Appleseed

by John Clute

It is the dawn of the fourth millennium, and for trader Nathanael Freer it is business as usual. Tile Dance, his ship, is in the safe hands of KathKirtt, an AI with two minds, and a loyal krewe of cybernetic and android helpers. His latest commission-to deliver a shipment of nano-forges to the planet Eolhxir--is routine enough. All seems okey dokey.

But it is not. A virulent data plague is infecting the local spiral arm of the galaxy all the way from Old Earth. Universal darkness threatens the vast concord of living civilizations. And a trap has been laid that will draw Freer and his lover, Ferocity Monthly-Niece, into an eons-old conflict. His new contract is, in fact, far from routine, and Eolhxir holds the key to everything.

Appleseed is filled with wild high tech, weird aliens, and wonderful vistas. It will dazzle, amaze and delight you.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Space Opera, Aliens

337 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

John Frederick Clute (1940- ) is a Canadian born author and critic who has lived in Britain since 1969. He has been described as "an integral part of science fiction's history."

Clute's articles on speculative fiction have appeared in various publications since the 1970s. He is a co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (with Peter Nicholls) and of The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (with John Grant), as well as The Illustrated Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction, all of which won Hugo Awards for Best Non-Fiction. Clute is also author of the critical essay collections Strokes, Look at the Evidence, and Scores. His 1999 novel Appleseed, a space opera, was noted for its "combination of ideational fecundity and combustible language" and was selected as a New York Times Notable Book for 2002. In 2006, Clute published the essay collection The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror.

Reviews

[Harold Ogle · Rating 1 out of 5]

Appleseed is a simply fascinating piece of writing. It's definitely a contender for the worst book I've ever read, but it's not bad in any sort of normal, pedestrian way. It is magnificently, astoundingly, uniquely execrable. Every page was a surprise: an unexpected slog through a morass of absurd prose, a brow-furrowing puzzle of interpretation, that somehow never got easier.

I checked this book out from the library, as I often do with authors I've not read before, almost exactly a year ago, along with several other books that seemed promising. It took me a few days to get around to cracking the book open, and then worry about the escalating pandemic and my family's safety distracted me for a few weeks. I dutifully renewed the book but found it easy to ignore, to not pick it up again. "It just didn't grab me," I told myself. "I'll get to it later, just as soon as I have some more free time." Weeks went by, and somehow I still didn't bring myself to read any more of it. By the time the pandemic had become a global public health crisis and everyone was sheltering in place in March, I'd forgotten about it completely (thankfully, the library waived all late fees shortly after the orders to shelter in place started). It wasn't until we got some time away after the kids had finished school for the semester in May that I picked the book up again. I quickly realized why I'd been unconsciously avoiding the book all that time: it's simply the worst writing I've ever read.

I've read plenty of bad novels; I've even reviewed some of them here on Goodreads. But this is on a whole different level. It is exquisitely bad. It's not your normal, mundane, workaday bad writing as found in TekWar or Battlefield Earth (though they are terrible). No, Appleseed is awful on a completely different level. It is so bad it deserves an award; it has literally been a conversation piece for me this past year. Everyone in my social circle (friends, relatives) as well as a wider circle of acquaintances with whom I have interacted (doctors, co-workers, church attendees) has had a discussion with me about how carefully, intentionally terrible the writing is in this book. I have pictures on my phone of passages to show to people, because otherwise they don't believe me that something this bad has actually been published. It's honestly amazing. This book was NOT self-published. There were many people who read this book as a manuscript and thought, "Yeah, that works."

Reading this, even you probably don't believe that it's as bad as all that. "I've read bad books," you think to yourself, "I know what they're like. This isn't any worse than the worst I've read. It couldn't be." Well...

...maybe you're right. After all, I don't know what garbage you've read.

But I don't think so.

I think writing this bad is extremely rare. Because it is bad in a way that takes both talent and dedicated perseverance: commitment to the idea of doing the worst that can be done.

