David R. Bunch (1925–2000)
Teoksen Moderan tekijä
Tietoja tekijästä
Tekijän teokset
Incident in Moderan [moderan] 6 kappaletta
The Escaping [short fiction] 6 kappaletta
The Problem Was Lubrication [short story] 3 kappaletta
2064, or Thereabouts 3 kappaletta
Breakout In Ecol 2 [short story] 2 kappaletta
Training Talk 1 kappale
Investigating The Bidwell Endeavors 1 kappale
The Soul Shortchangers [short story] 1 kappale
Coping with Eternity 1 kappale
Seeing Stingy Ed 1 kappale
Associated Works
Dangerous Visions: 33 Original Stories — Avustaja — 1,920 kappaletta
The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990 (1993) — Avustaja — 315 kappaletta
Isaac Asimov's Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction, Volume 9: Robots (1989) — Avustaja — 114 kappaletta
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine: Vol. 6, No. 8 [August 1982] (1982) — Avustaja — 16 kappaletta
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine: Vol. 9, No. 10 [October 1985] (1985) — Avustaja — 14 kappaletta
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine: Vol. 9, No. 3 [March 1985] (1985) — Avustaja — 11 kappaletta
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction January 1960, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1960) — Avustaja — 9 kappaletta
Merkitty avainsanalla
Yleistieto
- Virallinen nimi
- Bunch, David Roosevelt
- Syntymäaika
- 1925-08-07
- Kuolinaika
- 2000-05-29
- Sukupuoli
- male
- Kansalaisuus
- USA
- Syntymäpaikka
- Lowry City, Missouri, USA
- Kuolinpaikka
- St. Louis, Missouri, USA
- Ammatit
- short story writer
poet
Jäseniä
Kirja-arvosteluja
Palkinnot
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Associated Authors
Tilastot
- Teokset
- 20
- Also by
- 28
- Jäseniä
- 263
- Suosituimmuussija
- #87,567
- Arvio (tähdet)
- 3.8
- Kirja-arvosteluja
- 9
- ISBN:t
- 7
- Kielet
- 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.… (lisätietoja)