Appleseed Review: The Cyberpunk Classic That Asks Who Gets to Inherit the Earth

I read Ghost in the Shell first, like most people did. So when I finally picked up Appleseed and realized it came before it — that this was Shirow figuring out, in 1985, all the questions he'd later make famous — it felt like finding the rough draft of someone's whole brain.

But that's not quite right either. Appleseed isn't a rough draft. It's the messier, angrier, more political older sibling. Ghost in the Shell asks what a single mind is. Appleseed asks something bigger and scarier: now that humans have nearly destroyed the world, do we still get to be the ones who run it? I didn't expect a four-volume action manga from the eighties to sit with me the way it did. It did.

Quick Take

• Masamune Shirow's first serialized manga, and the cyberpunk blueprint he'd refine in Ghost in the Shell — politics, bioethics, and giant guns in equal measure
• Deunan and Briareos get pulled from a post-WWIII wasteland into a "perfect" city, then have to defend it from the people who built it
• 4 volumes, complete in English from Dark Horse; rated M (Mature) for violence, adult themes, and a density that does not let you skim

Story Overview

The Third World War has ended without nuclear weapons but with most of humanity dead anyway. Deunan Knute and her partner Briareos — once an ordinary man, now a hulking cyborg after catastrophic injuries — are surviving as nomad soldiers in the "Badside," the ruined demilitarized zones outside what's left of civilization.

Then a young woman named Hitomi finds them and brings them to Olympus: a gleaming city-state, the centerpiece of humanity's reconstruction, where roughly half the population are bioroids — artificial humans engineered with their aggression genetically suppressed, designed to act as an emotional buffer that keeps society calm. Deunan and Briareos are recruited into ESWAT, the city's special enforcement unit. Hitomi, it turns out, is a bioroid herself, which rattles Deunan more than she expects.

The catch — and this is the turn that makes Appleseed more than a cop-action book — is that Olympus's peace isn't natural. It's administered. The city is run by the supercomputer Gaia and a council of Elders, and the Elders have concluded that human violence will inevitably destroy the world again. Their solution is to extend the bioroids' behavior modification to the entire human race, and ultimately to release the D-Tank, a sterility virus that would let the engineered, peaceful bioroids quietly inherit the Earth as humanity faded out. The title Appleseed refers both to a global decontamination plan and to the data that becomes the key to undoing this — data tied to Deunan's own father, Dr. Gilliam Knute, who refused to let the sterilization plan go forward. When the administrator Athena moves against the Elders, Deunan and Briareos end up holding the entire fragile structure of Olympus together by force.

Characters

Deunan Knute — A soldier who has known nothing but war, dropped into a city engineered to never need one. Her arc isn't about learning to fight; she already can. It's about whether she can belong to a place whose entire premise is that people like her — violent, instinctive, human in the oldest way — are the problem to be solved. The reveal that she's tied by blood to the Appleseed data, through her father, makes her literally the inheritor of the question the whole series is asking.

Briareos Hecatonchires — Deunan's partner and lover, his body now mostly machine after being nearly killed. He's the human-machine question made physical: more reliable, more durable, and more "post-human" than anyone around him, yet still unmistakably the same man who loves Deunan. He grounds the abstract bioethics in something tender.

Hitomi — The bioroid who recruits the pair. She's the gentle face of Olympus's whole project, and the manga keeps complicating her: she's everything the city promises (calm, kind, engineered for harmony) and also a living example of what's been taken away from the bioroids in exchange.

Athena — Olympus's administrator, whose mutiny against the Elders is the political spine of the back half. She represents the compromise at the city's foundation — and the limits of governing a paradise that can only stay peaceful by quietly deciding who's allowed to have a future.

What I Love About It

It's the appendices, and I'm only half joking. Shirow packs the back of each volume with pages of notes — diagrams of Olympus's governance, the biology of the bioroids, the engineering of the Landmate power suits, the politics of the factions. Reading Appleseed genuinely feels like reading the field manual for a civilization that hasn't happened yet. Most manga ask you to accept the world; Shirow hands you the schematics and dares you to argue with them.

But the thing I actually love is how seriously it takes the bad answer. A lesser story would make the Elders cartoon villains. Appleseed doesn't. The Elders' logic — that humans have proven, with a dead planet as evidence, that we can't be trusted with the planet — is uncomfortably hard to refute. The series puts Deunan, the walking argument for human instinct, in the position of defending a species that the smartest minds in the city have already written off. I came in expecting cool mecha. I stayed because the manga refused to tell me the Elders were simply wrong. That's a heavier thing than I expected from a book with hundred-foot war machines in it.

Memorable Scene ⚠️ Spoiler Warning

The image that stuck with me is from Book Two, Prometheus Unbound: the introduction of the new "protective" defense platforms into Olympus — enormous mechanical walkers, gun emplacements built like hundred-foot spiders, lowered into the streets of a city that's supposed to be paradise. The visual does the whole argument in one panel. Here is the utopia, the place built so no one ever has to fight again, and looming over its clean white arcologies are war machines, installed by the city itself, in the name of keeping everyone safe.

It crystallizes the question the whole series circles: a peace that has to be guarded this heavily was never really peace — it was control with better lighting. And Deunan and Briareos, the two people most comfortable with violence, are the ones who end up having to tear down the old foundation and hope the city is still standing when the dust clears.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• The most politically substantive cyberpunk manga available in English
• 4 volumes — complete, self-contained, and dense
• Shirow's obsessive world-building and appendices reward rereading
• The bioroid / who-inherits-the-Earth question has only gotten more relevant

Cons

• The back half leans heavily on ESWAT mission set-pieces and the plot can get hard to track
• The footnotes and technical density interrupt narrative flow constantly
• It's drawn and paced like 1985 — busier and less cinematic than Ghost in the Shell
• This is a "lean in and study it" manga, not a "switch off and enjoy" one — that's either the appeal or the dealbreaker, depending on you

Is Appleseed Worth Reading?

Yes — if you want the philosophical, world-building roots of Shirow's whole career and don't mind doing some work. It's denser and less immediately slick than Ghost in the Shell, but it asks a bigger question and refuses to give you an easy answer. If you want fast, frictionless cyberpunk action, start elsewhere.

Similar Manga

Title	Its Approach	How Appleseed Differs
Ghost in the Shell	Same author; tighter focus on identity and the single mind	Appleseed is broader and more political — society and governance over the individual
Blame!	Silent, vast, post-human architecture as horror	Appleseed is talky and argumentative where Blame! is wordless and alienating
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind	Post-catastrophe world, ecology and who deserves the Earth	Appleseed answers the same question with cyberpunk and committees instead of nature and myth

Official English Translation Status

Dark Horse Comics publishes the complete four-volume run in English — The Promethean Challenge, Prometheus Unbound, The Scales of Prometheus, and The Promethean Balance — all in print and digital, including Shirow's extensive notes.

Where to Buy

Read the first volume. If it doesn't hook you, put it down. It'll hook you.

Start with Volume 1 →

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