The ways that this writing is terrible are myriad. Here are a few, to be a bit more specific:

- The plot, while obfuscated in the extreme by solipsistic curlicues of prose, is incredibly linear and simple; all the action takes place in only three locations, each one appearing right after the other. First, the planet Trencher: a man buys some security software for his ship and takes an alien on as a passenger. The planet is suddenly attacked by a hostile alien armada and destroyed; the man barely escapes on his ship. Second, aboard his ship: the man talks to the alien and his various AIs, including the security software. Third, the planet Klavier: the man disembarks on Klavier and meets his lover. However, the security software he bought was actually a trojan horse planted on Trencher by the alien armada. Realizing this, the man reprograms the security software and uses it to destroy the alien armada. Then he marries his lover and the book ends. Believe it or not, that's not really abbreviating the plot much at all! Very little happens, and what does occur plays out like a train ride: the results of Freer's adventures are determined from the very beginning, and he lacks even the illusion of control over his fate. It's frustratingly clear that nothing he could have done would have changed the outcome of any of the events. He makes for a very dull protagonist, as all his actions are in reaction to things, and mostly his reactions are to tell his AIs to execute a command, and then he listens to their reading him the output of his commands.

- The vocabulary is a stilted combination of Vancian sesquipedalianisms and Burgessian inventions (though some might say they're more like Lewis Carroll's pseudo-words). Creating new words is rather commonplace for science fiction, of course, as is using real albeit obscure vocabulary. But taken to this extreme, it reads like parody: every sentence requires conscious effort to interpret, an exhausting act of translation arduous enough that I would lose track of the higher level - what was being described in a paragraph - in the effort of just getting sense from the words enough to parse a sentence. It's arbitrarily and intentionally obtuse, which lends a sense of accomplishment to the reader for completing a page. Like a child learning to read for the first time, one can be excited at having finished the act of gleaning meaning from an entire paragraph! It's a milestone! But there are no gold stars for completing such a task. The labor of slogging through the text is not Herculean, it's Sisyphean: for hundreds of pages, there's always another paragraph, just as frustratingly meaningless as the last. I'm convinced that all the praise from critics on the book jacket originates from this process: there is definitely a sense of having overcome a challenge when reading this book, and many people couldn't hack it. So the critics who did manage to soldier on to the end feel elated and victorious, triumphant to have weathered the storm! Occasionally, though, there is respite from the onslaught of opacity: the author indulges in robotic repetition in some instances. But that break isn't a relief, as he will use the same phrase over and over and over and over again, as if the English language did not have a wealth of synonyms. "Appaumy" is a particular favorite; you will find this used well over a hundred times in the book. A fist is never "raised," "upright," "lifted," or "facing him..." it's always "a fist appaumy," repeated like a CD skipping on the same two seconds of a track.

- Character? What character? Reading this novel, there is no sense of personality or motivation for the characters. Granted, there are almost no characters to consider. The omniscient narrator presents us the human protagonist, his cadre of artificial intelligences, his lover, an alien passenger, and his alien antagonist. Of them all, only the alien passenger has a distinctive voice, and hers is distinct only because she speaks in a goofy pidgin of puns and pop culture that reads exactly like one of the Junkions from "The Transformers: the Movie." The human woman exists only to be a willing lust object of the man Freer, but we meet her only after two-thirds of the book has passed. ...at which point she is abruptly beheaded, eliminating all chance that we might get to hear from a new viewpoint. Then, a few pages later, she is magically resurrected - regrown from her severed head - but that's only so that she can consummate with Freer for the figurative and, sadly, literal climax of the book.

- Unbelievably, none of this is the nadir. The actual, basic construction of sentences is actually the worst of all the aspects of the book. Here we get the most poetic indulgences that throw syntax and punctuation out the window in favor of rhythm alone. This is where the book really shines; this arena is where the novel stands head and shoulders below all other writing. The combination of alien words and grammar with endless run-on sentence fragments is the main reason why the book is so fascinating: it's mind-bogglingly bad, the sort of writing that you think "Come ON! This is surely a joke!" How could proofreaders and editors have approved this? It beggars the imagination. As I was forcing myself to read more of the novel in May - four months into my encounter with this monster - I was suddenly struck by the similarity to entries in the annual Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest. The Bulwer-Lytton contest challenges participants to write the worst opening sentence of a novel that doesn't exist. Reading the output of the Bulwer-Lytton contest is hilarious, because as the reader you know that the authors of such purple, florid prose were writing it intentionally bad, that the hideous construction is the whole point. Appleseed reads like someone took all the sentences from every Bulwer-Lytton contest and combined them into one whole novel. Again, you may think I'm exaggerating. I'm not: This is an excerpt paragraph:
"Beckoner and beckoned, naked as eggs, hurtled still further, a far piece, in great silence, through argosy-dense crossroads light-years thick where Tropics met, and further still, into great darkness beyond the Tropics, into the intergalactic dark, inside his eyelids. A sphere lay before the two who were himself alone; one of them saw a light-devouring black hole, one of them saw a hole that burned. As they landed on the hole that was a world, beckoner and beckoned readily discovered that the surface they had touched was not black but sooth, not fire but hale, not smooth but walled, not hollow but dense with palimpsets, not eyeless but thick with murals. It was the maze of old, the maze of grief and joy, turn which way you might."

