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