Special Circumstances

Appleseed by John Clute

John Clute makes a mad grab at greatness, throwing everything into the process. As if desperately trying, through monumental effort, to create a masterpiece. It starts off like a firecracker, but the sheer tedium of reading this novel that is so densely constructed sets in at about 100 pages into it. It is an impressive feat that John Clute could write all this down, since it requires a herculean effort just to read it.

The plot involves the hire of a transport ship to carry two Made Minds to the planet of Eolhxir. A stop at a space station called Klavier impresses on the pilot, Stinky Freer, that he and his ship have been hired to find some artifact called `lenses' (such tedious references to famous sf names are littered through the book, telling you how many books Clute has read). Lenses apparently can cure the data plaque currently causing a crimp in the course of civilization. All the action happens over a small period of time, perhaps a few hours. In a valiant effort to rehaul the space opera genre, John Clute attempts to imagine strange technology, some of it is quite cool, and dresses it up in avant-garde prose. But, to my simple tastes in space opera, it was a thin layer over an empty shell.

I highly recommend reading the first chapter. And then stopping.

I shudder to think what kind of review John Clute would have given this book, if he wasn't the author.

%T Appleseed
%A John Clute
%I Orbit
%D 2001
%G ISBN: 1857237587 (hc)
%P 337
%K science-fiction

Review written: 2002/06/05