It's hard to imagine that someone would write something this abysmally poor unintentionally, but at the same time it's hard to imagine that someone would stretch a parody in such bad taste into a full-length novel. Appleseed is like an Andy Kaufman comedy bit: taking the joke way, way too far. With this novel, Clute is deep into Andy's co-ed wrestling territory. So maybe it isn't a joke, and the book is completely in earnest. But then again, maybe it is a joke, but the joke isn't for our benefit; maybe Appleseed's audience is only misanthrope John Clute himself, tremendously amused that anyone would actually waste so much of their time to fully read this colossal dreck he's concocted. And here I am, possibly adding to the joke by extensively critiquing the dreck, after having wasted most of a year of my life laboring to read the whole thing. The joke's on me, surely.

Save yourself from having to decide if it's a joke or not, and don't read this.

[nostalgebraist nostalgebraist · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I finished this book I was too dazed and worn out to give it anything like the kind of review it deserved. I ended up just resorting to the worst reviewer's cliche in the book -- "what was this guy on?"

I still don't feel like writing a real review, but in lieu of that I can at least throw some quotes at you. Quotes are specially informative here because what distinguishes this book from all the other science fiction I've read isn't plot or characterization or worldbuilding -- all pretty good, mind you -- but its use of language to disorient and dazzle the reader. I've always been confused by the preference many science fiction writers and fans have for plain, unadorned language -- isn't science fiction all about going to new and strange places where people may think, and thus talk, differently? The future will break the world apart into categories along different lines than the present, and those categories will be embodied in words. Well, Appleseed's style is anything but plain, and it is one of the only works of science fiction I've read that really sounds like the future. The future sounds like this:

A timorous sibling tched softly within striking distance of the breakfast head of the Harpe in command of the great ark in orbit around Trencher with its stuffing of deep-sleeps snoring through their brainchip tasks. The sibling masticated with tiny nibbles the real-paper printouts in its glutinous ticklers, which it extended, perhaps hoping to donate an extensor limb. The commanding officer -- a grown sibling of Opsophagos -- took the printout in the mouth of its slack-eyed famished breakfast head, read the co-ordinates displayed, pulled down a three-horned screen and punched out the designated location. Chip-sluggish, the screen cleared, in time to reveal Number One Son wobble bare-arsed into the homo sapiens braid. Controlling their aversion to sigilla, the commanding officer began to jubilate.

They almost ate himself alive with joy.

Or sometimes like this:

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 doppenganger-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 and at points of crisis.

Or like this:

--Upsydowndaisy lamentoso, death-bound froggies! whispered the transitus tessera out of the mouths of all the magi and the sages and the kings and queens and lower cards of conclave space in one single voice as though they had all suddenly remembered at the one same time the one same thing to say. The memory theatre of the conclave space of Tile Dance had not spoken ensemble for a Trillion Heartbeats, since before homo sapiens began to talk right, since before the Caduceus Wars.

What you think of these passages is a pretty reliable determinant of what you will think of the whole book. If you are the sort of SF fan who won't be able to enjoy the book unless you can determine precisely what each of Clute's funny words means and what basis it has in real science, then you won't like Appleseed. (I'm still not clear on whether there's a difference between "flesh sapients" and "flesh sophonts," and it took me a long time just to figure out that "sigils" and "sigilla" are different things in Clute's world. Which they are, by the way. Caveat lector.) On the other hand, if these quotes make you hungry for more psychedelic future-speak, Clute is your man. This is not a book that science fiction fandom received with a great deal of warmth, but it is nonetheless a book that should probably be read more often than it is.

-----------------------------------------------------

Original "review":

John Clute must be on some pretty fantastic drugs.

Also, was I imagining it, or was a lot of that book some sort of twisted parody of Stranger in a Strange Land? Maybe it's just a consequence of having read the two in close proximity.

[Craig · Rating 1 out of 5]

Clute has an amazingly large vocabulary, and shows it off in virtually every sentence. (E.g., almost at random, "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.") While this enables very dense description, it is also overwhelming--I feel I need to have a dictionary beside me to read this book. The story and characterization are somewhat left behind; there are story points that I think I'm missing because of the word games Clute plays.
At 1/4 of the way through this book, I'm giving up. Clute had to work really hard to make this novel so difficult to read.

