John Clute's novel APPLESEED: a review

From: Damien Broderick (thespike@earthlink.net)
Date: Tue Feb 11 2003 - 21:12:36 MST

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    This review appeared recently in a specialist insiderly sf zine, THE NEW
    YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION, and I'm mimicking Clute's own manner (the
    second section flagrantly appropriates and reapplies reflexively a passage
    from one of his own reviews), so don't get too annoyed if it seems
    perversely obscure. Think of it as a movie: Being John Clute.

    =======================

    Appleseed, by John Clute
    New York: Tor, January 2002; $25.95 hc; 337 pages
    reviewed by Damien Broderick

    Once I dedicated a book of theory thus: For John Clute, the world's finest
    science fiction critic. Yeah, but what's he done for us lately? An sf novel,
    that's what he's done. Not many notable sf critics have dared that, not
    unless they started out as fiction writers like Aldiss, Benford, Blish,
    Budrys, Delany, Jones, Knight, Le Guin, Lem, Russ, a handful more. George
    Turner's the only one who comes immediately to mind. He'd have detested
    Appleseed.

            1: A Modest Proposal in a Time of Singularity.

            Science aspires to the condition of deicide.
            Technology aspires to the condition of theogenesis.
            Science fiction aspires to the condition of theophany.

            2: Why, This is the Megatext, nor am I out of It!

    Like any really good sf novel written by an intelligent author at the peak
    of his craft, Appleseed is a byte dance and sorting of all the sf protocols
    we are likely to call up from memory. In an afterword, Clute acknowledges
    various predecessors on whom he has done, in echo of his deicidal,
    theogenic, theophanous book, Oedipal riffsCJohn Crowley, Thomas M. Disch, L.
    Frank Baum, Jorge Luis Borges, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur C. Clarke, Gene
    Wolfe, Roger ZelaznyCand he could have mentioned quite a few more, Samuel R.
    Delany and Dan Simmons, to name two, but perhaps there is no real need to be
    explicit, for the book is radiant with the language and moves of the
    genre-edge and all the way back to the deep center; and the thrill of the
    thing lies in the sense of new things transfiguring the old.
            It is a tale fetched up from the Ocean of Story; arguably, it is the story
    of the Ocean of Story, which is us, is all.

    3. Of the Origin of Narrative Species

    Storytellers once spun out their inventions by the hour with rhythm, bold
    colors, engaging or horrid characters: simple tricks. Then they took up
    pens. After fiction and journalism parted company, manner swiftly put out a
    thousand blooms. Matter grew baroque. On the tables of the languid, grand
    operatic works groaned unread.
             Future shock put a brutal stop to that. Bullrings and blood and short hard
    words.
             The kids of those kids went to school and studied fine art, high culture,
    and the sentences went lacy again, and irony caught every word in a trap.
    Who knew how to read?
             Some of those without reading accreditation did it anyway, with factory
    fairytales. They built bigger muscles in fourteen days or had their money
    back. Sf was anti-mandarin. Punched like a rivet. It was, as well, magic out
    of a whirling adolescent heart: it sang incantatory romance.
             Finally the thing went decadent with over-use. Sf risked expiring in this
    terminal generation of embroidery on ideas which once... blazed. Still,
    opportunities arise in a decadent art-form. As in a retirement village or a
    jail, everyone knows the narrative shorthand. You can write whole novels in
    the number of words it once took to get the spaceship out of the lab.
            Then, it seems, it changed again, somewhat. Exfoliation happened. In the
    first 63 pages of Appleseed what happens is that the chicken crosses the
    road, ornately, or rather gets part of the way to the other side, then goes
    back. That's all, really. What happens in the second chapter shows that this
    estimate was too hopeful. In fact, the chicken does not get back from
    attempting the curb until page 84, the end of the chapter, a quarter of the
    way in. Later we learn that we have misunderstood the chicken, have
    seriously undervalued and misidentified this baffled but plucky fowl. In
    fact, the chicken (Nathaniel Freer, than whom nobody is, or is less than: O
    paradox!) and his wife (named Ferocity Monthly-Niece, whom hereafter we
    might be tempted to call PMT for short) will be the masters of the sevagram.
    I bet you expected that.

