Humanity is doomed in Matt Bell’s unrelenting climate change novel, Appleseed
Matt Bell’s latest novel concludes that humans are incapable of change, headed toward the extinction we deserve
Books Reviews Matt Bell
At its best, dystopian fiction shines a light on a real-world problem like sexism, wealth inequality, or authoritarianism and pushes it to an extreme. The exaggerated story helps provide perspective and asks readers to grapple with the issues raised. Joining a crowded field of speculative fiction writers penning bleak tales about the perils of climate change is Matt Bell. Offering little more than misery and despair, his latest novel, Appleseed, concludes that humans are incapable of change, headed toward the extinction we deserve.
“[T]his wasn’t the world anyone wanted. A sullen midwestern dystopia…” Bell writes of America’s blighted breadbasket where about a third of his book takes place. The observation also describes this dense, depressing novel. While Bell occasionally embraces the pacing of a techno-thriller, most of the more than 450 pages are devoted to sullen characters brooding about how the world has been diminished and moving slowly toward a single significant choice they think might improve it. There’s something to be said for grappling with agency in the face of momentous forces, but Bell doesn’t provide enough depth to the characters or a sense that their actions matter, making it difficult to follow them on their long journey.
Bell, whose previous works include the dystopian novel Scrapper and the fantastical In The House Upon The Dirt Between The Lake And The Woods, doesn’t lack ambition. Appleseed adopts a structure similar to N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, with the story split across three timelines, though the connection between the characters that each follows is clear far earlier here. The genre-bending novel mixes bio-punk tropes with the story of Johnny Appleseed and the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Yet there’s no explanation for why the fantasy aspects exist or how they work, and it feels like a way to avoid going too deep into science fiction. One character is able to revolutionize cloning and 3D printing because she finds Orpheus’ head, for instance; what it and the Furies were doing for the past few millennia is never relayed.
One of the protagonists is Chapman, a faun traveling through 18th-century Ohio with his human half-brother, Nathaniel, as they plant apple trees to help make the land more appealing to new settlers. He appears to be the only one of his kind, yet this is not explained either. Chapman thinks that one of the trees might provide him with the antidote to the Garden Of Eden’s Tree Of Knowledge, a Tree Of Forgetting that would let him feel at home in either the world of man or beasts rather than having to walk the boundary between the two. Nathaniel believes the settlers will pay him handsomely for work he can’t prove he did a decade ago. The brothers are both naive and cruel in their constant spats.
In the near future, John is a brilliant engineer turned eco-terrorist. He’s returned to Ohio from a campaign blowing up dams in the Western U.S. to try to tear down Earthtrust, the agricultural megacorp he founded with his ex-girlfriend, Eury. This plotline delves into GMOs, climate migration, and corporate overreach, as John and his allies infiltrate Earthtrust and set up a violent confrontation with Eury. Unfortunately, the spycraft and fast action don’t deliver much in the way of thrills, since the outcome of John’s efforts is already made known in the third storyline, which follows C, an artificial creature trying to survive alone in a frozen far future.
Between his version of the expulsion of the Garden Of Eden and the tale of Aristaeus, the Greek god of agriculture, Bell argues that humanity is guilty of the original sin of attempting to tame nature and refusing to acknowledge that some things should be left untouched. Chapman’s chapters in particular are filled with lush descriptions of thriving forests and how they’re despoiled by settlers who kill animals, clear trees, and eat plants. Entire pages are devoted to listing every animal native to Ohio, all of which Bell imagines will be driven extinct due to humanity’s mix of malice and indifference.
John’s chapters are deeply techno-pessimistic, embodying the philosophy that science will never make things better for anyone except for those in power. He and Eury try to imagine ways to save humanity and the Earth’s plants and animals through bioengineering, but just create tasteless apples and tame wolves. Although Eury offers salvation to desperate climate refugees, she’s always the one in absolute control, unlike John, who is perpetually pushed along by more powerful personalities. Eury is intriguing in that she truly seems to believe her own hype about not only saving the world from starvation but also giving people dignity in her agrarian enclaves.
“No more clearing filthy plates off a table where you’d never be invited to sit,” she promises. “No more crushing your spine in an office chair, hunched in a cubicle, your blank expressionless face reflecting a monitor’s glow.” Eury is nuanced if not sympathetic, though it’s hard to believe the monetary and political power she’s amassed given her naïveté. She immediately welcomes John back into her inner circle, setting herself up for sabotage, and then reveals her world-changing plans on live TV like a supervillain, complete with a countdown timer. She’s surprised when everyone rises up to stop her.