[EmBe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ein wahrlich harter Brocken. Die ersten 60 Seiten gehörten zu den anstrengendsten meiner Leserkarriere. Inhaltlich eine Space Opera, aber das ist keine Buch, das man zur Unterhaltung lesen kann. Denn Clute bricht mit dem "Dogma", das allen SF-Romanen zu Grunde liegt, nämlich dass die Zukunft vorstellbar ist, genauer dass sich der Leser sie mit seiner Fantasie visualisieren kann. Es gibt immer wieder Bilder, die absurd sind, Wesen (Außerirdische) die sich selbst verschlingen beispielsweise. Ich kann nicht viel über den Inhalt sagen, es geht um Vernichtung von Bildern von Informationen, was aber irgendwie auch positiv konnotiert ist, als eine Art Befreiung. Dabei beziehe ich mich auch auf Aussagen des Autors selbst.
Ein faszinierende Lektüre, aber abseits aller Erwartungen. Auf jeden Fall etwas für fortgeschrittene Leser, die auch Erfahrung mit stilistisch anspruchsvoller Literatur haben.

[Rowena Hoseason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wows. Utterly gob-smacking 'proper' science fiction with all the aspects of sci-fi that I adore.
Spaceships. Space stations. Space battles.
Majestic, whimsical AI minds worth of Iain Banks.
Bizarre, almost incomprehensible aliens a la Niven and Pournelle.
Almost hallucinogenic, gloriously kaleidoscopic prose.
A blossoming sequence of Russian doll revelations, deeply personal but cosmically significant.
Its scope encompasses the spiritual and the sensual, philosophy and the heartstone of human desire.
Fabulous.
9/10


(Nothing whatsoever to do with the manga / anime of the same name, in case you stumbled across this by accident!)

[Wally · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most interesting sf books I've read in a long time, even though the language makes this a difficult climb. The quest story is fairly straightforward, but understanding it could take quite a slow reading.

[Mike · Rating 1 out of 5]

Way too many obscure adverbs and adjectives. So much so that I will not finish reading it! It's just too difficult to follow the story line with all the excessive verbage thrown in! It is too much like a vocabulary test, requiring a dictionary at all times.

[Simon Mcleish · Rating 2 out of 5]

Originally published on my blog here in December 2002.

Until the publication of this, his début novel, John Clute has been best known for writing about science fiction rather than in the genre, and his wide ranging knowledge shows in Appleseed's cross references. The most obvious link, as far as a reader is concerned, is not within the genre, but to the novels at the more flamboyant end of stream of consciousness, to James Joyce's Ulysses, for example, or to the richness of Jorge Luis Borges.

The plot is less important than the imagery and, indeed, is pretty rudimentary; the novel describes a trip to a world on which a cure might possibly be found for plaque, a disease which attacks both machine and organic intelligence. The densely packed allusive style in with Appleseed is written also makes it hard to read, particularly when it comes to picking up the details of the plot. (Stream of consciousness novels are frequently difficult to read, and in each case the reader must decide whether it is worth the effort to decode them; a typical snippet of Appleseed, for instance, reads: "A mask bearing the fist appaumy spoke. 'Queens have died', said the Uncle Sam, 'young and fair.'")

One of the biggest technical challenges in science fiction writing is to find a way to represent the alien, whether it is a non-human intelligence or the effects of new technology on human psychology and culture. (You could in fact argue that this is the very essence of the genre.) This is the purpose for which Clute has chosen to use this style, to render an almost incomprehensible universe (and there is, after all, no particular reason why we should understand the real universe) - home to many aliens and a bizarre mix of reality and virtual reality. It's a clever idea, and often works well (for example, in the humorous description of the rituals following an alien birth, which is the best passage in the novel). In general, though, I didn't feel that Clute was a good enough writer to carry it off, and this combines with the minimal plot to make some sections seem more about flashy prose than substantial content. There are many interesting ideas, particularly the use of this style to convey alienness, so Appleseed is worth a read if you're interested in literary technique. I can't help feeling that CLute would have done better to attempt something less ambitious for his debut.

