Retrato do autor

David R. Bunch (1925–2000)

Autor(a) de Moderan

20+ Works 262 Membros 9 Críticas

About the Author

Obras por David R. Bunch

Associated Works

Dangerous Visions: 33 Original Stories — Contribuidor — 1,894 exemplares
The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016) — Contribuidor — 411 exemplares
Dangerous Visions 2 (1901) — Contribuidor — 202 exemplares
10th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F (1965) — Contribuidor — 178 exemplares
Nova 3 (1973) — Contribuidor — 116 exemplares
11th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F (1966) — Contribuidor — 113 exemplares
The Best of Crank! (1998) — Autor — 99 exemplares
Christmas Stars (1992) — Contribuidor — 96 exemplares
7th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F (1962) — Contribuidor — 90 exemplares
The Red Thread: Twenty Years of NYRB Classics: A Selection (2019) — Contribuidor — 55 exemplares
Christmas Magic (1994) — Contribuidor — 55 exemplares
New Dimensions IV (1974) — Autor — 52 exemplares
Isaac Asimov's Wonders of the World (1982) — Contribuidor — 50 exemplares
Protostars (1971) — Contribuidor — 45 exemplares
The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: 18th Series (1969) — Contribuidor — 40 exemplares
Generation: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction (1972) — Contribuidor — 32 exemplares
Alternities (1974) — Contribuidor, algumas edições32 exemplares
Isaac Asimov's Aliens & Outworlders (1983) — Contribuidor — 19 exemplares
Bruce Coville's Strange Worlds (2000) — Contribuidor — 12 exemplares
The Umbral Anthology of Science Fiction Poetry (1982) — Contribuidor — 8 exemplares

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Nome legal
Bunch, David Roosevelt
Data de nascimento
1925-08-07
Data de falecimento
2000-05-29
Sexo
male
Nacionalidade
USA
Local de nascimento
Lowry City, Missouri, USA
Local de falecimento
St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Ocupações
short story writer
poet

Membros

Críticas

These are short stories, from the 1960s mostly, and collected here in a single volume for the first time. They read almost like a serialised novel though—same main character and setting throughout.
   And it’s quite a setting. This is a future world in which the land surface has been levelled and coated in plastic, the oceans frozen or discarded into space and Nature replaced altogether: flowers and birds are now made of coloured tin and artificial trees poke up through holes in the plastic. Our main character too, though originally a flesh-and-blood human, has been transformed—organs, limbs, even eyeballs now new-metal-alloy versions, with only thin strips of flesh remaining. The result, Stronghold 10, is the clanking, clunky, occupier of a fortress, and the plastic plain is dotted with similar fortresses. Stronghold-masters are, in effect, immortal and to fill the time they wage war on one another. During the truces between wars, Stronghold 10 has fun—his idea of fun mostly being to sit and think, pondering Universal Deep Problems.
   This is exceptionally strange stuff, not least due to the idiosyncratic writing style which reminded me (a bit) of Cordwainer Smith’s weird “up-and-out” stories (“the up-and-out” being Smith’s term for interstellar space). There are other oddities too: for instance, although Stronghold-masters routinely wage total war, there are no actual descriptions of it. Also, while supposedly near-invincible, Stronghold 10 comes across much of the time as a bumbling and eccentric old man.
   So what is Moderan about? Well, by becoming artificial (or 92% so in Stronghold 10’s case) its inhabitants and their sterile plastic world are safe—immune from change of any kind in fact—and I think these stories are about the price they’ve paid for that, what they’ve lost. In particular they’ve lost most of the emotions, such as love, as seen in the stories about Stronghold 10 and his daughter (“A Little Girl’s Xmas in Moderan”). This author is clearly against science, against technology, against the whole modern world, and Moderan is his view of what we’re doing to ourselves as a species in real life: becoming impervious to all natural dangers by living lives that are ever more artificial. This definitely isn’t a weird future he’s describing, it’s David R Bunch’s view of the world we already live in (and I even found myself wondering while reading: to our distant hunter-gatherer ancestors of fifty-thousand years ago or so, might this be how we would have looked to them?).
   On the one hand, unlike the author, I’m not myself in any way cynical about science, not anti-technology or anti-the-modern-world-and-everything-in-it. But on the other hand, this book is exactly the sort of thing I read science fiction for: in the hope that every now and then, if I’m lucky, I’ll stumble across something really odd, a bit different. And this certainly is.
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
justlurking | 6 outras críticas | Dec 15, 2022 |
The Publisher Says: 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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review
: First, read this:
“WE’LL FIGHT! We’ll fight each other. We’ll make harsh monsters, set them loose and fight such monsters across all our space. We’ll move with engines and hard, programmed thoughts. We’ll make all manner of dragons for our involvement, and we’ll overcome them. For we’ll program the conquests a little more carefully than we’ll feed in the threats. But mostly we’ll just fight each other—each other and ourselves, the truly tireless enemies.”

