APPLESEED by Matt Bell

Strange hybrids inhabit this novel.  Chapman is a faun—half man, half beast—who, along with his brother Nathaniel, marches westward during the early settlement of this country, planting apple orchards.  He manages to shapeshift into a man as necessary and is the author’s reimagining of John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed.  Two other storylines are futuristic and at times difficult to unravel, but they basically bring us to a world in crisis, due to climate change.  I feel a little guilty calling these sections sci-fi, since the consequences of climate change are anything but fiction, but there is definitely some not-yet-invented cloning and whatnot going on.  Another hybrid is C-433, who is a blue furry being (recycled from C-1 through C-432, plus some plastic replacement parts) and is gradually morphing into a tree, due to some biomass that C-432 threw into the mix.  The third storyline, which takes place sometime between the other two, involves John and Eury, childhood pals who built Earthtrust, a company that ostensibly intends to save the planet.  However, John abandons this enterprise when he discerns that Eury is becoming a little too drunk on her own power and is losing sight of their ultimate objective.  In fact, Eury is intent on saving humanity, at the expense of everything else, by monkeying around with the natural world.  The suspense in this novel, for me, was how the three storylines fit together, and I never caught on to the link between the Johnny Appleseed story and the other two.  Plus, the last name of John, of the John and Eury story, is Worth, which is also the last name of a farm family who befriend Nathanial and Chapman during their orchard-planting expeditions.  Huh?  Anyway, the author drives home the fact that Johnny Appleseed destroyed natural habitats by clearing land to plant apple trees.  Wildlife doesn’t stand a chance in the face of human proliferation.