A review by eccles
Moderan by David R. Bunch

challenging dark funny reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

A collection of short stories originally published between over about two decades from 1958, forming a kind of coherent picture of Bunch’s post-apocalyptic plastic-sheeted world with its new-steel “replaced” men and their flesh-strips, waging endless all-out Max war (YES!).   The stories centre loosely on one character, Stronghold 10, who despite his evident but inexplicable puissance is distracted from his doll-bombs and GRANDY whumps by occasional doubts and dark fears that apparently still leak from his few remaining flesh strips.   Intimations of mortality in the Land that Aimed at Forever.   It’s a weird imagining, written in language littered with neologisms, with a cadence out of Clockwork Orange; a style that is effective and disturbing.  It reads to me as archaic, expressing an anger and frustration with 1970s America’s ill-considered techno-optimism and I suppose what Bunch saw as inhumanity inherent in this ideal of an engineered Progress.   There is real poetry in this mechanical dystopia.  A paragraph that starts with “And when I find her! which I will! I hope I have my revenge schedule ready.” is followed by one with the phrase “Even in this heart-hurt spring, flat place in the wheel of the sad world’s journey, I have a hope.”  Although as a collection of stories there’s fair amount of repetition across the 330 pages of this volume, his prose is endlessly inventive, fresh and provocative.   I don’t know if as an author or poet he ventured much out of this steel-and-plastic future of his, but I would certainly try reading something else if he had.   However the principal merit of this collection, I think, is as a monument to the author’s overlooked genius, of interest mainly to archivists or historians of the genre, rather than a fix for clucking sci-fi addicts.