David R. Bunch, Moderan, Avon Books, 1971. + New York Review Books, 2018.
A collection of chilling and prescient stories about ecological apocalypse, artificial intelligence, and the merging of human and machine in an effort to survive.Welcome to Moderan, world of the future. Here perpetual war is waged by furious masters fighting from Strongholds well stocked with “arsenals of fear,” earth is covered with vast sheets of plastic, and humans vie to replace more and more of their own “soft parts” with steel machinery. What need is there for nature when trees and flowers can be pushed up through holes in the plastic? Who requires human companionship when new-metal mistresses can be ordered from the shop? But even a Stronghold master can doubt the catechism of Moderan. Wanderers, poets, and his own children pay visits, proving that another world is possible.
“The effect is as if Whitman and Nietzsche had collaborated,” Brian Aldiss wrote of David R. Bunch’s stories. Originally published in science-fiction magazines in the 1960s and ’70s and passionately sought by collectors, the stories have not been available in a single volume for nearly fifty years, and this new edition of Moderan will include ten previously-uncollected stories. Like Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange, and borrowing from the Bible and the language of advertising, Bunch coined a mind-bending new vocabulary. His intent was not to divert readers from the horrors of modernity but to make them face it squarely.
Come to Moderan...
Moderan is one of the most startingly original, provocative & fascinating future worlds in all of science fiction.
In Moderan, men are made mostly of metal. They retain strips of flesh to contain their humanity. They live in Strongholds. They prowl the war rooms of their Strongholds and plan wars.
Quite a world, Moderan. Come visit. The war is about to begin...
A writer whose work I admire vastly. And a writer who has, oddly enough, barely received the acclaim due to him. —Harlan Ellison
unch's first book remains his best-known (though it has never been reprinted): Moderan (coll of linked stories 1971; exp 2018), is a series of short, narratively deranged, fable-like tales which describe in satirical terms (see Satire) a radically technologized future world where, after a nuclear Holocaust, humans have been transformed into Cyborgs, the surface of the Post-Holocaust world is plastic, and thought and action are both solipsistic and deeply melancholy. The book's portrait of a manufactured humanity works as an arraignment of the late-twentieth-century slide into speed-lined rootlessness, and demonstrates his heterodoxy in the world of sf. Of the many non-Moderan stories, "That High-Up Blue Day that Saw the Black Sky-Train Come Spinning" (March 1968 F&SF) is an outstanding conflation of moral seriousness and Grand Guignol, in which children – who often appear in Bunch's tales just as they become monsters or are destroyed (see Children in SF) – are given an unusual chance to escape. Bunch's style at its best conveys resembles R A Lafferty's at his best, though it is far more exclamatory, and rhetorically pixilated, than Lafferty's work. At its most intense, Bunch resembles a diced, gonzo Walt Whitman, sampling (in a frenzy) the body electric. The relentlessness of his vision and the "zany" extremity of his rendering of it ensured Bunch's continuing unpopularity, which was not much lessened by the release of Bunch! (coll 1993), for the contents of that book are if anything more extreme than those of Moderan. His oeuvre is a marker of the wide range of modern sf, but his career marks the reluctance of most readers to explore that range. - http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/bunch_david_r
Originally published in the 1960s and '70s, Bunch’s dystopian science-fiction stories, set in his signature realm of Moderan—a futuristic Earth covered in plastic and controlled by warring cyborg warlords—are available in one volume for the first time in 47 years.
While genre historians (and few others) will remember Bunch from his inclusion in Harlan Ellison’s revolutionary 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions, this collection of Moderan stories confirms that Bunch was a major—albeit obscure—talent in the New Wave science-fiction movement. Powered by lyrical prose and a deeply philosophical tone, many of the stories feature the character of Stronghold #10, the leader of one of the many perpetually warring districts on the planet. A virtually immortal metal man with few areas of vulnerable “flesh-strips,” Stronghold #10 struggles to come to grips with his humanity in a “plasto-coated” world ravaged by toxic pollution where the mechanical populace is obsessed with war and hate. In “The Miracle of the Flowers,” Stronghold #10 attempts to understand a wandering metal preacher advocating love and pacifism. “Incident in Moderan” exemplifies the callousness of Bunch’s post-humanity. During a brief lull between wars, Stronghold #10 is far more concerned with launching his new weapons than with the death of one of his mortal subjects (a “little flesh-bum”). The only problem with this collection is the unevenness a reader will feel when consuming it straight through. There is a feeling of disconnectedness in some sequences in which the tales are unrelated and some repetition among the stories. That lack of fluidity notwithstanding, this collection gives Bunch’s cybernetic vision of the future new life for a new generation of science-fiction readers. Almost a half-century after these stories were originally released, the thematic power of Bunch’s vision still resonates, the narrative equivalent of a new-metal alloy punch to the gut.