[Peter Goodman · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Appleseed,” by John Clute (Tor, 2001). I suppose this is steampunk, but far beyond that. It’s the language, the language. Clute is another one of the wealth of great SF writers whom I’ve never heard of. There is a story, indeed there is a plot and some interesting characters, but the most interesting thing here is the writing. It’s Joycean, even Gerard Manley Hopkinsian, wildly allusive, full of puns, strange combinations, complicated, some of it I never really understood. Story: 3,000 years or so in the future, homo sapiens is a rare and almost sacred species among all the different creatures of the galaxy, the artificial intelligences, the cyberworld. The galaxy is slowly being strangled by plaque, an Alzheimer’s of space, which rains down on planets and chokes them of all intelligence and comprehension. Meanwhile, there still is a vital, chaotic interstellar civilization. Nathaniel Freer, a space trader, has his ship, Tile Dancer, which is controlled and navigated by KathKirtt, his AI, and a crew of androids and cybernetic beings. They travel to the planet Trencher to pick up an order of nanoforges for the planet Eolhxir. But things get very strange. The planet, which is orbited by Insort Geront arks full of sapient senior citizens dozing away their dotage, is suddenly under attack. Freer (Kath calls him Stinky) manages to get away with his cargo, and an unexpected passenger named Cunning Earth Link, headed the same way. Cunning EL tells them that planet is full of lenses that can destroy plaque. Meanwhile, Trencher is assaulted by plaque and is destroyed. The rest of the way Freer and crew try to get to Eolhxir. Along the way they meet up with Johnny Appleseed and battle the villains of Geront in a war to save the galaxy, if not the universe. That’s the story, and a good one. But it’s the language that make this book special. I am going to wait to read another, this one was exhausting.


http://www.johnclute.co.uk/

[Betawolf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Okay. So, I've been playing around with a few one-sentence summaries, and I think the closest I can get is to ask you to imagine what you'd get if John Milton had an erotic dream while possessed by the LSD-tripping ghost of Vernor Vinge. Even then, I'm selling it short.

In a lot of science-fiction, the weirdness is safely confined to the setting. More adventurous authors play with strange plot. And yes, to be sure, Clute is not easily outdone there. We have regular autophagy, a naked mankind whose gazes may never meet, and a story where the passage through the Inferno is navigated entirely coitally, with the ultimate aim of launching a war upon God (who is also plaque).

But what makes me really celebrate this book is the language. Clute's erotic theological space opera might seem to be about having sex with (/eating) a woman, a planet, or possibly God, but really it is Clute ravishing the English language. In public, no less. Whether describing the apocalypse of a city-world, or dialogue taking place in the nanoseconds between high-speed action, it is constantly surprising and delightful -- 'inventive' I think would be slander, Clute does not need to make up words, with such a rich palette to choose from. Nostalgebraist gives good examples.

The book is, to be sure, exhausting. It does not so much arc as spiral into a crescendo, slipping away from the concerns and premises with which it started. I could understand losing patience with it, if Clute's playful language doesn't resonate with you, if you're expecting something conventional and easily comprehensible. But if you're after something really operatic in your space opera, something like an epic poem written by and for Culture GSVs, you should try this.

[Brian Richardson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Strange, surreal, hypercool far future novel where humans are the hottest (literally) thing walking the worlds, aliens worship strange gods buried in the seas of Earth, and information plaque spreads like disease across planets. Highly recommended if you're looking for sci-fi that's way out of the ordinary.

[Randy Waite · Rating 1 out of 5]

Clute tries to impress the reader with verbose vocabulary (with both real and made-up words), which renders this novel unreadable. Too bad he didn't use his efforts to fully develop his characters instead of trying to fill space with arcane verbiage.

[Tera Nikolaos]

This book made very little sense. I have no idea what actually happened. Perhaps it is too clever for my brain to comprehend.

[Macha · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars at least. John Clute is more noted for his sf criticism than for his fiction. but lock early Samuel Delany, R.A. Lafferty, and Rudy Rucker in a room together, and this hallucinatory tall tale might result. yes, there are characters, in fact there's a hero and a villain; there's even a plot. but it's demanding to read, reveling in settings and language the far future might really throw up in a universe where earth is long gone and homo sap has almost been superceded by AIs and versions of nanotech. persevere: it's a tour de force, and John Clute's ultra-literate brain is worth following down more than a few rabbit holes of archetype and even art.

[Jacques · Rating 1 out of 5]

Brought a borrowed copy on a long plane trip and read the whole thing, despite the availability of other books, so that's something. I can sort of imagine liking it, but I didn't really. Well written, though I bet I could convince you otherwise by quoting from almost any page. Atmospheric, densely allusive, novel. Over-the-top flashy. The characters seemed static. The plot felt predestined. The anthropocentrism was tiresome. Maybe I was too tired and cranky when I read this! Who knows?

