Customer Reviews

Appleseed

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

John Clute is a singular SF critic: he writes with verve and style and with a unashamedly vaste vocabulary. Indeed his unapologetically fertile use of words, his love of language as a sensuous and liquid thing, alienate some who prefer a more direct and uncomplicated approach. His knowledge of the genre is also unmatched, and would be called 'encylopaedic' had he not in fact edited the definitive encyclopaedia in the field.

Given this background one might expect his first SF novel, a dense and intense reimagining of the classic space opera, to be a unique confection, and this it certainly is in these two respects at least.

This book delights in words, it explodes with linguistic pyrotechnics, it exalts in unexpected juxtapositions of the obscure and the mundane, of the arcane and the obscene, it drowns the reader is an almost cloyingly rich thesauric stew. In this sense it is an astonishing book, a novel whose language both makes and mirrors the baroque universe in which it is set. Because the language does work. It is not simply filagree, it is the substance and structure of the book and it does its job: I have never read a more utterly atmospheric and engulfing description of the process of landing on an alien trading world as Clute presents in the first two dozen pages of Appleseed.

Secondly, Clute's vast knowledge of SF enables him to play with tropes, concepts and situations in away that is a delight for the afficianado. There are references everywhere, only some of which are credited in the afterword. There are also some fascinating inventions of his own: the azulejaria tiles which line 'Tile Dance', the ship piloted by the protagonist, Nathanial Freer, and which are simultaneously story and storage; the world of Klavier as a multi-dimensional palimpset, layer upon layer, twist within turn; and the hilarious treatment of human odour and sexuality within a universe where most species find sex offensive and use smell to communicate subtle and complex matters.

But... and this is a big 'but'...

Some of the borrowings are more than references. The central notion of the entropic data 'plaque' infecting the universe, and indeed many of the situations, species, and general 'feel' of Clute's universe, while by no means exactly the same, certainly appear to have a lot in common with Vernor Vinge's 'A Fire upon the Deep', a work that is not mentioned by Clute in his afterword. While I would never go so far as to accuse SF's greatest critic of plagiarism, I would say that Clute certainly owes more of a debt to Vinge, who is neither as culturally-central or as highly-regarded as those whom Clute does namecheck, than he admits. In addition, his 'made-minds', Artifical Intelligences, are also strongly reminiscent of Iain M. Bank's darkly witty and bizarre Culture minds.

Most importantly of all however, the plot and resolution, character development - such as it is possible in a universe where identity is so malleable - and emotional content, are flimsy and ramshackle affairs when stripped of the dense superstructure of description. The lack of connection to what we know of as human emotion is a common and perhaps insoluable problem in any reasonable far future setting - it seems to go with the territory - although Attanasio's Last legends of Earth is a magnificent exception. However Appleseed's lack of substantial 'story' is far less forgiveable.

Still, this book should be read. For all its failings as a tale, stylistically there isn't much like it in SF (or elsewhere), and in many ways it is brave: the outrageous lovechild of a menage a trois between Vernor Vinge, Iain M. Banks and the Oxford English Dictionary, it won't be easily read, but certainly not easily forgotten.

Approaching a novel by a man known first and foremost as a critic, and moreover a man known for his formidable intelligence and vocabulary, and his enjoyment in wielding both, is at the same time interesting and a bit intimidating. And indeed, John Clute's Appleseed is itself quite interesting: and quite intimidating. I come away from it rather in awe at the imagination evident both in the world-building and the prose; and rather in awe at the ambitious conceptualizing. At the same time I concede that I found the book difficult. The writing is extremely dense: line by line a pleasure, but a pleasure which requires some labour to achieve; labour which is perhaps tiring over time.

The setting and technology are also densely imagined, and here I am less sure of the success of the book. Much of it was nigh incomprehensible to me. Still, the setting remains fascinating, and perhaps because of the difficulty of comprehension it may be the more convincing as a true far-future world. That remains as ever the tightrope an SF writer must negotiate: how to convince the reader that the future portrayed is a true future and not a slightly-altered present, while at the same time allowing the reader to "inhabit" the space of the book.

Finally, the characters and plot are perhaps disappointments, or at any rate not what this book is worth reading for. The central character remained distant, not fully believable, and not very distinctive, though some of the peripheral characters were quite interesting. And the plot, stripped of the ornate cladding of setting and language, is quite a straightforward chase. Though that is hardly a negative feature; it's just not particularly a plus either.

