Moderan
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A collection of chilling and prescient stories about ecological apocalypse and the merging of human and machine.
Welcome to Moderan, world of the future. Here perpetual war is waged by furious masters fighting from Strongholds well stocked with “arsenals of fear” and everyone is enamored with hate. The devastated earth is coated by vast sheets of gray plastic, while humans vie to replace more and more of their own “soft parts” with steel. 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 are waiting? 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.
“As if Whitman and Nietzsche had collaborated,” wrote Brian Aldiss of David R. Bunch’s work. Originally published in science-fiction magazines in the 1960s and ’70s, these mordant stories, though passionately sought by collectors, have been unavailable in a single volume for close to half a century. Like Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange, Bunch coined a mind-bending new vocabulary. He sought not to divert readers from the horror of modernity but to make us face it squarely.
This volume includes eleven previously uncollected Moderan stories.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Cult science-fiction author David R. Bunch created the alien—yet disturbingly familiar—world of Moderan in the ’60s and early ’70s. Devastated by war and pollution, the planet has become a tin-flowered, climate-controlled, plastic-coated place. Scrapping flesh and blood for “new-metal” cybernetic bodies, human beings—who have splintered off into feudal states led by despotic warlords—wage endless wars for supremacy. First published in 1971 and out of print for decades, Moderan’s gonzo surrealism and vividly antiauthoritarian voice feel as relevant today as they did at the height of the Vietnam War.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