A disturbing, stark, and deeply thought-provoking collection of stories chronicling humankind’s demise into heartless automatons. - Kirkus Reviews
Pain forms the common denominator of the late Bunch’s 58 wrenching short stories, most originally published in minor 1960s science fiction magazines and first collected in 1971. A cyborg dystopia’s polluted planet, now totally covered in gray plastic, houses doomed humans and relatively few “new-metal men” like the nameless narrator. The latter are transformed gruesomely over nine months into creatures of rage and hate, relentlessly blasting one another’s strongholds while thinking themselves secure in their metallic immortality. Bunch provides searing echoes of the Vietnam War and satiric jabs at “take-over” wives whom the narrator banishes to the “White Witch Valley,” all conveyed in overheated prose that suggests hippiedom’s worst excesses. In the most moving story, “The Miracle of the Flowers,” the narrator seems to experience pangs of conscience until a disturbing Nietzschean ending turns his yearning for softening human emotion into acrid bile. Jeff VanderMeer’s perceptive introduction, couched in Bunchian idiom, offers valuable insights. This is a steely view of a robot-dominated future. - Publishers Weekly
In the twentieth century, rapid mechanisation, fierce ideological warfare, and the rise of totalitarian regimes inspired a number of post-apocalyptic narratives, notably Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984. Both of these works imagined highly advanced socialist societies that regulated human obedience to the state through the systematic repression of individualism and free will. These societies deprived man of his most human qualities of love, creativity and independent thought. Effectively, they dehumanised their populations until they were little more than subservient machines.
American short-story writer and poet David R. Bunch carried this notion to its logical and literal end when he envisioned the world of Moderan, where the dominant species were machine-men, men who had transformed themselves into machines for the sake of eternal life. Bunch published his first collection, Moderan, in 1971. Since that time, his stories have been largely overlooked and not been collected in a single volume until a new reissue from New York Review Books. These grimly humorous, pointedly satirical and profoundly existential stories trace the rise and fall of the civilisation as described by a skeptical machine-man. They boldly ask to what extent man, when edited and excised piecewise for maximal efficiency and minimal humanity, remains man at all.
The Moderan society is an Orwellian authoritarian socialist commune created as a solution for the human destruction of natural resources, including the ubiquitous contamination of air and water, and principally, the problem of mortality itself. The solution involves the careful manipulation of climate, the global replacement of soil with plastic and steel layers, the freezing of all large bodies of water, and the mechanical transformation of the human body through a number of “replacement” operations until it has become impervious to any form of decay or sickness. Throats are plated in gold to prevent cancer, hearts are replaceable pistons that pump out pale green blood to joints connecting steel and flesh, and lungs have become flexible metal cylinders that balloon outward to accept air. Children are created by a method of in vitro fertilisation, in which a machine-man and machine-woman donate their respective reproductive cells for their enjoining in a sterile laboratory overseen by programmed machines. The child is born fully fleshed, and when he comes of age, he begins receiving his “replacement” operations until he has become almost entirely metal. Essentially, Moderan seeks to contain all the anarchy and lawlessness of the universe through the precise mechanical reproduction and replacement of original natural processes.
Because the protagonist of these stories accepted the ways of Moderan before significant deterioration of his body, he was transformed into a stronghold, an elite class of machine-men who continuously wage war against each other’s forts for the purposes of maximal destruction and self-preservation. The term “stronghold” not only refers to the machine-man’s fort itself but also to the machine-man himself. His original human name has become obsolete, and he is exclusively known as “Stronghold #10”. In the collection, Bunch is playfully ironic with the naming of things, and names are often puns, euphemisms, and double entendres. For instance, Moderan itself is a pun on “modern”. The “Joys” refer to leisure activities, which include lovemaking with mechanical women. But they are actually the cause of much despair and sadness. Death arouses so much dread and fear that the machine-man must qualify or even avoid the word. He refers to it as “natural-causes death”, “old-fashioned death” or the “Big Dark of the Cold Nothing” as if he were always trying to distance himself further from the possibility of dying. As in any society, names become signifiers of cultural values.
One of the implications of the catechism of Moderan is a universal repulsion with human flesh. The Moderan child’s transitory period with flesh has become a fragile embryonic stage prior to the final transformation into machine. Human flesh has become an obsolete form. In Darwinian terms, the fully fleshed human has become the less evolved species, an ancestor to modern machine-man. In this collection, the unmodified, unreplaced human becomes a rare, mythic figure because he is disappearing into history. Human appearances in Moderan are often strange, inexplicable accidents, as if they were ghosts delivering messages from the dead.
