released 07 mar 05 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* One of the first claims to fame of Japanese manga writer Masamune Shirow (a penname, by the way) was his APPLESEED series, which ultimately reached four volumes, plus a databook.
The first volume, THE PROMETHEAN CHALLENGE, takes place after a global war. Two commandos who have survived the conflict, including cute but impulsive Deunan Knute and her man Briaraeos, a hulking and easy-going cyborg, are picking through the ruins of a city when they are contacted by Hitomi, a representative of a new city-state named Olympus that is collecting up the debris and assembling it into a new world.
There are hostile factions in Olympus -- with Deunan, Briaraeos, and Hitomi battling it out with hostiles even before they leave for Olympus -- and once they do arrive there are intrigues that are quieter but just as dangerous. Olympus is a society of humans, cyborgs, and "bioroids" -- essentially tailor-made / vat grown humans; pretty little Hitomi is a bioroid, much older than she looks, and though she comes on as a bit of a ditz she carries a fair amount of weight. The intrigues lead to another battle, with Deunan taking on a gang of terrorists in combat armor and bringing them down.
THE PROMETHEAN CHALLENGE provides a good display of Masamune Shirow's style: meticulous and imaginative technology (he seems to have had some industrial or architectural design in his training), lots of action, a bit of "fan service" (a drunken Hitomi intruding on Deunan in the shower), and a plot that is at best hard to follow, when it can be followed at all. For example, after multiple readings, I still can't figure out what the terrorist gang was all about -- something about them being on drugs as an experiment, if that explains anything.
Volume 2, PROMETHEUS UNBOUND, takes up directly where volume 1 left off, with Deunan working as a member of the Olympus SWAT while Briaraeos recovers from the wounds he suffered in the terrorist attack. The intrigues continue, with the Gaia, the central computer of Olympus, commandeering huge spider robots to carry out an attack on the bioroid "production" facility.
While volumes 1 & 2 are closely linked, volume 3, THE SCALES OF PROMETHEUS starts to take off in multiple directions (and all at once, too), introducing new characters, such a smartass mercenary cyborg named Sokaku, a spy from the floating city of Poseidon named Doric, and a feral bioroid named Artemis; adventures in a decayed New York in a ruined USA and commando raids in France; and an evolved and more elaborate artwork style. The technical detail remains in force, as does the fan service (not only do we get a shower scene with full-frontal nudity, but we also get a massage scene), and the difficult-at-best to follow plots. One of the interesting items is watching the author play with clothing designs: some scenes are simply contrived to get Deunan (or whoever) into a specific sort of uniform or the like.
Volume 4, THE PROMETHEAN BALANCE, takes the adventure up to Masamune Shirow's modern elaborate artwork style. The story line is, thankfully, simplified, with Deunan tackling terrorists with the somewhat ambiguous help of Sokaku. It's fairly straightforward action-adventure stuff, with the author not bothering much with intrigues (as if anyone could figure them out anyway!) or even with fan service, as if he was getting bored with such things. The supplementary APPLESEED DATABOOK that follows provides a survey of the series, with the author (sort of) filling in the details and also providing a short adventure story involving Deunan and Poseidon agent Doric, who seems to exist in an ambiguous quantum state between friend and enemy.
Overall, the APPLESEED series is good fun if you're not too worried about a really credible story -- mind you, the stories rarely get ridiculous, they're just muddy and hard to follow. Where APPLESEED really shines is in imagination, detail, and sheer hard work; Masamune Shirow blazes his own path and doesn't follow others. I keep wishing he'd get a co-author or at least an editor who can hit him over the head with a mallet when he goes too far off the deep end, but it hasn't happened yet, and I'll have to be happy with things as they are.
