Herein John Clute espouses the evils of modern society. To believe his words is to take any faith in today's state of living and cast it aside like so many Y2K-preparation manuals. Clute distances himself from any relevance by admitting that the true date of the end of the world cannot be known until after the fact, but that surely the end must be on its way. Surely.

Clute's major thesis is that anything modern is either symptomatic or compounding of the imminent end of the world. He weaves through page after page of graphic and prose juxtapositions, perhaps trying to illustrate the futility of human creativity, or perhaps just entertaining himself with his own cleverness. Clute writes on and on about, of all things, the recent century-recapping issue of LIFE magazine, Nostradamus, Star Wars, Hopi indians, Tamagotchis, and Hell itself.

To his credit, he has provided the reader with some outstanding graphic images and quotations, often merged into the same striking page. Clute borrows extensively from science fiction movies and TV shows, classic art, and news events, although not always to great effect. In a diatribe about God, he shows a picture of a young Elvis along with the DNA double-helix. Um, what....irony? Later, we see an atomic explosion mixed with a picture of the American western homestead. Clever! I'll be cutting some of these pages out and framing them. As a testament to Clute's redundancy, I'm certain that any lost pages will not go noticed.

This is a book to be enjoyed for how much it loves itself, and for how it's message is all the more diluted from its own arrogance.

As described in the prologue, this book deals with the idea of apocalypse apart from millennium fever and doomsday prophets. "It is the premise of this short book...that millennium fever is nonsense, but that apocalypse is not...whenever it is suggested that the human race is approaching a turning point in its long and heavy-handed sovereignty over planet Earth-and that we do not yet know the nature of the new world to come-sense is being spoken..."
The book is divided up into four parts: "A Story Called Millennium," "What To Do in Dreamland Till We're Dead," "There is a Wasteland and It Is Us," and "How are Tricks?." Images of everything from Nazi Germany to the woodcuts of Albrecht Durer to Pokemon to John Wayne to Jesus to goofy street signs are juxtaposed with the author's own text and quotes from a variety of sources equally as diverse. There are sure to be arguments of whether or not the book relies too heavily on junk science and religious twaddle but the mission of trying to get people to stop believing the nuts who "name" the date the world will end is unquestionably a positive thing (unless you are the proprietor of a creepy cult of course). Even if you are not particularly interested in the whole worry that we are living in the end times business, you can still derive plenty of enjoyment from this book. I was thumbing through it in a bookstore and bought it because I liked the quotations and the neat artwork. As a pleasant side effect, I have read several of the stories quoted in this book because the snippet included by the author was so intriguing. Anyhow, if you are interested in the idea of mankind running itself into the ground or the notion of the world ending in some blaze of glory of Biblical proportions, this book would be a great selection. And if you aren't, check it out anyhow for the graphics and the quotes. (...)

This volume is certainly a bookworm like myself's anomaly and change in scenery. Its appearance is more like a magazine. (My ONLY complaint is the garish backgrounds that make the text difficult to concentrate on at times) However, the book elucidates on the point that millenialism is absurd. (Which we can certainly see in hindsight... us still being here into the year 2001 CE) but that Apocalypticism is a realistic future in contradistinction with our fear of the sky falling at Y2K. Now, that does not mean a literal construing of John's Revelation (one more absurdity) but that from our own doing as the crew of planet Earth that we may convert our fear of mortality into the death of our planet. The Eschaton manifests itself repeatedly in media, sci-fi, conspiracy theories, and the like. This work aims to shake some sense into the paranoid neurotics of this epoch. It is a two-edged sword, sorting out the nonsense beliefs in UFO... probings and clandestine Satanic ritual abuse, but exposing that we could very well destroy our island home in the cosmos.

You cannot become bored with "The Book of End Times." The West has been drugged and lied to with the chicanery of prophets of doom and preachers of death... this is my prescription. Not that this book alone would ever set us straight of the mass hypnosis and hysteria from the fears of fanatical fundamentalists, (Just as was pointed out in the book that the philosophical works of Hume were universally ignored, and the later {and lesser} works of Michael Shermer, in 'Why People Believe Weird Things') but, seriously, check it out. 'goes well with Mick Farren's "Conspiracies, Lies, and Hidden Agendas" or/and Richard Abane's "End Time Visions"

This book has a language all its own, the kind that requires you sit next to a computer with access to all the world's dictionaries just to figure out what Clute is talking about when discussing Flyte AIs vs Jack AIs, or when he describes a starship's bridge displays as "intagliated." Once you become used to it, however, the visuals, the textures, the world he's describing become very vivid, very real.

