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  DAVID ROOSEVELT BUNCH (1920–2000) was born in rural western Missouri. After serving as an army corporal during World War II, he worked toward a PhD in English literature at Washington University in St. Louis and then transferred to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he studied for two years before dropping out. He married Phyllis Flette in 1951 and they had two daughters, Phyllis and Velma. While working as a cartographer for the Defense Mapping Agency in St. Louis, he began publishing stories in science-fiction magazines, two of which were included in Harlan Ellison’s landmark 1967 sci-fi anthology, Dangerous Visions. In 1971, Bunch published Moderan, a collection of stories set on a future earth devastated by war and environmental exploitation. In 1973, he retired from cartography to pursue writing full-time. A poetry chapbook, We Have a Nervous Job, followed in 1983, and Bunch! (1993), another book of short stories, was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award. Bunch’s last book, the poetry collection The Heartacher and the Warehouseman, came out in April 2000. He died of a heart attack the following month. In 1965 he told Amazing Stories, “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.”

  JEFF VANDERMEER is the author of the Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance) and, most recently, of the novel Borne, which was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke award. His nonfiction has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and the Los Angeles Times. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, the editor Ann VanderMeer.

  MODERAN

  DAVID R. BUNCH

  Foreword by

  JEFF VANDERMEER

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  The publishers would like to thank Matthew Cheney for his assistance in the preparation of this volume.

  Parts one, two, and three copyright © 1971 by David R. Bunch

  Part four copyright © 1969, 1971, 1972, 1974, 1977, 1979, 1982, 1989, 2000 by David R. Bunch

  Foreword copyright © 2018 by Jeff VanderMeer

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Pavel Tchelitchew, Head of Gold (detail), 1947; private collection; courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Bunch, David R., author.

  Title: Moderan / by David R. Bunch ; foreword by Jeff VanderMeer.

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2018. | Series: New York Review Books Classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018010221 (print) | LCCN 2018016776 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681372556 (epub) | ISBN 9781681372549 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Science fiction, American. | BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction / Short Stories. | FICTION / Short Stories (single author).

  Classification: LCC PS3552.U46623 (ebook) | LCC PS3552.U46623 A6 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018010221

  ISBN 978-1-68137-255-6

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Foreword

  MODERAN

  Introduction

  PART ONE: THE BEGINNINGS

  Thinking Back (Our God Is a Helping God!)

  No Cracks or Sagging

  The Butterflies Were Eagle-Big That Day

  New Kings Are Not for Laughing

  One Time, a Red Carpet . . .

  Battle Won

  Head Thumping the Troops

  New-Metal Mistress Time

  And So White Witch Valley

  The Bird Man of Moderan

  Bubble-Dome Homes

  One False Step

  Survival Packages

  New-Metal

  Of Hammers and Men

  The Stronghold

  2064, or Thereabouts

  Penance Day in Moderan

  Strange Shape in the Stronghold

  Getting Regular

  The Walking, Talking I-Don’t-Care Man

  PART TWO: EVERYDAY LIFE IN MODERAN

  To Face Eternity

  In the Innermost Room of Authority

  The Problem

  Playmate

  A Husband’s Share

  The Complete Father

  Was She Horrid?

  A Glance at the Past

  Educational

  It Was in Black Cat Weather

  Sometimes I Get So Happy

  Remembering

  A Little Girl’s Xmas in Moderan

  The Flesh-Man from Far Wide

  PART THREE: INTIMATIONS OF THE END

  The One from Camelot Moderan

  Reunion

  The Warning

  Has Anyone Seen This Horseman?

  Interruption in Carnage

  The Miracle of the Flowers

  Incident in Moderan

  The Final Decision

  Will-Hung and Waiting

  How They Took Care of Soul in a Last Day for a Non-Beginning

  How It Ended

  PART FOUR: APOCRYPHA FROM AFTER THE END

  A Little at All Times

  The Joke

  Two Suns for the King

  The Good War

  In the Land That Aimed at Forever

  Among the Metal-and-People People

  The Dirty War

  When the Metal Eaters Came

  A Little Girl’s Spring Day in Moderan

  December for Stronghold 9

  The Heartacher and the Warehouseman

  Publication History

  FOREWORD

  IT’S BEEN hard to get your hands on David R. Bunch’s best-known work for almost half a century now. Most of the Moderan stories—linked, fable-like tales written in an experimental mode, set on an Earth ravaged by nuclear holocaust—were published during the 1960s and ’70s in magazines and later gathered, along with several additional stories, in Moderan, a collection put out by Avon in 1971. Outside of specialist circles, Bunch has been all but forgotten, the original Moderan volume long out of print. Yet in the years since his most prolific period, the nightmarish dystopia he imagined has begun to look increasingly prescient, even prophetic. In Moderan, men who have violently transformed themselves into cybernetic strongholds battle across an Earth paved over with plastic and tunneled under with living quarters. Creature comforts for these men—who are portrayed with sympathy but first and foremost as products of a culture of toxic masculinity—include sex robots and seasonal cheer, from spring flowers to Christmas wreaths, regulated by technocrats.

