Moderan (1971)

By David Bunch

352pp, Fiction

Notes

2020-04-25

A series of loosely connected short stories set in a future where men have replaced all their soft parts with metal (read also as emotional openness/vulnerability) and are prone to excessive bouts of SHOUTING IN ALL CAPS and psychological breakdowns brought on by the aformentioned suppression of emotional reality. The NYRB collection I read was apparently the complete set of stories, perhaps a little too complete. The early stories are utterly gleeful in their savage humor and unexpected pathos but I think I should have spread my reading over a longer period, by the end I was a bit tired of it all. In his time Bunch was marginalised within the sci-fi world, it’s easy to see why, these stories are just too aggressively weird. Unsurprising that these satires on masculinity were published almost exclusively in magazines helmed by female editors (very few for very short periods). Still, I’d recommend this for genre fans and maybe one or two of the stories for others wanting something to cleanse their reading pallette.