However, the ending is straight out of some 1970's "new wave" SF, with humans as "special" and absurd amounts of sex and anlalochezic profanity replacing a painful creative lacunae as the story draws towards its ending.

I suspect this is a book for writers, not readers, of science fiction, a salmagundi of examples, John Clute's notion of "how some things should be done." And they're such clinquant examples, it's too bad that there's no real story there to enjoy.

John Clute is a singular SF critic: he writes with verve and style and with a unashamedly vaste vocabulary. Indeed his unapologetically fertile use of words, his love of language as a sensuous and liquid thing, alienate some who prefer a more direct and uncomplicated approach. His knowledge of the genre is also unmatched, and would be called 'encylopaedic' had he not in fact edited the definitive encyclopaedia in the field.

Given this background one might expect his first SF novel, a dense and intense reimagining of the classic space opera, to be a unique confection, and this it certainly is in these two respects at least.

This book delights in words, it explodes with linguistic pyrotechnics, it exalts in unexpected juxtapositions of the obscure and the mundane, of the arcane and the obscene, it drowns the reader is an almost cloyingly rich thesauric stew. In this sense it is an astonishing book, a novel whose language both makes and mirrors the baroque universe in which it is set. Because the language does work. It is not simply filagree, it is the substance and structure of the book and it does its job: I have never read a more utterly atmospheric and engulfing description of the process of landing on an alien trading world as Clute presents in the first two dozen pages of Appleseed.

Secondly, Clute's vast knowledge of SF enables him to play with tropes, concepts and situations in away that is a delight for the afficianado. There are references everywhere, only some of which are credited in the afterword. There are also some fascinating inventions of his own: the azulejaria tiles which line 'Tile Dance', the ship piloted by the protagonist, Nathanial Freer, and which are simultaneously story and storage; the world of Klavier as a multi-dimensional palimpset, layer upon layer, twist within turn; and the hilarious treatment of human odour and sexuality within a universe where most species find sex offensive and use smell to communicate subtle and complex matters.

But... and this is a big 'but'...

Some of the borrowings are more than references. The central notion of the entropic data 'plaque' infecting the universe, and indeed many of the situations, species, and general 'feel' of Clute's universe, while by no means exactly the same, certainly appear to have a lot in common with Vernor Vinge's 'A Fire upon the Deep', a work that is not mentioned by Clute in his afterword. While I would never go so far as to accuse SF's greatest critic of plagiarism, I would say that Clute certainly owes more of a debt to Vinge, who is neither as culturally-central or as highly-regarded as those whom Clute does namecheck, than he admits. In addition, his 'made-minds', Artifical Intelligences, are also strongly reminiscent of Iain M. Bank's darkly witty and bizarre Culture minds.

Most importantly of all however, the plot and resolution, character development - such as it is possible in a universe where identity is so malleable - and emotional content, are flimsy and ramshackle affairs when stripped of the dense superstructure of description. The lack of connection to what we know of as human emotion is a common and perhaps insoluable problem in any reasonable far future setting - it seems to go with the territory - although Attanasio's Last legends of Earth is a magnificent exception. However Appleseed's lack of substantial 'story' is far less forgiveable.

Still, this book should be read. For all its failings as a tale, stylistically there isn't much like it in SF (or elsewhere), and in many ways it is brave: the outrageous lovechild of a menage a trois between Vernor Vinge, Iain M. Banks and the Oxford English Dictionary, it won't be easily read, but certainly not easily forgotten.

I'll agree, Clute borrows heavily from a number of authors in imagining the glactic stage on which Appleseed is set, including Vinge and Banks, as noted, but didn't they draw on those who came before as well? Rich, baroque, and minutely imagined post-human galactic cultures date back at least to Dune and Ringworld, if not long before. What made me enjoy Appleseed so was Clute's insistance on giving the reader a full-immersion introduction to his unique flavor of galactic civilization, painting his picture as he will, and leaving interpretation up to the viewer. So much nicer than endless dull straightahead descriptive paragraphs. In this he reminds me of Gene Wolfe at the height of his powers (the Torturer series), providing us with an alternate universe seemingly imagined down to the most mundane, yet shockingly out-of-the-ordinary, details. I for one will grab the next volume as soon as I see it.