In the cleverly inventive story, ‘A Glance at the Past’, machine-men and machine-women journey from the far reaches of Moderan to gawk at a human heart that has been preserved as a curiosity in a museum exhibit. They view the human heart with pity and wonder at its primitive and monstrous form. Bunch quotes from a pamphlet written by the Moderan people describing the exhibit: “Today, after viewing this monstrosity, you and I must feel great pity for all our ancient ancestors. It was their poor fortune to be born so long ago and inhabit a world where such a thing as this was everyone’s common danger, not the clowning mutant exception, but the common sober rule. No wonder they were wavery and unsure, mushy and vulnerable, scared half to death most of the time and prone to be soft-headed.” This is a finely wrought moment of irony, in which the supposedly advanced civilization proudly congratulates itself for escaping the ignorance of its ancestors. The Moderan people are vulnerable to such hubris because they believe they have outwitted God and become deities in their own right. The Modern people seem to have expunged from their memory the fact that they were once entirely flesh themselves. In this passage, it is interesting that the machine-man enforces a sort of existential distance from the flesh-man. Machine-man believes himself to be a godly species all his own. The past is a source of shame rather than pride. The Moderan society has erected an imitation world that is so plausible that its people not only believe in the truth of the imitation but also start to doubt the existence of the original. For the Moderan people, to stare backward is to stare into an abyss.
Moderan society values hardness, militancy and hatred, while it seeks to abolish love, intimacy and compassion. For the machine-man, love is an anachronistic element of human culture and a threat to his civilisation. He believes that love is a form of weakness that distracts from his greater purpose of serving the state through deep meditation and war. The family unit is organised so large physical distances separate members leading hermitic existences and children only see their fathers on holidays for five-minute visits. The family has been economised so the roles of parent and child have been narrowed to the basic functions necessary for the welfare of the Moderan state. Children often undermine these prescribed roles by wriggling out of their solitude and demanding love from others.
Brief family reunions are often comical and tender scenes, in which the child attempts to elicit affection from the withholding parent. In ‘The Complete Father’, a daughter visits her father after one of her significant replacement operations. She starts pleading that they see each other more frequently and act like the loving parents and children on human television. Her scandalised father starts recounting the horrors of ancient, flesh-based family life: “People lived together in clusters of rooms, whole families lumped not only in each other’s consciousness, but together in sight and smell as well as feel. Their personalities were untrue; their characters developed twisted; they were walking nightmares of contradictions because they warped one another by their proximities.” The machine-man obsesses over the purity of the mind because he believes that the mind should always be engaged in the solution of some “universal deep problem”, or in contributing to the advancement of his civilisation. The machine-man’s obsession with solitude is almost as great as his obsession with immortality. Moderan men are all essentially hypochondriacs fearing the most remote source of infection that might compromise their pristine health. In similar fashion, they fear contamination of their minds by the subversive thoughts of others. In a broader sense, the paranoia over the integrity of body extends to that of the mind.
But in ‘The Complete Father’, the machine-man never really believes completely in what he preaches to his daughter. He seems to be saying what must be said or what is expected of him as an abiding citizen of Moderan. While he is excoriating closeness between family members, he is contending with feelings of love for his own daughter. The machine-man narrator sees his daughter dab at her eyes, and he feels “the love tear deep inside him trying again to embarrass him”. Bunch’s machine-man is highly complex because he is always torn between rationality and emotion. The heart (even a mostly steel, mostly artificial heart) rebels against the head. He is after a singleness of mind, a completeness of faith in the scripture of Moderan, but doubt always insinuates itself and nudges him toward existential crisis. The stories of this collection tend to pivot on the machine-man narrator’s doubt toward indoctrinated beliefs regarding the fallibility of flesh-man. When he declares the greatness of the machine-man civilization, he is instructing his daughter but also assuring himself. Despite all his self-flagellation and his attempts at training his own mind to believe otherwise, the narrator cannot help but feel love for his daughter. In Orwellian terms, he is constantly guilty of committing the thoughtcrime of love. The machine-man yearns for the immortality of the machine, while subconsciously and shamefully yearning for the feeling of man.
