I picked this up because of its reimagined telling of Johnny Appleseed or John Chapman, a man/faun and his brother planting apple trees in colonial Ohio. This epic novel includes two other threads -- the story of John and Eury and Earthtrust in a dystopic climate-ruined near future; and lastly a being known only as C-433 who begins to turn into a tree during a far-future ice age. Bell expertly intertwines these three time periods, although I struggled to connect with any character. The commentary on corporate greed and capitalism and destructive consumption of earth was spot on. In a depressing way.

This is a different way to come at the implications of our decisions regarding climate change, especially when considering the implications of the use of technology to preserve a dying world. I finished a couple of days ago and I'm still thinking about it.

1st time reading(7/21). I may review in depth after I decide to read it again. I enjoyed it because it doesn't stay one genre. The story references myths/stories from ancient Greeks, and of course, North American. It's a grand story, and can be, at times, reflective. I recommend it.

This is a brilliant novelized version of these non-fiction thoughts/opinions:

* Manifest destiny was a climate disaster.
* Capitalism's focus on growth will inevitably lead to total global ecological collapse.
* Only total destruction of our current global system (and probably also: our species) will save the planet.
* Perhaps, many generations from now, our post-human or transhuman progeny will co-exist peacefully with nature. But they won't be homo sapiens. We're a transition species, and the sooner we transition ourselves out of the picture, the better.

If you tend to agree with the above, you'll likely enjoy this fiction that artfully and emotionally conveys these ideas. I enjoyed this work of fiction.

“There are exactly three minutes left, then there’s less. Always less. Every noncommittal breath, every vacillating utterance, every frustrated gesture, every wavering thought: the only result of inaction is less time.
No matter what you do, there will never be more time left to act than there is now.”

Appleseed is a novel of a grand scale - told in three parts, in largely three different perspectives, and in three different ages of past, present, and far-flung future. It can be considered to be historical fiction, eco-fiction the likes of which can only be possible in this day and age, and part mythology and myth-making that centers around the all-too familiar Tree and its Apple. It touches on many facets of being that rounds the narrative in such a way that makes it seem inevitable - one cannot tell a story-epic without considering the question of the self: what one wants, and what one has to do to attain it; is want a necessity of being alive, and can it be wrest free of the never-ending quest for more? What makes a man, and is it the want?

The story begins by way of Chapman - not as John Chapman of myth and legend, at least not yet - but Chapman as faun. Half man, half beast, an Other. That’s not all that is transmuted in the telling. In Appleseed, Chapman has an older brother, Nathaniel. The historical fact is thus: John Chapman is the older brother, the one who persuades the younger Nathaniel to join him in the edge of the frontier; their mother died giving birth to Nathaniel. What changes is that Chapman the character was younger, with Nathaniel as his father-figure, but more so his brother, the civilizing influence to his dual nature.

This duality of nature also plays into the future arc, C-433’s narrative. What he is and what he becomes. And in the present, Eury and what she proclaims herself to be: nymph, saviour of the world - and what she becomes: a ghost, spectral and unreal.

The themes of identity, of memory, of being, are all so heart-wrenching in how those topics never cease to be matters of contention to me. Cloning plays a crucial role in Appleseed, but it goes beyond the replication of a body. Every iteration of someone the Loom spits out carries the memories of the ones that came before. Immortality, in short. But Appleseed plays with this in ways that had me questioning what makes a person, as per always. I used to think it’s memory, but with backups and redundancies and carry-overs, it’s not so simple anymore. The matter of forgetting/remembering is crucial too, what with Chapman’s quest for the Tree of Forgetting, a remixed, defamiliarized spin on the Tree of Knowledge - where the implication of the Fall of Man is not so much an enlightenment, but a forgetting of the prelapsarian natures.

Then there is the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. I’ve been encountering this myth a lot lately, but Appleseed focuses on a different aspect of the myth. Where it’s always how Orpheus exercises his human folly/his love/his choice to mythologize Eurydice, in Appleseed it latches on to ideas about grief, foretellings, and a hopeful return to what can not. The layer of inherited sin, as per Chapman-as-Aristaeus, adds to the entire focus of climate change as the compounded inaction of us at the present, along with our fathers and their forefathers.

Appleseed is layered, complex, and necessary. But I have to confess, my romanticization of Ohio (it being for lovers and all) further tugged at my heartstrings as I read this book. The six page litany of native Ohioan species? Had me choked up something fierce. The book’s language is Romantic - it has no choice but to be - transcendental and myth-making as it is.