  Replace nuclear annihilation with climate change and over-industrialization, and Bunch’s future feels psychologically and metaphorically akin to our modern situation. What are we doing right now but paving over our future with plastic? All while increasing our alienation from nature just as we ought to be doing precisely the opposite. In Bunch’s tales, men become fortresses, trapped in remade bodies that personify ritualized aggression. These bodies are literally and figuratively sequestered from any vestige of the nonhuman world.

  That these tales come off as a seamless meld of the eccentric poetics of E. E. Cummings, the genius-level invention of Philip K. Dick, and the body horror of Clive Barker perhaps explains both why they remain vital today and why they were characterized as
“fringe” during Bunch’s career. They are wild, visceral, and sui generis, without the signifiers of a particular era that might provide anchors for mystified readers. Popular contemporaries like Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, and even James Tiptree Jr. ameliorated the strangeness of their work with the scaffolding or appearance of more familiar plotlines, even as they wrote stories generally from the point of view of marginalized groups. Bunch, by contrast, foregrounded lyricism over plot and chose to write from the potentially unsympathetic viewpoint of a hyperagressive warmonger—a viewpoint clearly quite far from his own. Even his authorial stand-in, the nameless writer of the fictional introduction to this volume, has monstrous qualities.

  Nothing quite like the Moderan stories had been written before and nothing like them has been written since. In their intensity and structural spiraling they at times resemble prose poems. They convey an astonishing amount of information and characterization beneath a hyperkinetic exterior that houses a powerful intention: to show a future in which all effort is directed toward war, and in which war is the only worthwhile activity: “Plotting for each the other’s total destruction and coming up with countermeasures to protect each his own new-metal hide at all costs are the kinds of human enterprises that put the human animal up close to godliness.”

  Bunch’s prose style is jaunty, lyrical. And this clash between subject and style makes it hard for a reader to relax. But perhaps this is Bunch’s point: to relax would be to normalize the future the stories depict, to accept foundational assumptions that no one should accept, even as we as a society have accepted so much that is bizarre and unhealthy. With this maneuver, Bunch brings to mind gambits like Vladimir Nabokov’s in his novel Bend Sinister, where a death camp is described in the vernacular of a summer camp brochure. Both authors want to make new horrible realities that, sadly, may otherwise seem banal to jaded readers.

  Bunch does not neglect a ground-level view of things. In fact, several of his stories deal directly with the ground: with soil and dirt. In “No Cracks or Sagging” the man who will later be known as Stronghold 10 consults with a manager who is working on paving the world in plastic. In this exchange, the reader can hear echoes of so many real-world situations in which bad big ideas go unexamined at the policy-making stage and then are implemented in a mindless way by devotees who make a religion of the effort:

  But this ice age, if you want it so—go ahead, call it that!—is for the species, not against it. You’ll never see this ice age rolling up boulders or creeping along with mammoth bones in its teeth. This ice age is covering up dirt, not just rearranging it. That’s plastic you’re looking at, man! I’m out here as an advance guard for plastic. It’s a friendly deadly-competitive hell-for-plastic devil-take-the-hindermost. . . . And we’re gaining!

  It’s impossible while reading parts of Moderan not to think of the setting as the wet dream of a certain kind of realtor or land developer or as the apotheosis of those clips shared on social media showing modern inventions that, for example, can destroy a tree in seconds flat.

  Along with observations about the military-industrial complex and environmental issues, Bunch manages to juxtapose the metallic with a visceral sense of the humanity being sacrificed by separation from the physical world. In the “The Butterflies Were Eagle-Big That Day,” Stronghold 10 recalls his transformation from man to new-metal man: “and thus they made the move up there to do MY head! to work on the face flesh-strips, the brain slosh pans and the green brain fluids, the knives falling and flicking and snicking like cold silver rain. . . . ‘Knives in left-side eye socket; knives in right-side eye socket; coring out left-side eyeball now . . . and folks, there’s blood! . . . always the blood. . . .’ ”

  It is easy to temporarily forget in the age of social media and the electronic presence the importance of the sheer physicality of our bodies, and that forgetting, that amnesia, is a micro example of a macro malaise: the drifting away of the nonhuman world of trees and animals, of complex habitats, the only world we have. Bunch’s world narrows these distinctions to a sharp point by simplifying the world (smothering it in plastic) and gleefully exposing and exploding the perspective of the despoiler not just by inhabiting that perspective but by doing so joyfully at the level of style and engaging in enthusiastic reverie and rhetoric for what he knows is morally and ethically disgusting.