The protagonist is haunted by death, and his waging of constant warfare is only a distraction from his questioning whether he is truly immortal. In the highly allegorical story, ‘Has Anyone Seen this Horseman’, a horseman tied to his horse visits the protagonist. The allegorical roles have the explicitness and solidity of a fable or an ancient Greek drama. The horseman claims the ropes represent conscience, while the horse, which has been blinded, represents duty. Visitors to the stronghold, like the horseman, children or fully fleshed wanderers, in the fashion of Shakespeare’s fools, bear difficult truths in the guise of insanity or clownishness. Toward the end of the story, the protagonist describes his feelings toward warfare to the horseman. They betray a loss of conviction: “And since it’s come to a discussion, I guess I’m happiest when I’m steel. I guess I’m happiest when I’m in my War Room handing the big orange switch of war to ON and pressing the buttons of launchers. Or, to put it another way, I’m not unhappy or worried or asking questions then—and I’ll settle for that.” The protagonist assumes that the reason for his existence is to wage war but he risks his own sanity when he starts to question whether that war has any purpose at all. The name “Stronghold #10” is ironic because the machine-man is actually weak-willed and prone to lapses of faith. In fact, his ideals are not strongly held at all. He is a creature of deep insecurity, an agnostic who professes to be a believer, or a skeptic who is ashamed of his own skepticism.
In this highly accomplished and deeply imagined collection of stories, Bunch suspends the machine-man between the realms of machine and human. The tragedy is that the machine-man cannot escape this condition of inbetweenness unless he kills either the machine or human part of himself. These stories are ultimately concerned with what Camus proposed was the only serious philosophical question—that is, the question of suicide, of deciding whether or not life was worth living. In one of the most poignant moments of the collection, in the story, ‘The Final Decision’, the protagonist seriously contemplates suicide and plans to disassemble his machine parts and store his flesh in a box. He cannot find happiness in war-making, love for a metal woman or any of his former joys. The machine-man suffers such despair because though he has been assigned a definitive role in society, he is still eluded by a legitimate sense of purpose. He realises that the Moderan world is all artifice. He knows that he is simply playing a game to pass the time. In Moderan, he functions as a soulless machine and not at all as a human being. His existence in Moderan has become a non-life, a form of spiritual death. For Bunch, love and purpose sustain man, whether part-machine or otherwise, and when neither can be found, he longs for another world. The machine-man does not know what actual death constitutes but at least it contains the possibility of a different sort of life. - Darren Huang
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/92610-2/
In the earliest days of this blog, I declared David R. Bunch to be "unjustly neglected". This was true back then, but not nearly as true as it is today, when all his books are out of print and usually sell for high prices on the secondary market (if you can find them).
After I wrote that post in 2004, Jeff VanderMeer and I started talking about ways to get Bunch back into print. I sought out every stray Bunch story I could find. I tracked down the rightsholder. I typed up a section of Bunch's novel-in-linked-stories Moderan before tendonitis forced me to stop typing much of anything for a few months, and made the thought of returning to typing up Moderan painful. Various obstacles presented themselves. (I started a master's degree. I became series editor for the Best American Fantasy anthologies. I moved to New Jersey. My father died. I moved back to New Hampshire. Etc.) In amidst it all, I couldn't follow up on the idea of reprinting Bunch, though it was never forgotten by me and a few other folks, at least.
Jeff and Ann VanderMeer moved from one success to another, in terms of Jeff's writing, Ann's editing, and their joint anthology projects. As they began putting together The Big Book of Science Fiction, they thought of Bunch, ultimately reprinting three of his Moderan stories, the first time any Bunch had been reprinted in almost 20 years.
And then they wondered if maybe they could find a way to do what we'd dreamed of doing more than a decade ago: Bringing Bunch back into print.
Their tremendous efforts have now paid off. New York Review of Books Classics will publish a new edition of Bunch's Moderan, possibly with some previously uncollected and/or unpublished Moderan stories (Bunch kept writing about Moderan after the book was published, and always dreamed of a complete Moderan volume. It's too early to say whether this edition will be able to be that).
Jeff and Ann are generous in crediting me with some of this, but the truth is that they picked up a ball I'd dropped and ran with it farther than I ever dreamed possible. My greatest hopes a decade ago were to bring some of Bunch's work back into print either via print-on-demand technology or through a small press that would do a limited edition for collectors. He's such an odd, esoteric writer that I didn't think more would be possible. And more might not have been possible then — the literary world has changed a lot in the last ten years, and it seems to me far more hospitable now to the sorts of things Bunch did than it was then. In many ways, our current era has finally caught up to David Bunch.
