#moderan

Moderan by David R. Bunch

Cover by Norman Adams

Moderan by David R. Bunch

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Moderan is a collection of short science fiction stories that were published by David R. Bunch in various magazines between 1960 and 1989. These stories are all centered around the world of Moderan, which is a satirical, irony-ridden hyper-capitalist future—one where the entire earth is coated in grey plastic to seal in the radiation from nuclear pollution, and cyborg men (whose humanity is literally held together by a few strips of flesh) with strongholds wage perpetual war on their neighbors for the sake of, uh... war. And a bit of good-natured competition, of course. Metal flowers are pushed from holes in the ground, the atmosphere is artificially coloured (and flavoured!), and the lowly commoners are forced to live their lives inside tiny bubbles. It is also a HYPER masculine world where women are reduced to literal sex robots with on and off switches, and the ones that begin to develop free will get cordoned off to the White Witch Valley, where they essentially become another faction to wage war with. I know that sounds jarring if you are at all a reasonable, normal person, but it's done in a way that is so obviously a damning critique of the toxic masculine psyche that Bunch manages to pull it off without it ever feeling like misogyny itself is the butt of the joke.

What Bunch does extremely well in these stories is represent a stronghold as not only a physical space with 11 steel walls adorned with turrets and cannons, but also a mental space of isolation—an ideological stronghold of violence and hate that is deeply rooted in fear and insecurity. The world of Moderan is hypermasculine and constantly at war, but the Stronghold Masters are cowards (I believe our main character is also a cuckold, lol). They hide in their metal peep boxes at the center of all their walls, flipping switches to shoot bombs at their enemies while their grunts suffer the casualties. But these Stronghold Masters also show a strict adherence to the rules: truces are respected and can be called at any time; warring strongholds will often help each other get back up when they are knocked down just so that they can get back to shooting each other for profit and entertainment again. The way Bunch represents the bullshit orchestrated façade of world relations is both uncannily accurate and hilariously absurd; he strips down all of these systems of governance and the fragility of the male psyche to their bare foundations and then laughs at them heartily.

Bunch's approach to satire and absurdity is further aided by his prose, which is highly free-form and experimental, often prioritizing DRAMATIC EFFECT! over coherence. Bunch writes very abstractly and often uses improper grammar on purpose (because FUCK rules). I got a good amount of fun out of it, but sometimes it feels like trying to parse the scrawling of a psychosis patient. Some of his paragraphs are dense and hard to follow without feeling like you are being ambushed by word jumbles or bushwhacking your way through a thicket of thorns. This isn't exactly a problem in and of itself, but when you consider the episodic nature of this collection and the fact that all the stories are only a few pages long (and often spend the first one or two of those pages recapping the same information), you can see how it might become tedious. My enjoyment of this book peaked by the first third and then quickly bottomed out by the final.

Moderan, David R. Bunch. Avon Books, first edition (1971). No cover artist credited. 240 pages. The uncredited Boschian cover for this 1971 mass-market paperback edition of Moderan is by Norman Adams. (Adams did a similar cover in 1972 for Jack Williamson’s novel The Humanoids.) I think copies of this volume were expensive and hard to find previous to NYRB’s 2018 release of a new edition…

“”A Little Girl’s Xmas in Moderan” by David R. Bunch from Moderan IT WAS in Jingle-Bell weather that Little Sister came across the white yard, the snow between her toes all gray and packed and starting to ball up like the beginnings of two snowmen. For clothing she had nothing, her tiny rump sticking out red-cold, and blue-cold, and her little-jewel knees white almost as bones. She stuck up ten…

Picked up two on Friday— I’ve been wanting to read Natalia Ginzburg for a while, and when I saw a used copy of her novella The Dry Heart (translated by Frances Frenaye), it seemed like a good entry point. It was really the description on the back that grabbed me: The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: “I shot him between the eyes.” As the tale—a plunge into the…