Moderan, David R. Bunch. Avon Books, first edition (1971). No cover artist credited. 240 pages.
The uncredited Boschian cover for this 1971 mass-market paperback edition of Moderan is by Norman Adams. (Adams did a similar cover in 1972 for Jack Williamson's novel The Humanoids.)
I think copies of this volume were expensive and hard to find previous to NYRB's 2018 release of a new edition of Moderan (which included eleven new tales). That's the version I read---although I was happy to snap this old paperback up for three bucks at a used bookstore. I wrote of the novel in my 2018 reading round-up:
Moderan works as a post-nuke dystopian satire on toxic masculinity. The tropes here might seem familiar—cyborgs and dome homes, caste systems and ultraviolence, a world of made and not born ruled by manunkind (to steal from E.E. Cummings)—it's the way that Bunch conveys this world that is so astounding. Moderan is told in its own idiom; the voice of our narrator Stronghold-10 booms with a bravado that's ultimately undercut by the authorial irony that lurks under its surface. The book seems equal to the task of satirizing the trajectory of our zeitgeist in a way that some contemporary satirists have failed to.
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