To restate the above a bit differently: anyone familiar with John Clute's critical work will know that his prose is not simple, though it is precise and at its best exhilarating. They will also know that Clute is passionate about SF, and that he has an abiding fondness for the sub-genre called Space Opera. In many ways, Appleseed is precisely the SF novel one might have expected from John Clute.

The story starts with Nathaniel Freer, an instance of that hoary SF trope, the solitary interstellar jobbing trader, coming to a system called Trencher to pick up his latest cargo, a shipment of nanoforges for the planet Eolxhir. Freer might seem at first glance an ordinary human, but we soon learn that his milieu is not ordinary at all. Earth is long dead, a victim of a galaxy-wide information disease called "plaque", which seems to corrupt any computer based systems it infects, leading to complete disorder of information. The still-uninfected parts of the Galaxy are inhabited by a mix of "meat" species and AI's (or "Made Minds", in Clute's felicitous term). Among these for some reason humans have a special place, due apparently to their sexual habits. The AI's are extremely powerful, at full power making use of the quantum foam of the universe, but they are risky too as they can carry plaque. At Trencher, Freer picks up his cargo and, in addition, buys a couple of potentially useful Made Minds: the war machines SammSabaoth and Vipasanna. These seem especially fortunate acquisitions as Trencher suddenly comes under attack, apparently from both plaque and from an inimical alien entity called Opsophagos of the Harpe.

Freer, his ship the Tile Dance, which may be an artifact of the mysterious Predecessor species, his personal Made Mind companion, KathKirtt, his two new Made Minds, and an alien passenger named (delightfully) Mamselle Cunning Earth Link, who is the only person who knows where they are going, find themselves in a desperate fight/chase. Soon they are holed up in a sort of repair station/planetoid called Klavier, where they meet an odd character who calls himself Johnny Appleseed, and they learn a bit more of the real cargo Freer has picked up, and the value of this cargo. Furthermore, Appleseed has a surprise for Freer, in the form of his long lost lover (also delightfully named: Ferocity Monthly-Niece). The book continues to spiral further into strangeness. Though in the end, the basic outlines of the situation and a general sense of what has happened come fairly clear. There is plenty of quite fierce action, but as with many books featuring purposefully incredibly advanced tech, it's hard for the reader to quite believe in the peril to the characters, as the powers of the players seem all but arbitrary. The final resolution manages to be emotionally affecting despite some of the distancing effects of much of the book. A sequel seems probable, but this book comes to a reasonable close in itself.

Read this book for the often intoxicating pleasure of the prosody -- though to some people's taste it may be simply too much of a good thing. Or read it for the heavily recomplicated and well-imagined, if hard to follow, details of the setting and technology. Or for the sense of a truly different future (though Clute does cheat just the slightest bit: by having his protagonist's primary historical period of interest be 20th Century Earth he allows himself to make a number of contemporary allusions). Or for the occasional funny dialogue -- particularly that of Mamselle Cunning Earth Link, the most intriguingly depicted character. (At times I thought I detected echoes of Alfred Bester, in particular.) Be prepared for a bit of a tough go -- transparent prose this ain't! And as I said, the plot and characterization are not as interesting as the prose and setting -- so there are certainly longueurs. But on the whole Appleseed rewards the effort, and I suspect it might reward a second reading even more.

I've always felt it's unacceptable to write a review unless you have actually read the book. Regardless, I feel the need to write a bit about Appleseed, as it is the only book I have ever started and not been able to finish. Reading it hurts. Clute's use of language, with it's endless cavalcade of arcane and nonsensical terminology is beyond annoying. Just to give an example from a random page:

"The masks resident within the stories stared outward through moist bee-eye-dense embrasured tiles between molten grouts of gold. Flitting from the stories that held them, other masks exfoliated themselves for the nonce to become memes, hiked themselves through the grouting slots, janiform and doppleganger-pale from the prison of the dance of tiles, and into the gimbal-shot free space of Glass island, where they loured over the scene from fittings atop brass herms, shot antic bat glances around toggles, crouched over a braced scroll beaded with the sweat of attar, through which the Prime Copy of the Universal Book might be accessed ceremonially at points of crisis."

I mean seriously. Why would anyone want to torture their public with this kind of text? The very definition of cruel and unusual...

It is very very rare for me to give up on a novel - especially a hardcover that I paid [money] for, but i gave up on this one. Fifty pages from the end I had no idea what was going on or even which characters were which anymore so I just threw in the towel.

