"The Escaping" (1967)

David R. Bunch's second story in Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions collection is basically more of same, a very short story set on the war planet version of Earth called Moderan. For whatever reason, it did not make it into the recent republication of Bunch's 1971 Moderan collection (though I'm not sure it was in the original either). I have to say I'm never really sure what's going on in this story, which might be the reason. It's also not included on the comprehensive list of Bunch's stories at Wikipedia. "The Escaping" features a first-person narrator, and he seems to be pondering work, but it's also possible he is undergoing punishment, or some treatment, and/or remembering his work or a former life. Any or all of the above. On another level it's not that hard to understand—it's about a kind of dissociative state that can be achieved (see title), which helps in dealing with the privations of this culture. Moderan prizes and loves hatred above all else. These eternal soldiers are less like noble warriors such as Crazy Horse or King Arthur's bunch, and more like the monsters of varying skill you encounter in RPGs. The language is difficult—I'm not surprised Bunch was also a poet!—and if the vision is dangerous it is also maddeningly undetailed. In many of the stories in this collection the "dangerous vision," as such, involves collapses of enlightened democracies into immoral autocratic societies. In Bunch's Moderan, I have the impression you can forget the foregoing enlightenment, even if it is Earth. Arguably our enlightenment has been feeble. War and hatred are all that has ever been known. Further clarity may lay in Bunch's Moderan collection, either the 1971 version or the 2018 version, which both have dozens more stories. But I'm not inclined to push much further myself. I'd almost just rather read the screenplay treatment versions of stories like this, with these flimsy narratives thrown like loose scarves around them. For every time my mind is well and truly blown by SF concept there are 10 or 20 more where I'm only confused and impatient. Maybe somebody else will have better luck with this one. Bunch has been remarkably obscure, at least until the recent republication of Moderan, which might change that. You never know.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison