Isaac Asimov believed that science fiction is more of a setting than a genre. He sought to prove this thesis in his works—The Caves of Steel, for example, is a murder mystery. While there’s nothing original about pointing to science fiction’s potential as a means for political philosophy, one critically acclaimed but popularly obscure author deserves more attention from those looking to use fiction as a framework for exploring freedom, morality, and meaning. David R. Bunch’s short story collection Moderan, brought back into print with a new edition in 2018, may best encapsulate this potential of science fiction settings for finding insight into human nature and society.

Through the absurd perspective of narrators who believe the lie of the future dystopia of Moderan, where people think they have finally transcended all the flaws of the natural world—including humanity itself—the truth of humanity shines through Bunch’s stories all the brighter. One will not find a full-fledged political philosophy in the twisted visions of a future sterilized of perceived imperfection. But the exercise of reading even five of these stories stimulates the same speculative imagination so fundamental to struggling with the nature of both the good of individuals and the common good of all. Though marked by Cold War tropes, especially worries over nuclear war, these stories nevertheless feel contemporary, addressing technology, transhumanism, and tyranny in its most tempting form. This is not Orwell’s 1984, but more of a satirical take on Huxley’s Brave New World, a dystopia we dream about, where interpersonal conflict, physical weakness, and our nagging consciences can be engineered away, leaving us with nothing but leisure and play to entertain ourselves.

The stories contained in Moderan were written over decades and originally printed in periodicals. First published in 1971, the 2018 edition adds 11 stories set in the same world written throughout the 1970s and 1980s. As Jeff VanderMeer summarizes in the foreword, “These tales come off as a seamless meld of the eccentric poetics of E. E. Cummings, the genius-level invention of Philip K. Dick, and the body horror of Clive Barker.”

In Beatnik prose, Bunch describes how people in the age of Moderan have frozen their hopelessly polluted seas. They’ve encased their poisoned soil in plastic. The narrator of many of the stories describes the robots that work to flatten the plastic surface into perfect conformity. Government bureaucrats even control the weather and the color of the sky, adjusting the settings of an aerial barrier set in place after endless war destroyed the atmosphere. Characters dispersed throughout the stories, including the narrator, journey miles of the world’s wasted terrain to Moderan, hoping to trade in their weary, suffering bodies for cybernetic upgrades.

Our narrator goes unnamed until after the gruesome transformation for which he longs. In “The Butterflies Were Eagle-Big That Day,” he describes the nine-month process by which cyborg doctors painfully excised his limbs, organs, and skeletal structure, leaving only the most minimal amount of “flesh-strips” from his original, organic form:

Oh, sure, there were deadeners, but never quite enough. Always just on the edge of all the hurt you could take, clamped down in a stark white bed in a cold blue room and watching from a box of glass being very clear for viewing and, with the sized slot for your neck, fitting quite snugly and putting your head in a still still world of its own. To watch pain!

I’ll spare readers the gory details that proceed this, but such scenes explain why Bunch never became a household name.

After the narrator’s transformation, this “new-metal man” takes his assignment to Stronghold 10, and in so doing, becomes Stronghold 10: “Something like a small iron frigate from the Old Days, I guess I was, loaded to the gunwales and standing forth on end.” His cybernetic body stands as a stronghold-unto-itself, and once he assumes control of Stronghold 10, that sterile designation becomes the closest thing to a name he ever gives his readers. Yet despite the horror and dystopia, Bunch’s storytelling never lacks a certain sardonic humor as well. In “New Kings Are Not For Laughing,” for example, Stronghold 10 struggles to control his voice box modulation and shouts his greeting at an unfortunate workman, who had not been blessed with a body so ready-made for replacement.

As Stronghold 10 settles into his fortress, he eventually gets lonely. So, naturally, he gets a robot girlfriend he can turn on and off and store beneath his bed—all the “joy” of sex, none of the hassle of relationships. Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the creators of Moderan distinguish “between what is moral and what is physical in the passion called love,” rejecting the former for the latter. But unlike Rousseau, they satisfy this longing through technology rather than a return to nature. When real women show up wanting to live the “Dream” as well, they are given their own domain designated “White Witch Valley.” Meanwhile, strongholds spend their time firing missiles and launching drones at each other across the barren, mutant-ridden, plastic plains, pushing buttons from the comfort of cushy chairs inside their bunkers. It’s as if the corpulent humans of Pixar’s WALL-E embraced transhumanist technological upgrades to their physiology but then decided they preferred lazing about after all.