Even those with the best intentions can fall to their own hubris, Bell says, and elites shouldn’t be able to make decisions for everyone else, something that applies equally to Eury’s schemes and the way John and his allies try to subvert them. Bell doesn’t believe that consensus can be reached on how to stop climate change in time to make a difference and that we will be doomed by our inaction. His dismissal of heroism on any scale is both bold and dispiriting.
Bell has a propensity for using repetition to emphasize his points, resulting in some plodding prose, such as a section on homesteaders trapping wolves they blame for lost livestock: “wolves struggling in steel; wolves dead of bloody injuries and poison. Wolves with broken forepaws, shattered skulls; wolves with black tongues, bulged eyeballs.”
Late in the book, Bell acknowledges, through a supporting character, the laziness of having a singular villain in a story about environmental degradation: “The problem is bigger than any one person, any one company or government: the problem belongs to every last person; until it’s solved everyone remains complicit, even if they resist.” Yet Bell does not think the problems he explores can be solved at all, and by his own logic, there is no redemption to be found in resistance.
Author photo: Jessica Bell
34 Comments
Enjoyable read or not, it’s hard to argue with the premise “humans are incapable of change, headed toward the extinction we deserve.”
I will argue that humans are not going extinct in the foreseeable future. There are more than 7 billion right now all around the globe, and humanity has survived over a wide range of conditions in the time we’ve existed.
In fact, it’s kind of our unique competitive advantage. We’re fantastically versatile omnivores of opportunity, have some ability to plan ahead and think synoptically (though maybe not enough, per the apparent thesis of this book), and enjoy the mixed blessing of year-round fecundity. Once we figured out fire and clothing and rudimentary food preservation, there was no stopping us.Homo sapiens, n., the species that lives in both the high Arctic and the Kalahari.That said, “No more clearing filthy plates off a table where you’d never be invited to sit,” she promises. “No more crushing your spine in an office chair, hunched in a cubicle, your blank expressionless face reflecting a monitor’s glow.” implies a rather misty view of what subsistence farming is really like… As a smart fellow said, TANSTAAFL.
We are great at problems that are clearly put before us. By the time the real problems of climate change become obvious to even the most willfully ignorant politicians, it will be far too late to do anything about it.
implies a rather misty view of what subsistence farming is really like.Subsistence farming is really great and personally fulfilling all the way through late Spring and early Summer, and then again if the harvest turns out good. If you live in a part of the world with a climate/geology that doesn’t require complicated irrigation or really heavy ploughing. And there aren’t the kinds of people who come screaming down the hillside every 3-5 years, to kill your family and take all your stuff. And you don’t get hit by a “bloom” event of fungus, weeds, insects, small rodents etc.
My guess is that people will still be around in a 1000 years, but conditions (not just environmental ones) will be so bad that only the super-rich and powerful manage to live with any comfort. Tech breakthroughs could change that, I suppose.
Humans aren’t going extinct (most likely), but mass extinction events will happen and will ensure that millions (if not billions) of the global poor will die.
I’m certainly in the camp that thinks that, along a long enough timeline, humanity can survive and then thrive. But to a lot of people, several billion dead might as well as be all of us dead, and I can vibe with that a little.
Even setting aside the incredibly depressing low bar of mere biological survival, we are literally experiencing an unprecedented rate of CO2 release. Never before, in the entirety of geological time, has so much greenhouse gas been released so quickly. Even the End Permian extinction, the closest thing the planet has ever experienced in terms of total global extinction of ALL life, was a sloooooow burn compared to the rate at which we are releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. Humans will be extinct by 2100, along with the vast majority of animal and plant life, when the global nutrient cycle collapses following the total failure of ocean stratification and circulation in 30-40 years.
Even setting aside the incredibly depressing low bar of mere biological survival, we are literally experiencing an unprecedented rate of CO2 release. Never before, in the entirety of geological time, has so much greenhouse gas been released so quickly. Even the End Permian extinction, the closest thing the planet has ever experienced in terms of total global extinction of ALL life, was a sloooooow burn compared to the rate at which we are releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. Humans will be extinct by 2100, along with the vast majority of animal and plant life, when the global nutrient cycle collapses following the total failure of ocean stratification and circulation in 30-40 years.
While of course humans will not “go extinct”, the quality of life for all but the top 1% of them will drastically decrease very soon, leading to billions of deaths. Just read the reports.