It's important, I think, to note that Bunch's work was very close to being forgotten. He never had a large audience, despite publishing many short stories over a period of nearly 50 years, and getting enthusiastic support from such influential writers and editors as Harlan Ellison and Judith Merril. (Indeed, he not only didn't have a big audience, but many readers actively loathed him. The few editors willing to publish his work inevitably got letters from outraged readers who complained that Bunch's stories and vignettes didn't have plots, weren't written in good English, and were much too weird.) The original edition of Moderan was a paperback published without fanfare in 1971. His later books came from tiny presses. He died in 2000, almost completely out of print. Until The Big Book of SF, the most recent reprinting of a Bunch story that I know of is "2064, or Thereabouts" in Bruce Coville's Strange Worlds (the story had previously been included in 1993's The Norton Book of Science Fiction, probably the most recent Bunch anthologization before that).
But now at least some of that work will be saved, and Bunch's words will be read again by a world in many ways more prepared to understand them than at any other time, as writers like George Saunders, Matthew Derby, and Ben Marcus, among others, have helped readers learn how to read such writing.
I always struggle with how to describe Bunch's work. I like Jeff's comparison: Philip K. Dick meets E.E. Cummings. John Clute in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is good, too: "Bunch's style at its best resembles R A Lafferty's at his best, though it is far more exclamatory, and rhetorically pixilated, than Lafferty's work. At its most intense, Bunch resembles a diced, gonzo Walt Whitman, sampling (in a frenzy) the body electric."
Comparisons only go so far. Bunch is utterly unique.
Perhaps the best way to let you know the great treat you are in for when the NYRB edition of Moderan is published is to give you some little bits of Bunch. Here, then, a few passages from various pages of Moderan:
Quaint they were, these records, strange and ancient, washed to shore when the Moderan seas finally unthawed. Played in the old-fashioned machine way we, the beam people, the Essenceland Dream people, easily divined, they told of a very different world, a transition world, if you will, between what we are now and the death and defeat these people hoped to overcome. New-metal man! It does have a ring. MODERAN! It did seem pretty great in concept, I'm sure, and, who knows, perhaps it had a reasonable chance of success. But all societies, all civilizations, all aspirations it seems must fail the unremitting tugs of shroudy time, finally, leaving only little bones, fossils, a shoe turned to stone maybe, a bone button in the sea perhaps, a jeweled memento of an old old love.
∞
Flesh seemed doomed that year; death's harpies were riding down. The once-beautiful, sweet and life-sustaining air was tinged with poison now, and man drank at his peril from the streams that had once been pure. He prayed to a God that was said to be in all things good, true and beautiful, but especially was thought to be all sternness and goodness, justice and loving-care, in some milk-white place far away, "On High." And those prayers if answered were answered very obliquely indeed. For the air got deeper in poison from the tinkering with lethal things the flesh-man indulged in when not praying, and the water got fuller with danger as each new explosion pounded the bomb-fevered air. There was talk of the End; great discussions were handled in great halls across the land. Treaties were signed among statesmen to help the air get better, to allow the streams to recover and run pure once again. But even as the flesh-hands grasped the pens to scrawl the marks of good faith in some countries, fear lashed at capitals in other countries. Arsenals were tested anew. Things done were undone. The air got sicker; the streams ran not pure but pure danger-- There seemed no chance for flesh-man, and his God seemed entirely silent wherever He was, wherever His white throne was. The HOPELESS signs were out everywhere. Little children asked that they be allowed to go quickly and not grow up hurting and maimed. Adults in what should have been the full flower of brave manhood and fair womanhood quaked, looked heavenward for some hopeful sign and, finding none, fell down and cried bitterly. The aged ones, quavering and whining now, finally decided that yes, truly they were most glad that they were so very old. The flesh billions courted at the Palace of Danger so ardently had turned against them and the mass wedding of Death and Destruction seemed now all but assured.
∞
"Maybe you could camp here until the time comes up to talk, and then I could hear your tale," I said, because I had my humor about me as well as one of my feet in safety, in the door of the peep-box of steel. "Just say I found the Answers," he said. "Just say you've seen the walking-talking Don't-Care man, one being who has escaped The Grip. It wasn't easy, it took a long time, and planning, but I think I've achieved it finally, the ultimate resolution of that built-in agony, the Life-Death Predicament of Man."
That was a big statement he'd just loaded out there at the last.
∞
So do you wonder that I sit in my hip-snuggie throne in the Innermost Room of Authority, sometimes for days on end, calm as a cold bowl of oil, my heart on REST, my brain on MAX and think on Universal Deep Problems? I have so many problems! We have so many problems, inlooping problems, intertwining problems, interwoven problems. And, really, how to do these circles is not even a beginning of THE PROBLEM.
http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-return-of-david-r-bunch.html
I'm not in this business primarily to describe or explain or entertain. I'm here to make the reader think, even if I have to bash his teeth out, break his legs, grind him up, beat him down, and totally chastise him for the terrible and tinsel and almost wholly bad world we allow.... The first level reader, who wants to see events jerk their tawdry ways through some used and USED old plot -- I love him with a hate bigger than all the world's pity, but he's not for me. The reader I want is the one who wants the anguish, who will go up there and get on that big black cross. And that reader will have, with me, the saving grace of knowing that some awful payment is due...as all space must look askance at us, all galaxies send star frowns down, a cosmic leer envelop this small ball that has such great Great GREAT pretenders.
