Moderan

Moderan
By David R. Bunch

This collection of stories, published over a 30-year period and set in the post-apocalyptic, pounded-plastic landscape of Moderan, can be a hard slog to read from cover-to-cover because there’s little through narrative and a lot of repetition. It makes up for this though in stylistic exuberance and the narrator’s enthusiasm for turning the volume up to 11. His percussive shouting and long trails of violent exclamation marks mimic the explosive nature of Moderan life: “WOOOO WOOOO WOW WOW WOW WOWEEE!!!!!!” The upshot is that you keep thinking something important is happening or being said, even when it’s all the same.

Life in Moderan is a paradox. On the one hand, its machine-men – organs replaced by a system of mechanical parts decorated with flesh strips – are eternal. On the other, they are stuck in an endless round of battle that doesn’t progress but only struggles toward annihilation. Existence is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and long.

Though ostensibly Nietzschean (“power is joy; strength is pleasure”) the real presiding spirit is Hobbes. Stronghold 10 isn’t one of the Übermensch but a Last Man: bunkered down behind eleven steel walls, isolated in his man cave’s hip-snuggie chair, eyes glued to his security monitors, and cowering in a hate-filled fear that has him launching doll bombs, White Witch missiles, man-blammers, and even Grandy Wumps at everyone and everything in range.

A philosophical satire then, on militarism and masculinity and everything mechanical and hard and fast. Progress as a dead end, with man’s final evolution into a state of solipsistic techno-Nirvana. Then waking up to do it all over again. WOWEEE!!!!!!