“Humans are incapable of change,” says man who lives in civilization vastly different than the civilization of even a century before, much less a millennium or two.
To be entirely fair, those people didn’t have thousands of nukes nor could they appreciably change their biosphere in such radical ways.
Do you think maybe there is a difference between societal change and changing human nature?
Technology changes. Humans don’t.
I think change is possible, but not likely on the global scale needed to avoid climate predictions. Too many people will always refuse to cooperate, whether it’s out of greed, fear, laziness, etc.
True, but the idea that climate change would cause the extinction of humanity is pretty absurd. About the only feasible way this would work is indirectly — that nations fighting over resources made scarcer would escalate to full out nuclear war.
it’s not absurd at all. literally geologically unprecedented rates of CO2 release into the atmosphere -> destratification of oceans and collapse of global circulation -> destruction of the nutrient web -> 95% of all animal and plant life goes extinct. easy as.
From my understanding, the worst-case scenarios still aren’t “total human extinction”- we may lose billions, civilization as we know it may collapse, but the species will probably persist. The kind of nihilism Bell’s talking about honestly benefits the polluters more than anyone; they can go right from “There’s no problem and if there is we’re not causing it” to “Well it’s too late to do anything now.” Actually continuing to fight is the tougher option but also, well, may as well do what we can while we still can.
I don’t think society will collapse. I think billions of people will continue to live on in comfort and relative ease (including much of the US and Europe), albeit while facing mild-to-severe disruptions from worsening storms and food shortages.
But, I also think it’s inevitable (at this point) that billions of people will die, and those will be the people who never even had a chance to have a voice in the “debate” over climate change, i.e. the global poor. The same people who will be held at the gates by immigration policies that are almost certainly going to get stricter, especially if the global food supply is disrupted by famines and supply chain issues.
We’ve already passed multiple “points of no returns” and we’re nowhere near making the full reversals needed to stop climate change completely (or even lessen it noticeably).
I’m sure there will be advances in science that will help mitigate the impact of climate change for those who already live in world-relative wealth (that includes most of us posting on AV Club). We may even see major technological leaps forward that will make the world a far better place in the long run (think the post-WWIII invention of Warp Speed in Star Trek; not literally, just an analogy), but the reality is that a whole shit ton of people are going to lose their livelihoods and lives before that will happen (or, at least, while it’s happening).
So yeah, there will be an extinction of the global poor, but for the billions of people who survive, it won’t feel like an extinction, because it won’t be one single event. It’ll be a multiplicity of catastrophes (wildfires, famines, natural disasters, wars, pandemics, terrorist uprisings).
The kind of nihilism Bell’s talking about honestly benefits the polluters more than anyone; they can go right from “There’s no problem and if there is we’re not causing it” to “Well it’s too late to do anything now.”
They’re already doing that.
No scientific advances are needed. We already have the technology to completely reverse all climate change effects we’ve caused. The only thing we lack is the political will to do so.
that’s not true at all
I return you to my original comment, then.
that is incorrect – there are numerous plausible models that show a collapse of global ocean circulation as a result of continued “business-as-usual” CO2 emissions, which would result in global anoxia, collapse of the nutrient web, and a literally unprecedented in all of geological history level mass extinction that would, absolutely certainly, cause humans to become extinct
The real “there ain’t no justice!” aspect is that the countries doing the most pollution, and in some cases doing the least about it, might geographically be the best able to survive the consequences. Substantial bits of Poor World are likely to take a heavier hit with less ability to withstand it.
How do we deserve extinction more than other species? I bet they’d exploit the Earth just as much as we do if they had the capability.
Bell argues that humanity is guilty of the original sin of attempting to tame nature and refusing to acknowledge that some things should be left untouched. This feels very 1970s environmentalism, with its view on “unspoiled nature” vs man. It got left behind once we realized just how thoroughly humans everywhere have modified the landscape, such that even what westerners thought of as “natural” landscapes were the product of ecological engineering by the people living there.
Humanity is doomed in Matt Bell’s unrelenting climate change novelhad to read the article to confirm if this was fiction or non-fiction
Based on this review, this sounds vaguely like the Great Value edition of The Overstory.
If there are no cyborg soldiers, cyber punk technology, or navel-gazing at what human nature truly is, then don’t call your work “Appleseed.”
Specially if you’re lacking a cyborg with “rabbit ears” antennas.
Sounds like a nice breezy beach read.
The good news is that the beach will likely be a lot closer yo your door soon.
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