--David R. BunchIt is not a surprise that David Bunch's hundreds of short (very short) stories have been nearly forgotten, his few books gone out of print nearly as soon as they sneaked their way onto unsuspecting shelves. It is not a surprise, but it is a shame. A travesty. An indication of all that is wrong in the best of all possible worlds.
That Bunch's large body of small works has become little more than a footnote in reference books is not a surprise because Bunch was never an easy read. His prose has been called "convoluted", he was said to be a writer who alienated readers. "Convoluted" may be an accurate term for the feeling one gets from reading Bunch's sentences, but it is not an accurate term overall because it connotes bad writing, and Bunch was not a bad writer -- exactly the opposite. "Dense" is a better way to describe those sentences, those little stories of immense weight. "A miracle of language" might be the best description, though.
Out from the black-curtain area those compilers from another unit would swagger and stand looking at us like we were cold spit on the floor, and then they would gaze all around our area as if seeing everything clearly in a kind of blanket stare and evaluating everything correctly in a kind of God's judgement just before ambling on up to get their doughnuts, and their coffee or tea, with the sure walk of Captains to the snack bar.
("In the Empire")
I've been reading a bunch of Bunch over the past few days. I knew I wanted to write about him, as I have wanted to write about him for years, to shout his name out to the world, to say, "Look what you have ignored!" But I hadn't read much Bunch in a long time, and I needed to refamiliarize myself with the specifics of the tales, to try and figure out how he did what he did, because from the first story I read (in Dangerous Visions) I could describe the effect of Bunch on the brain -- he sizzles the senses, he snaps the synapses, he makes you go back to page one and start all over again -- I've never been able to figure out, precisely and incontrovertibly, HOW he achieved his effects.
(Another Bunch effect: He's contagious. Look at that ALL-CAPS up there. Oh, DRB, what have you done to me!)
It's been said that when Bunch was publishing one story after another in Amazing, Fantastic, If, Galaxy, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction during the 1960s and '70s that readers were outraged -- they felt the stories were deliberately opaque, that he was mocking them and their desire for linear narratives with clear plots and sympathetic characters.
He was.
But he was doing it out of necessity, and somehow he convinced editors to let him get away with it. (Perhaps because he didn't take up too much space. It's a rare Bunch story that lasts for more than a few pages.)
What readers who decided to hate Bunch, to deliberately Not Get It, missed out on were, among other things, some of the best first sentences and paragraphs ever published in genre magazines:
At first I was always scared that the policemen would come. And there I'd be up in my poor little room kicking this head. So the extreme pleasure I would be getting would be tinged with fear -- not guilt, not at all -- but fear that sooner or later those big blue men would come on their leather-cloppy feet -- heel plates thundering, thick knuckles pounding, and say, "Who's that up there making all that noise? Like kicking a head. Who's it? OPEN UP!!" And there I'd be.
("Any Heads at Home")
It was early along in my Stronghold reign, after I had won me a couple of world Max Shoot-Outs and had established myself as the current Greatest Man, that I began to think again of other things; I began to think of ... aspects ... Purpose ... Beauty ... Community Interest...
("The Bird Man of Moderan")
There wasn't much we could do about it. Mostly we just did our job, which was to dump the cans and scoop up the sacks and the broken lamps and the pieces of chairs and the old picture walls and the kids and put it all in the back. Where the teeth were.
("In the Time of Disposal of Infants")
The wonder of Bunch is that all of those first sentences and paragraphs are followed by equally skilled, surprising, magical sentences and paragraphs. Each story works its way toward endings which are unpredictable, disturbing, darkly funny, and utterly apt.
Reading lots of Bunch is an exhausting experience, but also fulfilling, for the vast majority of his stories are -- given close attention -- immensely rewarding. You would think that reading such SHORT stories would be easy, quick, light. Not in the least. There are some Bunch stories which I have spent an hour reading, working slowly through the sentences, going back and forth and back and forth, imagining and savoring, constructing and reconstructing the sense and imagery in my mind.
In Trillion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss says of reading Moderan, Bunch's collection of linked stories and not-quite-stories: "The effect is as if Whitman and Nietzsche had collaborated to rewrite a typical Heinlein-Anderson-Niven-Pournelle future history story. As such it is a unique book in the science fiction field." He goes on to say: "Moderan appeared only once, in paperback in the USA in 1971. Like so many good books in SF's history, it vanished in the flood of hype which launches many lesser fictional craft."
