection of the past. The whole thing took a really preachy tone relenting on the failures of humanity not making do with what they have. It's like the author wrote this book thinking people will reflect on it in 75 years as an insightful warning. This is one of the main flaws of the tone for me. It just felt condescending in a way or like it was written expressly to be studied by uninterested teenagers in an English class. At some point I just got really frustrated. We get it tree of life, tree of good and evil tress have historic symbolism WOW SO SMART. It just got on my nerves. 

*Spoilers from here on

The next worst thing about this was just that it felt too far fetched and got confused. Like the guy wrote a quarter of it got bonked on the head and decided it should be fantasy. WHY ARE THERE WITCHES??? I was genuinely confused not exaggerating when I say I couldn't believe what I was reading. For half a second I thought that it was some future technology Chapman was mistaking for magic but no we had witches. why. 

That leads me onto my next criticism. Chapman and C-433. I say again. why. They added absolutely nothing, less than nothing. Maybe C-433 was useful for the insight into the future but I honestly felt like it would have been a far more compelling narrative for it to be told through John as the swarm cloud and E-5 or whatever. We could have easily gotten all the narratives in that way and it would have saved the boring trek across America by the two brothers. 

It may be slightly nitpicky but I was very confused at the fact that America, China and India were mentioned but no country in Africa was. It is literally one of the biggest landmasses with diverse climates and fertile regions yet it was 100% missed out?? Even the mention of the vac's in India and wherever were extremely shallow and still poses the climate crisis through American eyes. Which doesn't add up to me since so much of the global food, textile, manufacturing chains are situated elsewhere in the world. It might be harsh to say a little American supremacy kicked in but that's what I think. I think. I mean the whole structure of Earth trust as an American company with little worker colonies around the globe basically makes it out like americans are the smartest. "No one could replicate Eury bla bla bla's tech" but John himself admitted he created one of the most crucial parts (the bees) and repeatedly states how simple the technology is. Anyway it's really a minor point so I'll move on.

We didn't need Chapman's POV dedicated to mansplaining the greed of men.

Just a personal point is that I really despised the character of John. He just had very weird logic and preached it as if it was a profound insight. Like when he went on about how the apples of the trees at the VAC were a gross imitation and nothing like a "real apple" even though modern apples are not like the original and are specifically bred and selected for certain attributes. His whole rant on future generations growing up under a white sky. Who cares. He just came of as a "back in my day we didn't have all these iphones". Also just came of as weak minded. Additionally when we are introduced to him he's blowing up stuff because.... because.... well we never really got a good explanation in my opinion. He already explained to us that there are no pollinators left, plant life has diminished to basically nothing outside of the VAC's but blowing up this and that is supposed to rebuild an entire ecosystem. sure.

C-433 was genuinely so pathetic I wanted to throw my kindle when it got to his narrative. I was literally agreeing with the remainders. Should've just taken one for the team and gone into the recycler. 

I called that all three narratives were kind-off the same person.

How does giving humanity 25 instead of 100 years to turn around fix anything? Seriously, I could have laughed when this was revealed as the grand plan. It already clearly stated in detail that humanity has been in denial at every catastrophe to the point that most life is artificially constructed and a mass amount of the population is gone but this was going to shock them into reality? really?

Also makes entirely no sense that consciousness can be transferred through "the rung" between bodies and he didn't bother even trying to explain that one properly we just had to accept it. 

Why was Eury, a mastermind so blind to Johns motives? The guy has stated many times he hates you and your company, he has dedicated his life to your downfall yet you give him an all access tour around your top secret facilities. I know they tried to make it out that John was this super genius but I really just couldn't believe that. Not even for a second. It just began to feel like great man syndrome. Out of all the engineers in the world not one could execute code John writes in a matter of minutes. 

I could go on about how insufficient I found this and how much time I'll never get back from reading this but whatever. 

Anyway don't read this. Not even to see how bad it is.

Read for the Ursula K. LeGuin Prize for Fiction TBR.

This novel tried to do too many things at once; that, or it felt like it didn't quite know what it wanted to be. It features three narrative strands: a) two brothers, one human the other a faun, travel the Ohian Frontier in the 19th century, planting apple trees they hope to cash in on in the future. b) A man in the ecologically devastated 22nd century becomes involved in a ploy to sabotage the hubristic world-saving aspirations of his highly intelligent corporate overlord ex-girlfriend. She owns a good chunk of the world through her company Amazon Earthtrust (sorry I had to make that joke) and hopes to save Humanity and the Biosphere using what I'll call the "Snowpiercer Method" (I hope those who can will appreciate the more obscure reference here heheh). c) Centuries in the future, a many times bio-technologically printed, and re-printed, faun patrols the surface of the frozen, post-apocalyptic Earth in search of organic materials, and maybe something more...

And it all felt like a bit of a mess. Plot strands b) and c) are very directly connected, but plot strand a) barely connects to the rest of the novel, though it was also, ironically perhaps, the most emotionally engaging for me - not that there was much emotional engagement overall anyway. And that in turn is probably because the character work was better in strand a) than it was in either strand b) or c). Brotherly love is central to it, which I appreciated in a literary landscape awash with (poorly executed) romances. But it wasn't anything particularly compelling either.

Plot strands b) and c) fall within the broader domain of science-fiction, but plot strand a) doesn't in the slightest, and falls rather in the domain of fantasy, or even magical realism. I didn't get the point of having a faun main character, so completely divorced from its original mythological context, and the other main elements of the story. I get that it was supposed to be part of some "Orpheus and Eurydice Myth" motif, but said motif was very poorly put together and very clunkily - not to say pointlessly - embedded in the overall narrative. I love mythological themes, motifs and symbols in fiction, but not when they are poorly incorporated and/or executed, which I felt was the case here.

The story also felt, despite its references to other areas of the world, too US-centric, hell too Ohio-centric even, to me. It's strange because a narrower setting doesn't necessarily bother me, even in stories that rely on a premise affecting the entire world, but here it just didn't work for me for whatever reason. It was all just too small, and I couldn't care (no offence to Ohians).

The world-building was lacklustre in strands b) and c), and the overall theming... Ugh, it was tedious. This novel features superficial - to me - ecological theming of a specific type I hate, because it relies heavily on establishing a hard divide between Humanity and the rest of the Animal Kingdom wherein the former is cast as near-irredeemably Evil and the latter as overly simplistically Good. I for one believe this divide is part and parcel of the problem, even when it is well-meaningly established in favour of ecological conservation. And whilst I have a decently misanthropic streak (lol), if a story makes me feel overtly defensive about Humanity, I know it's done fucked up. 😆 It's naïve dualism that just doesn't hold water, as far as I'm concerned, in light of ecological knowledge or even ecologically-informed spirituality if we're going to go with that. Appleseed, thematically, is basically the polar opposite of the recently-ish read Hollow Kingdom when it comes to depth, nuance and personal appeal.

Yes, there is also, apparently, theming about Christian Manifest Destiny, or something, and The American Dream, bits and bobs about consumerism, capitalism, blah blah... But none of this felt particularly salient, interesting and/or well executed to me. The prose was competent to good, sure, and to be fair I found a lot of the Ohian landscape, forest, swamp, what have you descriptions in strand a) sufficiently evocative. But at the same time I struggled to keep reading in many places, so much so that after a while, even my "favourite" strand of the story could barely hold my attention.

There were a couple decent ideas here, more-good-than-not writing, but so much more that was poorly executed or simply not to my personal preference. That's why I feel it lands smack-dab on an average or mediocre 5/10, though I rounded the star rating down because ultimately, I just didn't enjoy Appleseed at all.

Just wasn't interested.