On Moderan by David R. Bunch


For The Millions, I wrote about David R. Bunch's extraordinary Moderan, recently republished by NYRB Classics for the first time in about 50 years and with material that's never before appeared in book form.

Here's a taste:
Moderan collects dozens of brief stories set in a future world apparently destroyed by nuclear bombs, a world where the landscape has been entirely paved over with plastic and the surviving humans have transformed themselves into cyborgs, their bodies mostly replaced with metal, leaving only a few flesh-strips as evidence of their old form. The men with the most metal become warriors whose identity is merged with the Stronghold that houses them, and the pleasure and glory of Moderan is the warring of its Strongholds. (Most of the stories in Moderan focus on Stronghold 10, the best at warring.) 
The new-metal men hunker down in their Strongholds and wage war against each other. War is the most exciting thing in everyone’s lives, the way to prove strength and superiority: a force that gives meaning. “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.” War lets the Strongholds forget everything but the war, because “amidst the stern havoc, the hard contest demands and all the real problems of carnage, there was not time for either doubt, ghosts, or fears.” War is action, and action allows something almost like joy. “I guess I’m happiest,” Stronghold 10 says, “when I’m in my War Room handing the big orange switch of war to ON and pressing the buttons of launchers. Or, to put it another way, I’m not unhappy or worried or asking questions then—and I’ll settle for that.” 
Bunch’s language is unique, sometimes reminiscent of E.E. Cummings, sometimes of Kurt Vonnegut, sometimes of folktales and sacred texts, sometimes of advertising and propaganda. With a breathless tone and many words set in blustery ALL CAPS, the stories present a diction appropriate to the hyperbolic masculinity of Moderan, a world that values only macho strength and aggression. Before their body parts were replaced with metal, Stronghold 10 tells us, humans were weak and vulnerable, susceptible at any moment to injury or death. No more. “I am a Stronghold master, BIG, in the armor plate of total invulnerability. My ammo is stacked in heaps roundabout, and I can win ANY war. My blasters stand itchy on the GO pad, ready, at the speed of a metal thought, to launch for TOTAL SMACK.”
Continue reading at The Millions.

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