Who Goes There?

David R. Bunch was born in 1925 and made his genre debut in 1957, although he didn’t start writing full-time until much later. He tried for a PhD in English Literature but ultimately didn’t get it. Unlike the vast majority of genre writers, who may write a poem here and there for funzies, Bunch really was a poet; but unfortunately, poetry didn’t and indeed does not sell, so when it came to writing he tried (on top of poetry) the next best thing. See, Bunch never wrote a novel, which goes some ways to explain why he’s always been an obscure figure, but he wrote something like 200 short stories over a span of four decades. Mind you that while 200 is a big number, no matter how you look at it, Bunch specialized in the short-story story; it’s hard to find a Bunch story that goes over ten pages in length. When he appeared in the landmark anthology Dangerous Visions he was the only author to come in with two stories, one of which takes place in the setting that would come to define his fiction output: Moderan. Moderan, the book, is a collection of linked stories set in a futuristic hellscape in which the vast majority of people have given up their fleshy bodies in favor of mostly robotic exoskeletons. Humanity has conquered death, aging and disease are apparently things of the past—but at what cost? That is the question.

“Getting Regular” is one of the longer Moderan stories (not saying much, I know), and unlike some of the other stories in the collection, which can be thought of as vignettes or prose poems, it has a character who goes through something like an arc. This is an early entry in the series, and the fact that it was published in 1960 is a little astounding; but then Cele Goldsmith, who edited both Amazing Stories and Fantastic at the time, seemed fond of Bunch’s work and gave him leeway that other editors at the time might not have. It’s also worth mentioning that the Moderan stories were printed in both Amazing and Fantastic during Goldsmith’s tenure, as if both magazines were interchangeable for this setting. It could also be that there’s something fantastic about Moderan that

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1960 issue of Amazing Stories. It has only ever been reprinted in Moderan. Surprisingly Moderan is in print, after decades of not being available, thanks to NYRB Classics. It’s one of the relatively few SF books to get an NYRB edition.

Enhancing Image

A peculiarity about the Moderan stories that makes them easy to pick up but hard to digest individually is that there’s not much context given per story, and also Bunch having the understandable tendency to repeat himself with regards to crumbs of backstory the reader is allowed to have. As I also said before, some of these (I decided to dig into Moderan a bit before writing all this, hence the slight delay) are less stories in the traditional sense and more like prose poems. Bunch has a touch of the poet about him, and he also has a poet’s mindset for providing detail in places we don’t consider typical when dealing with short stories. Moderan is like a bag of M&Ms, in that each M&M is virtually identical to every other M&M, aside from coloring; and yet it’s impossible to have just one M&M. The idea is that Moderan is greater than the sum of its parts.

As for the plot of “Getting Regular,” there isn’t much of one, but the dense backstory for the setting makes the plot seem thicker than it is. We have an unnamed narrator, the commander of Stronghold 10, who from what I can tell is a recurring figure in Moderan and basically our eyes and ears for understanding the weird mechanics of this world. Despite being the leader of a whole fortress, the commander is himself a hulking and cumbersome mass of metal who can barely move around on his own, lying on a “bed of levers.” As he tells us, “I must look more like a suit of old armor once would have looked if it had in the ancient days rolled in some thick-sliced bacon and then gone to bed on a bridge truss.” The commander, like everyone else, has had his organic body gradually “replaced” with metal, with only a few “flesh-strips” left of his old body. The image we’re given right away is a grotesque one, sort of proto-Cronenberg. Everything comes to us as deeply inhuman and unnatural. Even the flowers, with their “spring-metal stems,” are merely simulacra. Even the birds that pirch in the (obviously metal) trees are themselves made of tin. We infer that everything in Moderan is made of either metal or plastic, mankind’s embrace of artifice having spread like a virus across the face of the planet.

Since the cyborgs that now make up mankind can’t expect to die natural deaths, a chief way of passing the time is apparently for Strongholds to play war with each other—I say “play” because it may as well be a game to them. Actually it might be the only game for them. We even get weapons with quirky names like Honest Jakes, Wreck-Wrecks, etc. If I was your average SF reader back in 1960, I would probably struggle to grasp what this is all about. At the same time, these Moderan stories that appeared in the early ’60s would’ve fit right in with the New Wave crowd had they come out just a few years later, which makes sense. The sheer weirdness of it, not to mention Bunch’s melodramatic stylization (a lot of instances of the commander explaining at the reader! sometimes IN ALL CAPS!), will inevitably be off-putting to some, but I kinda like it.

As for the commander there’s the issue of the fact that Stronghold 10 has been underperforming as of late, or rather that things have been “irregular” around here. He has to answer to the higher-ups in the Needle Tower, “so tall and high-spired that the pennon pole pierces the vapor shield,” and he has to “get regular” or else lose his status, by way of losing a flesh-strip. Flesh-strips, at least among the leaders of Strongholds, are treated like tokens, although they’re quite precious. This all sounds rather morbid and a little gross, but that’s how it is. We’re told that the reason for the commander’s irregularity has to do with a girlfriend, or maybe an ex-girlfriend, who left him one day as what might’ve been the result of a technical error. The girlfriend (also unnamed—nobody seems to have a name in Moderan) was so thoroughly “replaced” that she didn’t even have a flesh-strip. She was, for all intents and purposes, a robot, and yet the commander loved her. But then what is the difference between someone who is 95% metal and someone who is 100% metal? It’s the Ship-of-Theseus problem, obviously, but there’s real wonder as to where humanity ends and machine begins. For being 95% metal, the commander is still human enough, evidently having an interior life, hopes, fears, dreams, all that good stuff.

Now you may be thinking, this sounds a bit like cyberpunk. It’s true, despite the earliest Moderan stories predating the cyberpunk movement by a couple decades (ironically Bunch gave up on the series around the time William Gibson and the Vinges made their first moves), it’s easy to think of the setting as an outlandish precursor to what we would see in, say, the Sprawl stories leading up to Neuromancer. Another point of comparison, which is more immediate (at least to me), is J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition. We have here another book that’s a collection of linked stories and vignettes, with a recurring setting and central character, in which the author makes a grim if also satirical point about machismo and mankind’s seeming need to go to war with itself. It’s also decidedly New Wave in style and temperament, and both books contain stories which had appeared earlier in magazines. I will say, from what I’ve read of Bunch he doesn’t strike me as being as much the misanthrop as Ballard.

There Be Spoilers Here

Now, keeping in mind that we know the commander of Stronghold 10 will keep his rank and manage to convince the ghoul in the Needle Tower that he can “get regular” (a foregone conclusion if you’re reading Moderan, but not if you were reading “Getting Regular” in 1960), the back end of the story is less tense and more a telling depiction of a nightmare from which there is no waking. Even with the commander’s power we’re reminded that said power doesn’t mean a whole lot—for one because there’s always a bigger fish, but also Moderan is such a bleak setting that we’re left unsure if it really is better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.

A Step Farther Out

I had more to say about this one than I expected, but then I did end up reading a few more Moderan stories after “Getting Regular,” to get a better idea of what Bunch is going for. Each story in Moderan is dense enough that rereading is not only rewarding, but maybe necessary. How much you enjoy it will also depend on how much you like Bunch’s style, which I happen to like a fair bit. I should read the whole book at some point, but it feels like one of those story collections (and Joanna Russ agrees with me on this, in her review) where you should refrain from binging. You should take your time and let the weirdness marinate.

See you next time.