Human stories, in other words, don’t tell the whole story. But Bell notes that the Appleseed myth papers over a history of exploitation: “The new peoples of Ohio and Indiana make their own myths, raising up the brave pioneers who came before, erasing crude violence and genocide in favor of edifying local legends and entertaining folk tales.” The faun Chapman, as his name suggests, is modeled after John Chapman, a.k.a. In the case of most novels, that’s a platitude for Bell, it’s a critique. “All plots move humanward, all human plots move toward the human,” he writes. But John, who invented the robot bees these swarms are modeled after, sees only a high-tech variation on the usual kick-the-can schemes, with more opportunities for Earthtrust to exploit.īell’s story is audacious beyond just its plot-he’s attempting to shift our focus from mankind to nature, or at least suggest that we keep them in balance. Her master plan, called Pinatubo, involves using manufactured “nanoswarms” to cloud the stratosphere, theoretically cooling the planet long enough for humanity to develop a better solution. Now we exploit the gaps left in our democracy to save our people.” Eury summarizes our trajectory with a sinister logic that encapsulates a half century of wheel spinning on climate change: “Starting late last century, corporate greed weakened democracy’s safeguards now, in the places where the safeguards are weakest, we’re free to act. The Earthtrust thread-in which the corporation assures people there’s nothing wrong with human-made climate change that can’t be fixed-feels like a persuasive extension of current events. The one who escapes, the one who saves herself, the one who is enough to save everyone else.” And C-433 exemplifies the legend of eternal return, regenerating as half tree–half human in an “earth reset.” But Bell asks, “What good is the earth reset, if nothing living survives?”Īppleseed is wildly ambitious by the standards of climate fiction and most novels, period Bell applies some spectacular world-building. But Earthtrust’s Eury is hubristically confident: “I’m who she would have been, in a better story. Eury is short for Eurydice, who in Greek myth was trapped in the underworld. Chapman is a product of a kind of primal-earth mythology in which fauns are condemned to live in linear time. They’re also bound by mythological themes. These three braided narratives are connected by a shared lineage. C-433 is bound for Black Mountain, where, it’s been said, the last of humanity remains, if it remains at all. The company’s director, Eury, is pursuing a monomaniacal plot to cool the earth, while her former partner John is attempting to monkey-wrench it.ĭoes climate fiction fail to show us what the long-term stakes are, the true endgame of our folly? The third thread of Bell’s novel takes place in the far future and follows C-433, a creature capable of self-replication (thanks to Earthtrust technology), as it heads west during a new ice age. Is climate fiction too lecture-y? Another plotline offers a techno-thriller set in the not-too-distant future, in which extreme heat and massive die-offs have left much of the United States to rely on Earthtrust, a megacorporation that has strong-armed citizens into laboring as indentured farmhands. Is the genre doom-and-gloom, dwelling too little on the humane and verdant world we once had and might possibly have again? One strand of the novel follows Chapman, a faun who, with his human brother, Nathaniel, seeds the Ohio Territory with apple trees in the 18th century, balancing their livelihood with a caretaking instinct. Matt Bell’s third novel, Appleseed, tells three kinds of stories about the climate crisis-and in the process addresses three kinds of anxieties that tend to hover around climate fiction.
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