  At times, Bunch seems like some kind of alchemist; the Moderan stories contain very unlikely alliances that might be described as a cyborg version of Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective by way of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. The stories are at heart about how we no longer recognize dystopia because it’s been sold to us as utopia, about how we may not understand the irreplaceable value of aspects of the human and nonhuman world until they are irreplaceably gone from our lives. He achieves this by chronicling the exploits, through Stronghold 10, of a death cult intent on destroying the world as it projects the illusion that the world lives on.

  Of course, it’s no surprise how the Moderan cycle ends. A death cult cannot live on forever. Eventually, the illusion is shattered by the physical laws of the universe. Eventually, the universe itself reveals the truth no matter what human beings do.

  •

  Nothing in David R. Bunch’s upbringing or background suggested unfettered access to a fevered, transgressive imagination, but it’s wise to remember Gustave Flaubert’s dictum: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Bunch grew up on a farm in Lowry City, Missouri. He finished all of a PhD except for his dissertation at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, leaving to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He then spent most the next several decades working as a cartographer for the U.S. Air Force, mostly in Missouri. According to his daughter Phyllis Deckert, Bunch had a “wonderful sense of humor” and “liked animals”; their family always had pets. Sometimes he wrote in the bathtub. “He never really talked about his influences, but as with most authors he wrote from life,” Deckert says.

  Bunch wrote prolifically up until his death, publishing his writings across the genre–mainstream divide. More than two hundred pieces of poetry and prose appeared in literary magazines like Shenandoah and The Little Magazine. In the 1960s and ’70s, his work appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, and Fantastic, and he was the only author with two stories in Harlan Ellison’s iconic anthology, Dangerous Visions.

  In his writing, Bunch strived to be a Cassandra-like prophet of the human condition, the modern condition, and like Cassandra he was dismissed as a crank. Perhaps there is a special place in hell for those who say a writer has “too much imagination” or is “too weird.” Maybe a tenth circle, a kind of purgatory or heck. Ironically, it wasn’t the readers of literary magazines who rejected his work but the readers of genre magazines. Letters columns regularly ran pleas to the editors not to publish any more “garbage” by Bunch. Even the entry for Bunch in Twentieth Century Science-Fiction Writers notes that his stories “met with varying degrees of outrage.” And it is undeniable that his literary success was hampered by the characterization of his work as minor or fringe by science-fiction critics of the day.

  On the other hand, Deckert doesn’t think the pushback particularly bothered her father “as much as it was simply interesting to him. Sometimes amusing since the reader clearly didn’t understand what he was trying to say with the story.”

  Bunch seemed well able to defend himself, perhaps benefiting from an unusual, antagonistic conception of the author-reader relationship. Armoring himself like Stronghold 10, Bunch famously stated in the June 1965 issue of Amazing Stories that

  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 pretenders.

  It may not have helped that Bunch’s two best champions, Cele Goldsmith and Judith Merril, were women working in a male-dominated field. Today, both women are considered among the best editors of science fiction and fantasy from that era, but both, during the time they served as editors, faced considerable resistance to their editorial approaches. This was due in part to sexism but also to their efforts to make science fiction less “provincial” by buying stories that blurred the distinctions between “genre” and “mainstream,” “commercial” and “literary.” Merril in particular, in selecting stories for her Year’s Best series that might have first appeared anywhere from Galaxy to The New Yorker, expanded the idea of what work it was possible to consider science fiction. That Bunch fits comfortably in her anthologies and that he, in that context, now appears central to various literary traditions like the dystopia and the postapocalyptic tale is no coincidence. Bunch was equally influenced by genre and literary writers. It is also no coincidence that just as he was pushed to the fringe of science fiction, Merril was pushed out of the publishing industry entirely, retiring early in Canada.

  Bunch was trying in his own E. E. Cummings–meets–Philip K. Dick way to warn of a present set on a course toward disaster—even as the readers of science-fiction magazines hardly seemed to notice. He was nevertheless in tune with greater political and social movements of the day that were making strides in protecting the environment and preserving natural spaces (for instance Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962, and the Clean Air Act of 1970). In assuming a worst-case scenario, Bunch may have appeared extreme. Yet, in retrospect, he wrote during an era when cautionary tales like those in Moderan had the potential to do the most good. At the time, a predictiveness embedded in his prose, down to his use of metaphor, could have been as transformative to the ways we question foundational assumptions about our right to destroy the world and to live within it as the works of J. G. Ballard. Now, unfortunately, the jury is out on whether calling them “urgently relevant” and “prescient” is just a way of affixing words to a gravestone.