Moderan

A strange and isolated incident in genre fiction. Moderan is a series of fragmented stories that found their way into the magazines throughout the mid-20th century. I can only imagine readers being confounded and disturbed by Bunch’s ornate and violent vignettes, struggling to figure out what the hell was actually going on. Thankfully, the stories were collected by Avon in 1971 with gorgeous artwork by Norman Adams, and remain in print today via NYRB.

Something of a Thus Spoke Zarathustra meets A Clockwork Orange, Bunch has composed perhaps the only fragmented satirical allegory of a “man’s world” ever produced in literature. In the wake of an apocalyptic disaster, the earth has been covered with sheets of plastic. A cohort of humanity has been “refactored” with new-steel and limited flesh — the more steel the better, if you want to be anyone worth knowing in Moderan. We largely follow a nameless figure who is the master of a Stronghold, a metaphor for a powerful empire that spends its time playing war games with rival Strongholds, racking up hate-points, pondering Deep Thoughts, and considering the Universal Problems from hip-snuggie chairs while admiring gardens of tin-flowers and tin-birds under a protective dome managed by a bureaucracy that can change the weather and seasons on demand.

Along the way, our hero aims to be the baddest Stronghold Master of them all, but is continuously visited by strange flesh-bums — men with no new-steel or hip-snuggie chairs — who confuse his Moderan ways and tease him with those evil and bewildering notions of souls, love, forgiveness, fatherhood, and consciousness. But he must press forward, dropping his Grandy Wumps, Doll-Bombs, and Honest Jakes, waging BIG wreck-wrecks and shrieking violence on other Strongholds. Moderan is a man’s country, after all. The wives are locked away in a high-walled maximum-security prison known as the White Witch Valley and replaced with new-steel ladies equipped with that precious ON/OFF switch, deployed only during a truce for a little indulgence in the joys.

Moderan is often fantastically violent and funny. Bunch was a poet, and each entry to his world reads as a short stanza of its own. The book is viciously clever and speaks directly to the anxieties of civilization and the fears of Future War with an accuracy that has not aged a day.

This novel sits at the top of my list for readers new to the genre. It is a stunning and strange piece of genius, remarkable in its originality of scope and execution. Bunch knew exactly what he was doing and precisely what he wanted to say.

Go visit Moderan — and walk away with the understanding that if the big bomb is our ultimate demise, well, in hindsight, it’s depressingly hilarious.