Two: Medea: Harlan’s World

edited by Harlan Ellison

by:Jack Williamson

Thomas M. Disch

Larry Niven

Frank Herbert

Harlan Ellison

Poul Anderson

Frederik Pohl

Kate Wilhelm

Hal Clement

Theodore Sturgeon

Robert Silverberg

Pub date: June 1985

ISBN 0-553-34170-7

One of the few books that functions as a bonanza for both readers and writers, Medea is based on a series of discussions held at UCLA in 1975, in which noted sf authors Ellison, Clement, Anderson, Niven, and Pohl laid down the premise for an imaginary world. For those of you who haven’t heard of them, the participants, except for Ellison, are renowned for their ability to construct scientifically correct, believable worlds in which to set their tales.
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moderan book

One:

moderan, by David R. Bunch

The stories that appear in this book first stated showing up in sf mags in the late 50s. Amazing, Fantastic, and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction were the havens of the late Mr. Bunch’s peculiar and poetic visions, partly satire (though what he was satirizing was often open to debate), partly dark comedy, wholly engrossing and original. The world of moderan is one of a plastic-coated landscape where the denizens are consumed by their quest to rid themselves of the flesh they bear and become eternal, and by their incessant territorial wars. Not typical of the sf yarn of the late 50s, the time of the Engineer-as-hero paradigm, practiced by Asimov and Heinlein and del Rey among other notables, and stylistically the precursor of the “new wave” that was to begin appearing a couple of years later, in tales by British authors like Ballard and Aldiss.

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