“This book is pretty much ALL NEW. It is ALL GOOD. It may not be the novel for ALL PEOPLE, but it should be. It probably will be, in say, thirty, fifty, a hundred years. We can only hope that by then there will be quite a few more novels from this fascinating author.”

--trashotron.com, Rick Kleffel

Whoa! Rick, dude… just chill. Accessibility is a real issue for any work of literature. Rick here made a comparison to “Finnegan's Wake” [sic] later on in the review, which is apt because it, too, is wildly impenetrable. There are many well-respected critics who regard Joyce’s Wake as going far past the point of diminishing returns and it is certainly also true about this book. Making something extremely hard to read does not automatically make something good. You want to read something as accessible as it is beautiful? Then read Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others.

“Rarely has there been a space opera with such zeal for language, such a concatenation of ideas archaic and intergalactic and such irreverent reveling in humanity's stinky, steamy, singular sexuality.”

--Publisher’s Weekly

Old PW found something good to say about this book and it’s actually true so we present it here. Zeal for language and concatenation of ideas is certainly accurate but it’s also the very problem. We also put this quote in for its reference to stinky, steamy, singular sexuality. This book is brimming over with sex; weird, kinky stuff.

“Clute's prose blends hard sf with space opera in a kaleidoscopic adventure suitable for large sf collections.”

--Library Journal

We present this quote for that really funny statement: “suitable for large sf collections.” Of course, they’re making recommendations for libraries, but it still reads as a nice, charming way of saying, “If you’re an obsessive geek that must read every sf novel that comes out to the exclusion of reason and interaction with the rest of humanity then you ought to go ahead and buy this book.” And that’s a pretty true statement. [We're well aware that they make similar comments in most of their reviews... it just strikes us as particularly charming in this case.]

“Stir in tons of explication and lashings of weird sex. Set it down in prose that frequently stretches credulity into unintelligibility (‘The theophrasts of the inner stars designate the masking of a Made Mind as a form of kenosis-the ultimately fatal incarnation of the divine into the progeria of mortal flesh’).”

--Kirkus

And Kirkus nails one again. If they hadn’t inflicted some of the worst examples of dense prose on you then we would have. It is indeed the book’s major flaw that it often lapses into the unintelligible.

“In the final analysis, if a story is not more than can be said about it, then there's something wrong with the story. But certainly I can say this: Appleseed is 1) an adventure story set in the space opera arena, 2) a stab at representing a universe so complex that everywhere you look it only gets bigger, and 3) hopefully an engine which generates a sense of wonder.”

--John Clute (SFsite.com interview)

Why not let Clute say a word about it himself since he enjoys some good reputation for critical work in the genre and we're about to bash the guy. We think his first premise is too accurate—it is only an adventure story. He certainly accomplished his second aim of complexity--and greatly exceeded the mark. He fails at the third of generating wonder. In this novel, Clute is basically kicking you in the nuts as hard as he can and then giving you some prescription pain meds but he gives them to you in one of those childproof containers that defy adult access. Reading Appleseed is like trying to open that container while writhing in pain and having some bystander tell you it’s a unique experience.

“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). It's never really clear 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.”

--scifidimensions.com, John C. Snider

Snider comes in on exactly the point that concerns us about this book: people will hail it as pioneering breakthrough only because it “sounds really cool.” It really isn’t.

Appleseed is written by an author with a tremendous pedigree. John Clute has dominated the critical arena of science fiction for quite a number of years, been a celebrity at many a sci-fi convention, and who’s critical eye we often find striking and agreeable. In fact, his favorite authors of note that he mentions in a recent interview are Neal Stephenson, China Mieville, and Kim Stanley Robinson. These are all authors that we adore.

But professional critics don’t often write well in the sense of creating literature. One need look no farther than that creator of modern literary criticism, Matthew Arnold, whose poetry is far, far less celebrated than his criticism. Critics, in our opinion, or often so self-conscious of writing that they reach a point where their own knowledge is detrimental to their story. Good authorship demands a certain naiveté and a stark dismissal of criticism. In short, critics write as if making tricks on a stage, never able to forget themselves as author, while true authors create sentiment that seems magical and are invisible as authors; they are totally unconscious of the existence of a stage.

(We should note that our detractors will point out that JRR Tolkien himself was a famous critic and an author whom we celebrate as the best. Quite true. But we also note that Tolkien was not really a critic, but a philologist and that his life’s work was born of philology. Tolkien’s critical entries were far outside the mainstream of literary criticism and operated on a level of creating a new class of criticism developed for ancient works and words. His criticism and his creativity were almost inseparably integrated. John Clute, on the other hand, is a purely modern critic with no similar agenda and his work is undermined in the manner that we describe.)