Reading this novel was a pointless excercise in frustration. There are a few interesting ideas in there, but they were buried under so much annoying, meaningless, decorative language that it wasnt worth digging them up. I lost count of how many words the author made up or used in bizarre contexts. I don't consider re-reading every second sentance of a book to try to glean the meaning to be entertainment.

Being obtuse and keeping the reader guessing are well-used literary mechanisms. Authors such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling have used inventive language and imagery to create impressions of concepts beyond our current day, but Clute's penchant for obscuring meaning makes Gibson's writing style appear clear and open. His habit of refering to his characters by multiple un-related names was incredibly confusing was the final straw in me putting it down with only FIFTY PAGES TO GO.

Clute struggles to create an interesting vision for the future, but his vision is so clouded by his own "language"(I'll bet that he thinks he's being clever) that it takes too much effort to get through to the story. When you finally do figure it out, he has nothing to say... his grand conflict between god and the universe left me completely bored. And what really annoyed me, was that Clute has the gall to describe in the aknowledgements how he used elements from two Borges stories (an author who I greatly enjoy) to create his mess. Don't waste your time with this book - if you want to read some trippy sci-fi, read some Phil Dick.

Appleseed is the first novel in over twenty years by John Clute (best known as co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy). It's a bold, energetic pouring-out of Clute's vision of a future civilization in which social display is an obsession, and where the line between style and substance is blurred.
 
And that's Appleseed's biggest problem. While Clute writes in a poetic and wildly evocative fashion, he sacrifices style for substance. Appleseed comes across as a peyote-powered academic experiment, a fusion of William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch and Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky. It's one thing to expand a reader's vocabulary, but quite another to send him scurrying for the dictionary every other paragraph (often in vain). You're never really sure of what's going on, or to what end - but it sounds really cool.  
 
This is certain: you won't be so-so on Appleseed. You'll either hail it as a pioneering breakthrough in science fiction literature, or you'll swear it's total gibberish.

John C. Snider<BR

I'll agree, Clute borrows heavily from a number of authors in imagining the glactic stage on which Appleseed is set, including Vinge and Banks, as noted, but didn't they draw on those who came before as well? Rich, baroque, and minutely imagined post-human galactic cultures date back at least to Dune and Ringworld, if not long before. What made me enjoy Appleseed so was Clute's insistance on giving the reader a full-immersion introduction to his unique flavor of galactic civilization, painting his picture as he will, and leaving interpretation up to the viewer. So much nicer than endless dull straightahead descriptive paragraphs. In this he reminds me of Gene Wolfe at the height of his powers (the Torturer series), providing us with an alternate universe seemingly imagined down to the most mundane, yet shockingly out-of-the-ordinary, details. I for one will grab the next volume as soon as I see it.

Smothered under rich verbal goo is the rather slight story of trader Nathanael Freer, who finds himself on a mission to save the sentient universe (I think.) The author's highly ornamented and baroque descriptions become rather irritating and tend to detract from the storytelling. However, on the plus side there are several very imaginatively depicted aliens, and a space ship inhabited by multitudes of dancing tiles, which house AI personalities that actually seem stronger and more distinct than that of their human associate. If you have the patience (and a good dictionary) Appleseed may just be your kind of book.

This book has a language all its own, the kind that requires you sit next to a computer with access to all the world's dictionaries just to figure out what Clute is talking about when discussing Flyte AIs vs Jack AIs, or when he describes a starship's bridge displays as "intagliated." Once you become used to it, however, the visuals, the textures, the world he's describing become very vivid, very real.

However, the ending is straight out of some 1970's "new wave" SF, with humans as "special" and absurd amounts of sex and anlalochezic profanity replacing a painful creative lacunae as the story draws towards its ending.

I suspect this is a book for writers, not readers, of science fiction, a salmagundi of examples, John Clute's notion of "how some things should be done." And they're such clinquant examples, it's too bad that there's no real story there to enjoy.

All the ideas in this story could have been done as a short story or novella. The only reason it is a long as it is, is because the author insists on stuffing every sentence with layer after layer after interminable layer of clever, but basically useless and undiscriptive, verbiage that seems to serve no other purpose than to stretch the story to novel length for the sake of the publisher. One almost wonders if Clute wrote this or if he is merely presenting the product of some piece of experimental story writing software hooked up to an unabridged dictionary and a thesaurus.