David R. Bunch (1925–2000)
Autor/a de Moderan
Sobre l'autor
Obres de David R. Bunch
Incident in Moderan [moderan] 6 exemplars
The Escaping [short fiction] 6 exemplars
The Problem Was Lubrication [short story] 3 exemplars
2064, or Thereabouts 3 exemplars
Breakout In Ecol 2 [short story] 2 exemplars
Training Talk 1 exemplars
Investigating The Bidwell Endeavors 1 exemplars
The Soul Shortchangers [short story] 1 exemplars
Coping with Eternity 1 exemplars
Seeing Stingy Ed 1 exemplars
Fantastic Vol 20 #6 Aug'71 featuring The Joke 1 exemplars
No Cracks or Sagging {short story} 1 exemplars
New Kings Are Not for Laughing {short story} 1 exemplars
The Flesh Man from Far Wide {short story} 1 exemplars
Obres associades
Dangerous Visions: 33 Original Stories — Col·laborador — 1,919 exemplars
The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990 (1993) — Col·laborador — 315 exemplars
Isaac Asimov's Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction, Volume 9: Robots (1989) — Col·laborador — 114 exemplars
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine: Vol. 6, No. 8 [August 1982] (1982) — Col·laborador — 16 exemplars
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine: Vol. 9, No. 10 [October 1985] (1985) — Col·laborador — 14 exemplars
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine: Vol. 9, No. 3 [March 1985] (1985) — Col·laborador — 11 exemplars
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction January 1960, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1960) — Col·laborador — 9 exemplars
Etiquetat
Coneixement comú
- Nom oficial
- Bunch, David Roosevelt
- Data de naixement
- 1925-08-07
- Data de defunció
- 2000-05-29
- Gènere
- male
- Nacionalitat
- USA
- Lloc de naixement
- Lowry City, Missouri, USA
- Lloc de defunció
- St. Louis, Missouri, USA
- Professions
- short story writer
poet
Membres
Ressenyes
Premis
Potser també t'agrada
Autors associats
Estadístiques
- Obres
- 20
- També de
- 28
- Membres
- 263
- Popularitat
- #87,567
- Valoració
- 3.8
- Ressenyes
- 9
- ISBN
- 7
- Llengües
- 2
And it’s quite a setting. This is a future world in which the land surface has been levelled and coated in plastic, the oceans frozen or discarded into space and Nature replaced altogether: flowers and birds are now made of coloured tin and artificial trees poke up through holes in the plastic. Our main character too, though originally a flesh-and-blood human, has been transformed—organs, limbs, even eyeballs now new-metal-alloy versions, with only thin strips of flesh remaining. The result, Stronghold 10, is the clanking, clunky, occupier of a fortress, and the plastic plain is dotted with similar fortresses. Stronghold-masters are, in effect, immortal and to fill the time they wage war on one another. During the truces between wars, Stronghold 10 has fun—his idea of fun mostly being to sit and think, pondering Universal Deep Problems.
This is exceptionally strange stuff, not least due to the idiosyncratic writing style which reminded me (a bit) of Cordwainer Smith’s weird “up-and-out” stories (“the up-and-out” being Smith’s term for interstellar space). There are other oddities too: for instance, although Stronghold-masters routinely wage total war, there are no actual descriptions of it. Also, while supposedly near-invincible, Stronghold 10 comes across much of the time as a bumbling and eccentric old man.
So what is Moderan about? Well, by becoming artificial (or 92% so in Stronghold 10’s case) its inhabitants and their sterile plastic world are safe—immune from change of any kind in fact—and I think these stories are about the price they’ve paid for that, what they’ve lost. In particular they’ve lost most of the emotions, such as love, as seen in the stories about Stronghold 10 and his daughter (“A Little Girl’s Xmas in Moderan”). This author is clearly against science, against technology, against the whole modern world, and Moderan is his view of what we’re doing to ourselves as a species in real life: becoming impervious to all natural dangers by living lives that are ever more artificial. This definitely isn’t a weird future he’s describing, it’s David R Bunch’s view of the world we already live in (and I even found myself wondering while reading: to our distant hunter-gatherer ancestors of fifty-thousand years ago or so, might this be how we would have looked to them?).
On the one hand, unlike the author, I’m not myself in any way cynical about science, not anti-technology or anti-the-modern-world-and-everything-in-it. But on the other hand, this book is exactly the sort of thing I read science fiction for: in the hope that every now and then, if I’m lucky, I’ll stumble across something really odd, a bit different. And this certainly is.… (més)