God’s Green Earth or Humanity’s Hellscape? A Review of Matt Bell’s Appleseed

In his genre-bending novel Appleseed, Matt Bell offers an ambitious take on the horror of a climate doomed past the point of saving. As he lays out three storylines that transcend the traditionally distinct categorizations of fantasy, fable, sci-fi, and climate fiction, readers are invited into a world whose slow destruction by forces of human greed and exploitation is painfully familiar. While progressing through this literary masterpiece, one might wonder: can we truly pretend the demise of the ecosystems we’ve been ruining for years is far away, and is there any way to reverse our environmental impact before it’s too late?

Faun & Fable

Each of the characters Bell has created are dynamic and vivid, tormented by internal conflicts as they navigate the unstable eras they live in. In 18th century Ohio, a faun named Chapman joins his human brother, Nathaniel, in planting hundreds of apple trees in the hopes of profiting off the bountiful earth a few years into the future. Chapman, a horned and hoofed being who is both of this world and not of it, finds little purpose in the philosophy of “manifest destiny” that is championed by his brother and realized in the rapidly-developing farmland creeping west. His bestial half craves the unspoiled wildness of the woods, where death breeds new life in ever-repeating natural cycles that have been perfected without human intervention. Chapman thinks:

“with Nathaniel he lives only a man’s life, does a man’s work for a man’s reason: possession and enrichment, dominion and control…without Nathaniel he might have become something else: a wilder creature, unbound from human wants.”

p. 43

Indeed, Nathaniel’s intuition about the danger of human hubris is spot-on. It takes a faun—a creature born of myth and fable, never fully integrated into the human world—to truly comprehend how manifest destiny is incompatible with sustaining life. The notion that it is humankind’s right to profit off the earth will come at a tremendous cost.

Doom & Decline

Several centuries later, in what is presumably our not-too-distant future, dystopian horror unfolds as the company Earthtrust brutally purges swaths of dying land of its inhabitants and clusters large populations of people into artificial farms, where they are forced to help raise and harvest genetically-modified plants and animals in an attempt to secure a future for the doomed human race. This is where we meet John, an ex-Earthtrust engineer who spends his days “rewilding” the empty West and plotting a way to take down the cunning villain at the head of Earthtrust, Eury Mirov. John is living in the horrifying future whose origins Chapman sensed long ago—a future where humankind cannot escape from the irreversible process of Earth’s demise; a future where the only hope for subsequent generations’ survival entails handing all sovereignty to a dictator who claims her technology can force the dying earth into complying with continued human occupation.

John’s main conflicts are a) living with the guilt that he developed the foundational technology Earthtrust now uses, and b) determining whether he can use this technology to change the future Eury Mirov is creating. Eury craves a future that is human-centric, as it always has been; she tells John that “it’ll have to be humanity who gets saved first” and “the only way to sell the future to the human world is to sell a human future” (221). John envisions a future that will allow the planet to heal itself, and he recognizes that this is not a future where the Earth is parceled and manipulated to accommodate humanity’s boundless needs. Earthtrust’s technology embodies peak sci-fi horror—think “reprinting extinct species that are genetically engineered to have wildly different traits” and “enabling the brain to leave the body and occupy other vessels” types of horror. John knows this dangerous technology is not meant for this world, but can he use it outside of its intended purposes?

Glacier & Growth

The third storyline takes place even further into the future, as a creature called C-433 navigates a frozen, apocalyptic hellscape and scavenges for biomass beneath the Earth’s glacial surface. This empty world is the result of the planet’s brutal exploitation and its subsequent over-modification by a ruthless megacorporation, yet something extraordinary is occurring—new life, new nature, is sprouting within C-433’s body, and C-433 must decide whether he can preserve it in the hopes of planting it outside someday.

Sensitive readers, be warned: the three storylines described above are rife with violence, for the very process of climate change is a form of violence in and of itself and the author does not shy away from instilling as much visceral shock and dread within readers as possible. Bodies break, burn, and bleed as the earth is plowed, parched, deprived, and over-regulated; the abuse of nature is mirrored in the physical and psychological torment experienced by Bell’s characters. Bell’s prose is astoundingly vibrant and detailed. Each lush forest scene in Chapman’s world, ravaged desert scene in John’s world, and desolate snowscape in C-433’s world is powerful and absorbing. Even more absorbing are the characters themselves, who face monumental decisions, painful conflicts of interest, and feelings of both impending doom and fragile hope.

Final Thoughts

The annihilation of a planet is depicted with such intensity on Bell’s part that it is impossible not to put this book down without questions about the direction we are headed in now with a warming atmosphere, rising ocean levels, and indifference toward conservation efforts on the part of so many individuals and governments. What kind of future is our inaction creating? Matt Bell has some ideas about what it could look like.