[Nicholas Whyte]

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1309371.html[return][return]The writing style was entertaining, but I regret to say that I could not follow the plot at all.

[Sara]

Escape from infirno
sure not from broxel garden
its from painful plague
strange illness
to come to tree of life
traveling fear nothing from unknow
froo ailians
to another planet
in cqeepy time
to hold somthing value
its me
its tortue time
slave to rain of ailian
adv for peace of night
for love of color
for love to kill the time
undrer many hard time
i search for my eyes
not to end in the same season
ah
what mean of talking even we hadnt find true love
many story to tell
at first winter
love and song
escape from aeother inferno
iamnt Foz the lover of Alabas ibn Ahnf arabic poet
y my world
what mean of ilfe
past went
but today y from me
please nt go far
y r me
just for ya write
who mess our moment
who much i want to talk to all of the world
that y my peace
my somthing i escape from
cant admit it
even that my tears tell the truth
my soulmate
my red blood

[R_ VanHal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. This is really something. One of the most challenging books I read - not because of the story, no, because the setting, the future is so advanced, that it appears, as Arthur C. Clarke said, as magic, and Clutes style in writing is unique. The whole book is like a trip printed on paper, in a universe full of wonders, amazement and magic.

[Bromhidrosis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Do you remember the last episode of The Prisoner? That made no sense. Nor does this. Clute is undoubtedly a clever writer but I had to work at understanding rather than absorbing. If you fancy something completely different this will fit the bill. If you want a light read look elsewhere.

[Raj · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nathaniel Freer is a trader who's been lucky enough to find a commission in a time of hardship, when a data virus, plaque, is slowly encompassing the galaxy. He barely escapes from the planet Trencher when the plaque engulfs it but it seems that his cargo is more than it appears, and Freer must run for his life towards his destination planet that seems to be at the centre of everything.

This is a hard science fiction novel with lots of interesting world-building. From the twinned AIs, pleasingly termed 'Made Minds', to the hints of plaque apocalypse that overtook Earth in the distant past. This apocalypse has meant that Humans have had to abandon Earth but they have been welcomed by the Galactic community because aliens can get high on Human smell. However, it's also a very dense book. It's full of very evocative imagery but it gets tiring having to turn to a dictionary every other paragraph. There's a lot packed into the words which I suspect would reward rereading, but which made the first reading difficult.

A lot is just thrown at the reader with no explanation or context and while some of it eventually starts making sense, some is just left as general background noise which I found somewhat irritating, although I can see the point of it. I think that at some point I would like to reread it though and see if it's an easier read next time round.

[Leonard McCullen · Rating 5 out of 5]

For those who are comfortable with not understanding.

So much modern and classic science fiction resembles medieval paintings of Christ and pre-Christian times. They depict times far away from their present construction but everyone is suspiciously dressed in medieval garb.

So it is with science fiction. The stories are dressed up in fantastical hangings but beyond their surface they are disappointingly familiar and mundane.

Not so with John Clute’s Appleseed. Very little in this book resembles our modern time. This is its strength and what makes the average reader recoil in terror and deem it unreadable.

Never before in my reading life have I happened upon a work that makes me feel like a time-traveler flung far into the future. Things are bright and confusing, I have a hard time decoding the things I am looking at with my own eyes and words that are familiar in my own time have different meanings here. It is a discombobulating work. But please do not fear the unknown.

One of maybe five works I consider mind changing (as far as what fiction can do and what its function is). It’s a shame this may put me off the science fiction genre for good.

In a just and literary world, all new written works of sci-fi in the 21st century would start here and build forward.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clute writes powerful prosetry. I wanted to love this novel--I love the setting, the artificial intelligences, even the idea that humans are the most terrifying beasties in the galaxy--yet I was so busy looking up words and trying to make sense of individual sentences (much the time) that I failed to love the experience. I was left with a sense of what happened, not a concrete recollection--which may have been his intent. Perhaps he wanted a novel that left impressions instead of concrete memories. I will probably try it again one day.

[E.M. Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Appleseed is one of the most syntactically difficult books I've ever read and also fascinating when you dig down to what's happening at the line level.

Perfect for scifi readers who appreciate a challenge and space opera in one go.

[Douglas Beagley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Far-future science fiction that dumps ideas out on every page and makes your brain boggle. Wonderful, wonderful reading. Post-humans. Post-AI.

[Nina · Rating 4 out of 5]

A difficult book filled with gorgeous language.

[Frank Ashe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love SF that is so futuristic it is almost (but not quite) indistinguishable from magic.

[Steve Clark]

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