    4: Clute For Dummies

    It's an involuted ocean, this Ocean of Story. The inside, as so often in
    canonical sf, is larger than the outside. Wormholes eat at the core of the
    apple, which is the world, which is Trantor, which is the Yggdrasil, which
    is the Omphalos of the Pleroma, and so on, yet they don=t so much eat it as
    constitute it, spiraling inward and outward like choirs of angels. Certainly
    we can add Dante to that list above, and perhaps Geoff Ryman. Perhaps you
    think I'm being irritatingly obscure or roundabout, but reading Clute does
    that to you. Be prepared to work like buggery at this novel. Persist,
    reader, there is treasure to be had.
            I think I could tell you the plot, but then half the fun is gone, because
    really there is no plot, just a revelation space in the core of the tumble
    and burnished, blazing array of verbal icons telling a story of God as
    shit-eater and the necessary revolt against themself. Killing God is not
    very shocking these days, it being the escape artistry theme of the century
    we've left behind, not when Philip Pullman can place it at the hinge of his
    rather good children's trilogy (something earnest librarians urging kiddies
    to try His Dark Materials have not noticed, apparently--but wait for the
    plaque to hit the wall when they do). Appleseed is a puzzle palace, a memory
    palace, a cryptic crossword, a map of the world carved up into small absurd
    pieces and scattered, so that its gestalt recovery in the mind's eye urges
    theophany, or its simulation. You don't get that from looking up the answers
    in the back of the book, not even if the book's The Dark Night of the Soul
    or Morte D'Arthur. That was a hint: it really the Matter of Britain on a
    cosmic as well as the classic Glastonbury cosmogonic scale. Maybe that's not
    surprising from a Canadian who has lived much of his adult and intensely
    book-drenched life in England.

    5: Matičre de Bretagne on Mars

    `Stinky' Freer is hired, or so he supposes, to convey in his starship Tile
    DanceCwhich is laminated with Janus-faced tiles, congealed mindsCa cargo of
    nanoforges from the planet Trencher, where he is nearly eaten, to the
    unknown planet Eolhxir, but he doesn't need to know where it is because his
    pilot is a parthenogenic tree named Mamselle Cunning Earth Link (and I don't
    think it's a pun on cunnilingus, but what else can it be?) which proves
    pregnant with the once and future king who is named, I kid you not, as such:
    Arturus Quondam Captain Future. You might find this almost unbearably
    whimsical and recursively knowing, but then Quondam's Mom apparently learned
    her English from Alfred Bester's fabulous temporal beachcomber, tall, gaunt,
    sprightly, bitter Mr. Aquila (from `5,271,009', half a century ago):

            `Shivering with anxious joy, behold me, sure! O enormous masculine sophont
    of dead Earth,' she continued, `bucking the bronco sigillum into badlands˙
    Agog with flush was I, you can altogether bet! Seeing you in the skin that
    wears those mighty bones! That was scrumptious! That was lagniappe! But reck
    you, O striking figure of a man, that such solace of the senses was my
    purpose down below? Nix!'

            That's charming, that's lagniappe, and it goes on for pages, wonderfully
    sustained, you can get hungry for its return in these densely wrought pages;
    there were stretches, elsewhere, I could hardly bear to get through more
    than a page and a half at a time. Freer buys and wakens an ancient AI battle
    bot called Uncle Sam (later revealed to be SammSabaoth, which for all I know
    is significantly Kabbalistic):

                    --Uncle? said Freer into Teardrop.
                    The archaic eyes of the truculent Uncle Sam glared at him, rimmed by
    flaming grooves, which shifted and flowed and became the image of an open
    fist, a fist appaumy, an heraldic warrior fist apparently aflame. The face
    of the Uncle Sam was at one and the same time a face and a hand, a hand
    which was a weapon, a weapon which raised a palm of peace, but a palm
    clenched. (p. 26)

