Appleseed

April 19, 2021
Bell (In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods) delivers a stirring take on climate change, complicity, and human connection. In separate narratives set centuries apart, three characters struggle to remain true to themselves in hostile worlds. In 18th-century Ohio, Chapman, a faun, wanders the wilderness with his human brother, planting apple trees that will feed future settlers and may someday grow the fruit Chapman hopes will make him fully human. In a postapocalyptic late 21st-century North America, a man named John confronts his role in the creation of the corporation that controls the world’s food supply, and plots to tear down the system. A thousand years from now, in an icy wasteland, humanoid C follows the directive of his previous iterations: find enough biomass beneath an endless glacier to regenerate life. An accident surfaces long-forgotten instructions, leading C across the ice to what may be humanity’s last stronghold. While each character’s situation appears bleak, the voices in this powerful tale continually seek something beyond the imperfection of human stewardship, as when John contemplates his complicity: “there’s no crime in being born into a harmful story but surely there’s sin in not trying to escape.” This is an excellent addition to the climate apocalypse subgenre, and the way it grapples with humanity’s dramatic influence on the planet feels fresh and bracing. Agent: Kirby Kim, Janklow & Nesbit.

June 1, 2021
An epic novel about saving the planet that blends science fiction, mythology, and techno-thriller. The third novel by Bell considers the Earth's fragility from three perspectives. One thread, set in the late 1700s, follows Nathaniel and Chapman, two half brothers planting apple trees across Ohio. A second is set in the near-ish future as global warming has become irreversible except for a massive corporation's plan to cool the Earth by clouding the lower atmosphere. The third is set in a far-future ice age as a cyborg heads to Black Mountain, near what was once Las Vegas, on a quest to "reset" the Earth. That's all ambitious enough in itself, but Bell adds a lot of symbolic freight to underscore the interconnectedness of humans and nature. Chapman, for instance, is a faun, capable of shifting from human form to that of a hooved satyrlike creature; the cyborg, C-433 (named for how many times it has regenerated itself), is a glitchy mix of humanoid and tree. In the near-future narrative, the Earth-cooling effort is led by megacorporation Earthtrust, which has purchased the western half of the United States and filled the east with indentured-servitude farms built on the biomass it's hoarded. That section of the novel is the weakest and most rote, featuring Earthtrust's leader and her former lover-turned-revolutionary engaging in potted debates about climate ethics. Still, Bell is gifted with the kind of imagination that avoids predictable apocalyptic fiction; you root for C-433 to succeed as a person, even if it's not quite a person. Bell cleverly combines the novel's plot threads in the book's late stages, and despite the elliptical structure, his central message hits home: The world as we know it is past saving if we need a monopolist to save it. A flawed but admirably big-thinking attempt to make readers rethink climate and climate fiction.

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June 1, 2021
Chapman, a faun, and his human brother, Nathaniel, plant apple trees across eighteenth-century Ohio. Nathaniel dreams of progress and development while Chapman sows each seed hoping for the Tree of Forgetting, whose fruit will turn him into a man. In the near future, the habitable half of the United States is owned by tech company Earthtrust, which claims a commitment to preservation and reversing climate change. In the abandoned West, John meets up with fellow rewilders and plots the takedown of the corporation he helped found. Hundreds of years in the future, a being searches for organic matter under the ice that covers the Earth. The three story lines alternate as Bell (A Tree or a Person or a Wall, 2016) slowly unveils the particulars of each world and their surprising connections. Appleseed is a work of cli-fi that explores myth and technology and asks what progress is good for humanity. Fans of Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven (2014) or David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (2012) will enjoy this, as will admirers of such speculative environmental fiction as Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy.

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July 1, 2021

Bell's third novel presents itself as a breakout work: Pitched to epic scale and scope, it's a heady, metaphor-rich mash-up of fairy tale-fantasy, cli-fi, and postapocalyptic fiction. The novel is structured as three separate but entangled narratives. The first takes place at the turn of the 18th century and follows two brothers--one a man, one a faun--whose entrepreneurial pursuits find them planting apple trees across Ohio's still-wild lands. The second is set in a nightmarish near-future of the climate change-ravaged late 21st century, as an eco-terrorist "rewilder" returns to the genetic engineering monolith he helped create. The last story line is set a thousand years in the future, in a new North American ice age. The result reflects a fairly organic waypoint for Bell, combining both the mythology and dark fabulism of his first novel, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, and the more dystopic, mechanistic texture of his follow-up, Scrapper. While Bell's writing remains rich and surprising, too much feels derivative of similar works, and the twined threads are unequally successful and fail to pull together with much punch. VERDICT Loaded with ideas and often poignant in its ruminations, but also languorous and merely expository; there's certainly no denying Bell's ambition, but this work simply fails to take root.--Luke Gorham, Galesburg P.L., IL

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