Appleseed

by Matt Bell

Science Fiction

Dystopian

Literary Fiction

480 Pages

"Appleseed is the most ambitious novel I've read in years — three timelines, three utterly distinct worlds, and Bell pulls it off. The glacial far-future sections alone are worth the price of the book."

Synopsis

Appleseed unfolds across three distinct eras, each building toward a reckoning with what humanity has made of the world and what remains when the making is done.

In eighteenth-century Ohio, two brothers push into the wooded frontier, planting apple orchards they plan to profit from as settlement spreads westward. The work of remaking wilderness into civilization strains and fractures the bonds between them in ways neither anticipated. Fifty years from now, climate change has ravaged the Earth and a single corporation — built on genetic engineering and food science — has come to own all the world's resources. One of its original founders returns to headquarters with the intention of destroying what he helped create, as a resistance movement works to reclaim what has been taken. And a thousand years hence, North America lies buried beneath a vast sheet of ice. A lone sentient being at a tech station on top of the glacier sets out across the frozen continent, following a homing beacon toward what may be the last remnant of human civilization.

Part speculative epic, part tech thriller, part reinvented myth, Appleseed is a hugely ambitious meditation on climate change, manifest destiny, corporate power, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we owe the world we inherit.

Our Take

Appleseed is the kind of novel that announces a writer operating at the outer edge of what they can do — and pulling it off. Bell's three-timeline structure could easily collapse under its own ambition, but each strand is rendered with such specificity and imaginative commitment that they hold. The eighteenth-century frontier sections have the texture of myth; the near-future corporate thriller crackles with urgency; and the far-future glacial passages achieve something genuinely strange and moving — a kind of post-human elegy that shouldn't work as well as it does.

What unifies the three timelines is not plot mechanics but thematic obsession: the relationship between humans and land, between short-term exploitation and long-term consequence, between the stories civilizations tell about progress and what those stories actually cost. Bell is not subtle about these concerns, but he is never reductive — the novel earns its arguments through feeling and image rather than declaration.

Readers drawn to Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation for its unsettling vision of a world that has moved past human control, or to Richard Powers's The Overstory for its sweeping ecological ambition, will find Appleseed a natural and rewarding companion. A breakout novel from a writer who thinks bigger than almost anyone working in speculative fiction today.