    And on and on. `Appaumy', I learn from the web (it's not in my fat
    dictionary) is heraldic jargon for palm outward. The citation below is
    niftier, but there's page after tens of pages of this Forbidden
    Planet/Delanyesque/Gibsonish stuff as Freer gets from his spaceship (in
    orbit?) down to (?) the planet Trencher (`Bite me!' as it were), like the
    chicken and road joke indefinitely extended:

            The braid did a loop-the-loop, gathering stray capillaries in like
    knitting, and exited docking country, passing through walls of rock and into
    a central intersection, seemingly roofed with glass, where bilateral and
    non-bilateral networks linked briefly, where Trencher opened downwards and
    up like the veined inner atrium of a dream of cities; vast artificial suns
    and moons and discs flickered through luminescent cupolas miles above
    Freer's head downwards through vertical arcades lined with mirrors. The
    float skidded through terrifyingly open air, freefell down a spidery frond
    curling for hundreds of yards over an abyss that dived downwards to magma.
    They hurtled into darkness shot by fireflies which turned out to be argosies
    ferrying homo sapiens upwards, perhaps heading towards an ark and the
    deepest of senior-citizen sleeps. There were a dozen of them; more. The
    inside of the world was churning.
                    --Is this normal?
                    --Aye aye, said the Uncle Sam.
                    They continued down, through a great shaft of light, dazzled, sigillated
    by photonic data flows cascading downwards from far above, perhaps
    ultimately from orbit, where the great Care Consortia arks shot perpetually
    their perfume and their honeytrap slogans into the apertures of the planet.
    Most of the data streams displayed the Insort Geront logo, the fiery
    three-snake caduceus almost too bright to read, the marque of the vastest of
    the godzillas--a ancient Human Earth term for any corporation, whether snail
    or trad dotcom or seeded nous cube, which having gone rogue was no longer
    subject to the rule of law of any individual state or planet or
    system--prating `Enkyklios Paedia' incessantly, boring its mantra deep into
    the bone of the planet. (pp. 31-2)

    And boring not just its mantra, I fear. This is overload in the service of
    bedazzlement, but it keeps going wrong: godzilla is parochial enough, but
    dotcom was dead before the book came out, and I doubt they'd have knitting
    in this remote future. There's an explanation for the explanation, of sorts:
    Freer's viewpoint is geared to ours, since our time is his selected `era of
    empathy choice on Human Earth', the ancestral world of pheromone stenchy,
    sex-obsessed bipedals now swallowed up, one gathers, like much of the
    universe, by encrustations of plaque, corrupted legacy data shit:
    Malacandra, as C. S. Lewis told us long ago it was, and is.
            All space opera aspires to the condition of Quest. Appleseed has more
    grails than you can shake a lance at. Johnny Appleseed, a scabrous rogue,
    wears one upside down upon his hairy head, like a tin pot, as in Vachel
    Lindsay's folkloric poem (`The apple allied to the thorn/Child of the rose)
    which is quoted in extenso in several places. He scatters his seed, we might
    suppose, across the galaxy. All Quest aspires to the condition of Tantra,
    delayed gratification to the max, unendurable pleasure indefinitely
    sustained. Still, novels have climaxes, and Clute does not blink: as in
    several Norman Spinrad space operas where captains literally fuck their way
    through hyperspace, Freer and Ferocity screw the world back into place,
    screw the inscrutable, as their ancient Predecessor starship, secret hero of
    the tale, fucks the world back to heaven. Sort of thing.