Yet through it all, Bunch indicates that we cannot so easily engineer away man’s deeper longings. The people of Moderan believe themselves to have transcended morality and religion, for example, but they still have their rituals, festivals, even their penitence. In “Penance Day in Moderan,” he describes an annual ceasefire in which strongholds march in procession, bearing bags of tears as offerings of repentance for their failure to launch more bombs and create greater explosions. Unlike the Hunger Games, only rarely does anyone die in all the violence, but Moderan still cannot do away with the social power of pomp and circumstance. They award the War Medal to the best stronghold—Stronghold 10 again—who trades empty threats with the other strongholds and gloats about his public honor. In another story, he wakes in fear to find that something, some shadow, has infiltrated his fortress—the specter of his conscience, who still haunts his cybernetic soul.

In something akin to the state of nature thought experiments of early modern philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, Bunch paints a picture of pure anti-nature in all its terrible and ridiculous facets. It is as if instead of asking, “What is left when every man-made addition to humanity’s natural state is stripped away?” he asks, “How much of humanity’s natural state could be stripped away?” Both questions alike seek to answer the same question: “What does it mean to be human?”

While Bunch never outright answers that question, he hints at it throughout, and pronouncedly in his stories about children. In his treatment of children in Moderan, Bunch seems to side with John Locke, who asked Robert Filmer, “What law of the magistrate can give a child liberty, not to honour his father and mother? It is an eternal law, annexed purely to the relation of parents and children, and so contains nothing of the magistrate’s power in it, nor is subjected to it.” Duties of parents to children derive from this “eternal law,” too, rather than anything man-made. Technology, in Bunch’s view, may prove a more powerful tool than legislation for neglecting that duty, but the duty ultimately cannot be erased by either. People, of course, are not born cyborgs but infants, and they must grow into adults before they can be new-metal men or women. In the meantime, children constitute a problem to be solved by robot nannies and friends provided by “the Organization for the Entertainment of Little Flesh People.”

Love, parenting, childhood, morality, religion, sexual difference—these things cannot be fully amputated away without finally removing the last core of our humanity. Moderan gives us a glimpse of a society that, in seeking to do away with these human concerns, yields men and women who have mutilated their humanity but failed to “overcome” it. Even our weaknesses deserve their due. Conflict and suffering, for example, cannot healthily be faced if we see no meaning in them. Indeed, though styled a “Stronghold,” it is fear that drives the “Dream” of the “new-metal man” of Moderan—fear of death most of all. In another story, we discover that even cyborgs cannot escape mortality, and though the mechanics of their bodies might be repaired and reprogrammed to operate again, no science or technology can raise the dead.

Bunch prompts us to conclude that the most just and humane society would be one that instead successfully develops these essential features of our humanity as sacred. Through the lens of Moderan’s sanitized society, we can, by negation, catch a glimpse of holiness—that uncanny reality just beyond the veil of this material world and inseparable from it. C. S. Lewis observed in The Four Loves, “To love at all is to be vulnerable. … The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.” Invulnerability is the “Dream” of Moderan’s “new-metal” men and women—invulnerability is achieved through technology and technocracy. Thomas Hobbes worried that apart from the man-made protection of Leviathan, life in a state of nature is “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”—a rabidly individualist war of all-against-all. By contrast, Bunch’s stories answer with a more frightening proposition: a world of our own making may just as easily make our lives “nasty, brutish, and long,” but no more meaningful or humane.

Indeed, Moderan is absurdist not because natural life is meaningless but because all meaning has been purposefully and unnaturally stripped away. Excising personal pleasure and self-preservation from love and mutual responsibility leaves us subhuman, not transhuman, and without an essential counterbalance to our destructive and war-bent impulses. Bunch never lays all his philosophical cards on the table, but the cumulative effect of these stories leaves readers longing for something like Adam Smith’s “obvious and simple system of natural liberty,” where both justice and beneficence find their place, and the designs of the would-be “man of system” remain only hubristic fantasy, rather than dystopian technocracy.

That said, Moderan contains little of 1984’s or Fahrenheit 451’s totalitarianism. The only “thought-policing” comes from individuals themselves. And where Brave New World warns of pleasure-pills that promise “All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects,” Bunch’s stories depict such an effort as laughable, though no less enticing or dangerous. So, too, while Frank Herbert’s Dune rightly warned of the genuine danger of messianic religious fervor, Moderan warns of the nihilistic loss of meaning in post-religious societies. Moreover, a clear anti-war message pervades most of the stories—from the wasted landscape to the never-ending war between strongholds. However, Bunch would no doubt recoil at any technocratic or technological solution to these challenges. Through the world of Moderan, Bunch demonstrates that nature has given us all the answers we need, if only we have the courage to reconcile ourselves to its vulnerability.