Judith Merril put a number of Bunch's early stories in her Best SF anthologies, Harlan Ellison invited Bunch into Dangerous Visions, and, more recently, the controversial LeGuin/Attebery The Norton Book of Science Fiction including one of Bunch's tales of Moderan, "2064, or Thereabouts". A collection, BUNCH!, appeared from Broken Mirrors Press in 1993, and in 2000 Anamnesis Press published a collection of his poetry.
But so much of Bunch has been left uncollected, and all but a handful of stories are extremely difficult to find. Judith Merril said Bunch had published 200 non-SF stories before selling his first SF story to If, and throughout his career he published nearly as much in small mainstream journals as he did in the SF magazines. (Some of these stories are collected in BUNCH!, and they don't feel too different from the SF stories, though they tend to have fewer machines.) At best, it seems, only 1/3 of Bunch's stories have ever been collected.
I have a copy of one uncollected story, "Doll for the End of the Day", from the October 1971 issue of Fantastic. It's essentially a horror story, and one of the most horrifying I've ever read, a tale of how one man takes out his frustrations, and the art that can be made from blood. If the rest of Bunch's uncollected work is of a similar quality, then the fact that it has remained uncollected means we have been deprived of knowing some of the best writing of the 20th century, in or out of the SF field. Scattered throughout hard-to-find old SF magazines and even-harder-to-find old literary journals is a wealth of wonder, and it's nearly impossible to know what we have lost through their obscurity.
David Bunch died a few years ago, forgotten except by some dedicated fans. His work should have changed the landscape of the SF genre. It still should.
Flying saucer stories were a little too mundane for these old rumor tigers, each of whom was a minor wise-person in many areas, not including of course the area on how to live on Earth with the world as presented to them by history and beyond their blame and, in large measure, beyond their power to alter and make amends for. In other words, these derelicts couldn't adjust, roll with the punch, make the best of it and all that. They were hung up on things like how to earn the daily and how to pay consistently for a roof that didn't leak too much to be under at night in moderate to heavy wet stormy weather. They were losers. Protestors. Disturbers. Snarlers and howlers until the end. YES!
("That High-Up Blue Day That Saw the Black Sky-train Come Spinning")
- Matthew Cheney
http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2004/02/unjustly-neglected-david-r-bunch.html
David R. Bunch, who passed away in 2000 at age 74, may be the
best kept secret in New Wave sci-fi. As far as I can tell, only two of
the hundreds of stories he wrote are still in print. These two tales,
included in Harlan Ellison’s pathbreaking 1967 anthology Dangerous
Visions, served as my introduction to Bunch’s work. And what a
stunning introduction they were—in an all-star collection, filled
with the stars of 1960s sci-fi, Bunch’s two brief tales impressed
me more than any of the other illustrious narratives.
Ellison himself clearly recognized Bunch's
exceptional talent. Bunch was the only contributor
to have more than a single story accepted for
the volume. In his intro to one of the stories,
Ellison noted that Bunch was "a writer whose
work I admire vastly. And a writer who has,
oddly enough, barely received the acclaim
due to him." Looking over the assembled talents
who participated in Dangerous Visions—a cast
of free radicals that included Philip K. Dick, J.G.
Ballard and Samuel R. Delany—Ellison added:
"Bunch is possibly the most dangerous visionary
of all those assembled here."
I was so struck by Bunch’s whimsical and
outlandish prose style and arch attitudes, that I
decided to track down more of his work. This proved much harder
than I anticipated. Bunch only published two short story collections
during his career, and both of them have been out-of-print for
decades. A few second-hand copies are available from online
retailers, but are usually sold at astronomical prices. I did some
online snooping and found that, for some puzzling reason, several
copies of Bunch's most famous work Moderan were available from
booksellers in Spain at only modestly outlandish prices. I placed
an order from a librería in Granada, Spain. When my copy of
Moderan arrived a couple weeks later, I opened the package in
eager anticipation—only to learn that it I had just purchased an
(out-of-print) Spanish translation of Bunch's book. At this point, I turned
to US sellers of overpriced, beat-up, out-of-print sci-fi paperbacks,
and after shelling out a sizable chunk of change, I finally acquired
Bunch's Moderan in English.
Yes, it was worth the time and trouble. Bunch didn't play by the same
rules as most of his peers in the genre fiction field. Moderan is written
in an extravagant first-person style that attempts to emulate the
speech patterns of a robot-and-human mashup from a future dystopia.