    6. Holiest Communion

    Appleseed is a consummately Catholic novel. It's a God-eat-dog world, and
    vice versa. In the hollowed fecundities of its grails lie lenses, hosts
    which focus Eucharistic haecceity. They are, finally, eaten; almost
    everything is. A malign triune godthing named Opsophagous of the Harpe (a
    harpe is a scythe)--sons born endlessly in the dying belly of fathers, which
    they munch--deliriously and continuously eats its own flesh in a Clutean
    rapture of disgust. Luckily for the galaxy, it's a dog-fuck-dog world too.
    Humans are, famously, on heat all round the clock. They can do it face to
    face, looking scandalously into each others' eyes, but in this unbuckled
    honest Darwinian future, 5000 years hence, reeking and leaking with sex day
    and night, they start it doggie fashion, sniffing and licking and mounting
    to heaven:
                    Her body glowed with sweat...
                    `Shall we fuck slow?'
                    `No,' said Ferocity. `No, I don't think I can.'
                    She leaped toward him.
                    He shifted sideways, slipped his hand between her legs, and they fell
    through the light gravity on to the floating bed, hardly noticing as it rose
    into the cupola, where windows real and universal gave them to the world.
    They burrowed into position, as was the normal habit of homo sapiens
    anywhere after the loss of Human Earth, lowering their heads to each other's
    orifices, sniffing, touching tongues to the pomace of sweat and juices. It
    was as though they were checking passports.

    Those windows are for seeing through. The Predecessors, we learn, `were
    epithalamial˙ Anything an excuse for a marriage', and everyone loves to
    watch. It's a robustly binary universe, which aspires to the condition of
    unitarity (down there in the quantum foam, here in the human heart, the
    wedding of Möbius), of dialectical sublation, and gets it, for a while. This
    is not surprising to devotees of Clute's emergent theoretics. He has been
    telling us for some years that the secret heart and driver of sf's mode is
    exogamy.

            7. Tell me a story

    All art, all science, aspires to the condition of story. In the Ocean of
    Story, which is the world, liturgy tells the world into being and sustains
    it. In the liturgy of science fiction, new thing upon the face of history,
    liturgy not only repeats, it insists upon the novum. In Appleseed, here is
    the mantra refrain, universally acknowledged, before which all fall silent
    and listen, or tell:
            `Sacred is the new. Tell me a story.'
            In Appleseed's world, the world is written on the face of words, but also
    tucked away inside, doubled, mirrored, counter-braced, upended. Freer, we
    learn, wears the face of Jim Thorne, Indian, finest American athlete of the
    first half of the last century. (So? The thorn and the rose? The Glastonbury
    thorn? On and on it goes.) On Trencher, Freer's ancient starship buys him
    those two Made Minds, bound to service, warbot Uncle Sam (or SammSabaoth)
    and absolute navigator Vipassana, which Clute does not tell us is the
    Buddhist term for clear insight, the Art of Mindfulness; this is a book of
    ironies. Stinky's angel at the helm of Tile Dance or more truly Ynis Gutrin
    (which is Glastonbury, cathedral of the Grail) is she/he quantum KathKirtt,
    wedded Kirttimukha and his bride. Now Kirttimukha, as everyone surely knows
    and so Clute need not tell us, and does not, is the horned, leonine `face of
    glory' from Indian myth, but what of Kath? Here's my guess: she's Kathapitha
    or Katha Sarit Sagara, from the same Sanskrit writings: Ocean of, of course,
    Story.
            That sundered Möbius world they knit up and make new, reprieving its Waste
    Land wound, is Klavier, reality's birth canal, perhaps, the cosmic bicameral
    brain, all that, and in Klavier, of course, the condition of all things
    aspires to the condition of music, Beethovian thunder, glory, molten light.
    Appleseed is the fall of seed into fertile soil, kenosis, Clute tells us:
    incarnation of `the divine into the progeria of mortal flesh'. That, at
    least, is the opinion of `the theophrasts of the inner stars', but the novel
    insists that the theophrasts are wrong. For all that, the machine angels of
    the world `found it strangely thrilling to spreadeagle themselves on the
    rack of time: to gape through the peepshow eyes of their chosen faces at the
    meat faces of the mortals to whom they gave suck.' These faces are dual:
    flyte and jack, out and in, maybe, or in and out. Don't ask me, you'll find
    out, or won't. The narrative blows in the winds, the gales of time. It winds
    in gyres. It closes in theophany and deicide, as space opera ought.



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