Fifty years ago, these stories...I really bridle at calling them stories, it feels to me more like loosely interconnected chapters of a single, too-big-to-fail novel...appeared. I wasn't aware of them. I was too young to "get" them. I am still too young to get them...they are brilliant tours-de-force of a man's vision of a future no one could possibly want, but they're likely to get anyway.

In a lot of ways, Author Bunch's world reminds me of the world that Sandy Hook took place in, and no one stopped it from happening again.
And then the flesh-man - oh, consider. CONSIDER him - the sick few that are left. Please do. Then perhaps you will see why we in our new-shining glory, flesh-strips few and played-down, pay homage to a massive stick of new-metal placed as our guide star when New Processes Land, our great Moderan, was new!

J.G. Ballard at his bleakest, John Brunner at his most sarcastic, Joanna Russ at her most misandric. SF futures don't usually age well...this one, more's the pity, has.
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
richardderus | 6 outras críticas | Apr 24, 2022 |
I know this is considered by some a classic work, but I think reading Bunch's short stories as they appeared may have been a better experience than reading through this collection of them. Interestingly, most of them appeared in magazines I read monthly at the time these stories first appeared, and not a single one left any impression on me, unlike some contemporaneous magazine science fiction, e.g., Roger Zelazny's stories and novellas. Reading the Moderan stories through was a tedious exercise for me, since throughout Bunch sounds a single note, and yes, I get it's satire, but satire wears thin though relentless repetition. Not a favorite of mine.… (mais)
 
Assinalado
nmele | 6 outras críticas | Aug 7, 2020 |
How you'll respond to this collection of linked short stories (really fables) will depend a great deal on your ability to stare unflinchingly on the abyss, as the author was on a mission to afflict the comfortable and rub their noses in the rottenness of High Cold War America. That said I'm going to diverge somewhat from Jeff VanderMeer's enthusiastic introduction, where he credits David Bunch with the poetics of E.E. Cummings, the inventiveness of Philip K. Dick and the sense of body horror of Clive Barker, while at the same time celebrating that there's not been anything like this body of work before or since it's been written.

As for myself I see a body of work that is part of the dystopian literature of the apex of Cold War nuclear terror and needs to be located in that period. I would also compare Bunch's work to the satirical fiction of Frederick Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth at their most acid with a certain literary gloss, or perhaps to Kurt Vonnegut with a more decided commitment to being genre science fiction. As for whether these stories are period pieces or news that remains news, well, we are still afflicted with leaders suffused with the hubris, vain-glory and sense of denial that Bunch excoriated and the dread of dehumanization and the destruction of the natural world Bunch invoked still stalks our imaginations, so yes; these stories are still worth the investment of your time.
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
Shrike58 | 6 outras críticas | May 8, 2019 |

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Associated Authors

Estatísticas

Obras
20
Also by
28
Membros
262
Popularidade
#87,814
Avaliação
3.8
Críticas
9
ISBN
7
Línguas
2

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