Appleseed is a world set far, far in the future where planets themselves participate in gigantic data networks and artificial intelligence is rather indistinguishable from meat intelligence. Minds operate at an augmented and interrelated level skimming quantum foam. It is a book serving dimly as a precursor to a coming war waged between the negligence or erasure of data versus data worship and preservation. It’s an interesting concept that information itself becomes the most precious commodity available in the universe and the experience of gaining information the most treasured portion of sentient life leading to tremendous jealousy over lost seconds.

But the world itself is almost entirely—as another reviewer put it—gibberish. Is the book’s language learned? Yes. Are there some compelling ideas? Yes. Is it worth it? No.

As we see it, the book has two very major problems:

1. Its inaccessibility
2. Its lack of importance in themes.

Accessibility, as we noted above, is a real issue. Lots of good books are challenging to read. But at some level they must ultimately be able to effectively communicate their ideas to a reasonably intelligent and motivated individuals. Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, for example, is very difficult. It is filled with archaic and unfamiliar words. It is very difficult to completely understand what is happening. One can even say that the first sentence of The Silmarillion falls into the inaccessible:

 “There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his though, and they were with him before aught else was made.”

But Wolfe gives us something to work with. Tolkien gives us something to work with. Clute never does. At no point does the inaccessibility of the prose ever, even once, stop. One can challenge a reader, like Wolfe and Tolkien, or one can just bury them under a torrential monsoon of half-fictional words and labyrinthine sentences. A buried reader—one who is never, ever, ever, given a moment’s relief  or a gesture of help from the author—simply cannot be expected to read, re-read, and mull over a book. Writing is at some level an act of cooperation between author and reader and the author simply must give some assistance at some point in presenting his vision and use a common set of signifiers.

Lack of importance severely undermines this book as well. For accessibility, one can point to the accessibility of Ulysses and the inaccessibility of Finnegans Wake for examples of a challenging author just going “too far.” But one of the redeeming factors of Finnegans Wake is that it’s rather important in subject matter since the nature of dreams, thinking, and perception all being philosophical issues that have demanded academic attention for centuries. Sadly, Appleseeed, for all of its high-concepts of data and social display and references to God, is really just a jazzy adventure novel setting up a big war. We don’t understand why minds in this era regard data as so important. We don’t understand precisely why a war is being waged. Every character experiences this world at a completely visceral level with all the regard for the future as a 2yr old presented with a bowl full of candy. Just not very important.

The sex was way overboard for our tastes. Omnipresent and all-meaning sex. Really, if we stripped away the language you might be able to plop this thing in a Penthouse magazine.

Clute has given us a book that shows all the tricks and none of the substance and it leaves us with something rather damaging emotionally. We can say in finality, this probably reads like a really great book only to the guy who wrote it.

Publisher’s Weekly indicated that it would gain quite a bit of attention given Clute’s status in the sci-fi community. It will get bought, perhaps even read, an--in some very extreme case--might even be finished by a lot of sci-fi enthusiasts who can be regarded as being “in the know.” But Appleseed is a book that will utterly fail to find an audience. The book will exert little influence except perhaps to inspire a series of copycat authors who will probably give us all the inaccessibility with none of the learning and get awarded 2’s by this site though more likely not to get published at all leaving the authors to wonder why. It is doubtful that this book would’ve been published had Clute’s name not been attached to it.

We hated this book. But it’s possible that we’ve totally missed the boat on this one. There are plenty of critics who didn’t get The Silmarillion, The Book of the New Sun, and Ulysses when they came out. Pretty much unthinkable to us, but possible. If you really enjoy a challenge in words and are comfortable with reading settings that seem like a drug-induced hallucination trip, then you might really, really like this book. Those with puerile interests in reading about sex will probably like this book quite a lot. If you thought there was little cooler in life than Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—book or movie—you might give this thing a try.

The Law of Diminishing Returns should apply here. There are deeper books that will yield better returns with much less investment. You would do well to concentrate your energies on those books. Perhaps Library Journal was right and this book really is appropriate for “large sci-fi collections.” If you’ve reached a point where you’ve comfortably read anything very good that might be out there and you can't seem to find anything new and different, why then this thing might be next on your list. But that has got to be a very, very select group of people John Clute is probably one of them, actually.