David R. Bunch (1925–2000)
Autor(a) de Moderan
About the Author
Obras por David R. Bunch
Incident in Moderan [moderan] 6 exemplares
The Escaping [short fiction] 6 exemplares
The Problem Was Lubrication [short story] 3 exemplares
2064, or Thereabouts 3 exemplares
Breakout In Ecol 2 [short story] 2 exemplares
Training Talk 1 exemplar
Investigating The Bidwell Endeavors 1 exemplar
The Soul Shortchangers [short story] 1 exemplar
Coping with Eternity 1 exemplar
Seeing Stingy Ed 1 exemplar
No Cracks or Sagging {short story} 1 exemplar
New Kings Are Not for Laughing {short story} 1 exemplar
The Flesh Man from Far Wide {short story} 1 exemplar
Associated Works
Dangerous Visions: 33 Original Stories — Contribuidor — 1,894 exemplares
The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990 (1993) — Contribuidor — 315 exemplares
Isaac Asimov's Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction, Volume 9: Robots (1989) — Contribuidor — 113 exemplares
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine: Vol. 6, No. 8 [August 1982] (1982) — Contribuidor — 16 exemplares
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine: Vol. 9, No. 10 [October 1985] (1985) — Contribuidor — 14 exemplares
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine: Vol. 9, No. 3 [March 1985] (1985) — Contribuidor — 11 exemplares
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction January 1960, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1960) — Contribuidor — 9 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
Prémios
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Estatísticas
- Obras
- 20
- Also by
- 28
- Membros
- 262
- Popularidade
- #87,814
- Avaliação
- 3.8
- Críticas
- 9
- ISBN
- 7
- Línguas
- 2
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)