David R. Bunch (1925–2000) was a prolific US fiction writer and poet who specialized in short fiction and whose real name may have been David Groupe. A cartographer for the US Air Force, Bunch became associated with the American New Wave due to his inclusion in Harlan Ellison’s iconic Dangerous Visions anthology. Bunch’s fiction shares some similarities with that of R. A. Lafferty, Stepan Chapman, and Kurt Vonnegut, but his is much more kinetic and punchily lyrical.
Although little-known, Bunch was among the most original voices in the science fiction field in the 1960s and 1970s. Much of his work appeared in literary magazines before he turned to speculative fiction. His first published science fiction story may have been “Routine Emergency” (IF, 1957). “That High-Up Blue Day That Saw the Black Sky-Train Come Spinning” (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1968) is one of his best stand-alone stories. The adventurous Cele Goldsmith is credited with championing Bunch by taking many of his stories for Amazing and Fantastic when she was the acquiring editor for those publications. (Fantastic also took work by J. G. Ballard and Harlan Ellison considered too outré for other genre publications.)
Bunch himself famously stated in the June 1965 issue of Amazing Stories, “I’m not in this business primarily to describe or explain or entertain. I’m here to make the reader think, even if I have to bash his teeth out, break his legs, grind him up, beat him down, and totally chastise him for the terrible and tinsel and almost wholly bad world we allow…The first level reader, who wants to see events jerk their tawdry ways through some used and USED old plot—I love him with a hate bigger than all the world’s pity, but he’s not for me. The reader I want is the one who wants the anguish, who will go up there and get on that big black cross. And that reader will have, with me, the saving grace of knowing that some awful payment is due…as all space must look askance at us, all galaxies send star frowns down, a cosmic leer envelop this small ball that has such Great GREAT pretenders.” Perhaps it’s no surprise that Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers wrote that Bunch’s stories “met with varying degrees of outrage.”
Bunch’s most recent collection was Bunch! (1993). However, Bunch’s first book, published in 1971, remains his best-known: Moderan, a mosaic novel consisting of linked fable-like tales written in a surreal, almost experimental mode. These tales of Moderan describe a radical future world of automation and factories where, after a nuclear holocaust, humans have been transformed into cyborgs, the surface of Earth is plastic, and communities exist underground.
Nothing quite like the Moderan stories had been written before and nothing like them has been written since. In their intensity and their structural spiraling they at times resemble prose-poems. Yet they convey an astonishing amount of information, characterization, and plot beneath their hyperreal exterior. The only comparable experience exists in sections of Stepan Chapman’s novel The Troika, which includes the story of a man named Alex who turns into a machine. The Moderan stories are also notable because of their increasing relevance in a world of scarcity and growing alarm about climate change and what humankind has done to the planet.
“Three from Moderan” represents the first reprinting of Bunch’s work in quite some time. There is some reason to hope not only that a full Moderan collection will be forthcoming but that previously unpublished Bunch stories will finally become available to readers as well.