Every sentence and paragraph of this book has been polished to a
fine metallic finish, and while reading it I found myself compelled to
recite certain passages aloud, just to savor the odd cadences
and phraseology.
Here our narrator talks about the scientific breakthrough of Moderan
society—which consists mostly of quasi-men who have replaced the
majority of their flesh parts with advanced metal components. The
most privileged members of the society are more than 90% metal.
"As steel men we were essentially but extensions of what man has
always been. The essential man had been extended, I'm trying to say.
The essence of normal man was and is and always will be the feeling of,
'I AM the greatest and most deserving thing in ail the Universe and I
should have preference wherever I go.' This is true collectively and
it is equally true individually. There was never normal man so lowly but
what he, if given the smallest smallest chance to rise, would start
regarding himself as a winner for sure. The domain of his aspirations
will have no NO ceiling and no NO walls: The whole universe will be
his pumpkin, his and his alone. A ghastly, slimy, ungodly contrivance
he, in many ways, is. But he has, let's face it, one saving grace. He is
to be counted on to be his ghastly, rotten, slimy, true-bad self until the
end. He is reliable, let us say, in that his total badness is assured. And
in that he is godly."
Unlike almost every other dystopian sci-fi book, Moderan lets the rulers
of the degraded future society speak for themselves, in their own words,
and in defense of their own actions. For this to work, Bunch needs to
impart a degree of hidden irony and double-meaning to virtually
every paragraph in the book. Yet he also gives his warlord narrator a
touch of a poetic sensibility, and even a bit of human sentimentality. By
any measure, this is virtuoso performance—and I can’t think of more
than a half-dozen sci-fi authors of the era who could have pulled it off
with such finesse and persistence. The end result is an odd but
convincing combination of humor, social criticism and psychological
insight.
The closest book to Moderan, among the other futuristic works of its
era, is Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, released around the
same time that Bunch began publishing his Moderan stories. Like
Burgess, Bunch realized that the conceptualization of a different kind
of society ideally involves the creation of a different kind of language,
a new body of speech patterns. Burgess's wordplay is largely indebted
to Joyce and other experimental authors of the first half of the 20th
century. Bunch's sources are harder to pinpoint, but his futuristic
metal men sometimes remind me of medieval chroniclers in their
language, at other times their words resemble the belligerent taunting
of skinheads at a British football match right before the rioting and
hooliganism get out of control. To emphasize the effect, Bunch liberally
uses exclamation points and all capital letters. Yet he also mixes in
sweet metaphors and quasi-Shakespearean imagery. The finished
product is sui generis, a way of expression that exists solely within
the pages of this book.
The philosophical content in Moderan is almost as fascinating as
the work's linguistic effects. The name Nieztsche does not appear
anywhere in this book, but clearly his fingerprints are all over its
dystopian society. In Moderan, the sword is truly mightier than the
pen—and supersized bombs are mightier than either. The practical
result of the melding of advanced metals with flesh is that the
'improved' citizens of Moderan are almost indestructible. This new-
found invincibility inspires them to devote most of their energy to
warfare and domination. Many of the most poetic passages in the
book are devoted to singing the praises of various weapons and
their consequences. Behind all this bluster, Bunch makes a case
for peace and fellowship—but only by presenting this over-the-
top counterexample.
The only clumsiness in this book is due to its origins as separate
short stories. Bunch made some token efforts to create the appearance
that Moderan is a novel not a collection of isolated tales. But he
didn't successfully integrate the separate works into a flowing,
holistic narrative. As a result, the connecting passages don't
adequately connect, and the individual sections are marked by
repetitions and occasional contradictions. In most of the stories, the
Moderan civilization is devoted to warfare, but in a handful of
'chapters' the narrator adheres to much different priorities, aiming
to spend as much time as possible meditating over deep philosophical
issues. Another cavil: too many of the stories here repeat a predictable
plot of a visitor coming to a warlord’s stronghold and sharing a
more humanistic and traditional viewpoint. The ensuing dialogue
between worldviews is fascinating, at least at first, but not after
the fifth or sixth repetitions. Even with these flaws, Moderan is a tour
de force, worthy of praise (and a return to print); but it would have
been even better if Bunch had exercised some judicious editing and
pruning.
Although I offer these tiny gripes about the book, my main
complaint is targeted at the parties who have kept this work
out-of-print for decades, and haven’t salvaged more of the
hundreds of stories Bunch published in magazines during his
lifetime. Make no mistake, David R. Bunch was a big-time talent
even if he only left behind a small-time reputation. He can't
change that now, but we can…and should. - Ted Gioia
http://www.conceptualfiction.com/moderan.html
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