The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

One quick query, and a remarkable seven-page reply later, I not only understood something of the faction lines in modern psychology, and a little bit about kinesthetic aftereffect, but I could see why a “Neo-Hebbian” (“an inveterate neural mechanistic theorist”) had to find a way around a trip to the headshrinker. (“Personality theorists” —-and that includes virtually all schools of psychiatry—”are mechanists, but not neural mechanists.”)

Not even Herzog’s letter, with its inspired three-dimensional (areas, schools and “father-Images”) analysis of the many-mansioned structure of contemporary psychology, leaves me exactly sure where the Bidwell sisters would fit—although I may be checking the wrong catalog. Possibly religion? Communications? Maybe cartography . . .

David Bunch, investigator of the Bidwells, is a most unlikely young man from Missouri who spends his days making maps for the Air Force, and (judging by output) every other minute turning out a unique brand of—well. Warren Miller, writing in Paperback Review, said: “He has the new eyes and new mouth we now demand of writers,” and perhaps that is as close as one comes to classifying the terrible lessons of Little Brother and Little Sister (“The Monsters” in Husk 1965, or “Training Talk” in the 10th Annual), or the flesh-and-metal people of tortured Moderan (“The Walking, Talking, I-Don’t-Care Man” in Amazing), or the gay-sad old people of “The Time Battler” in The Smith, and the “Bidwell Endeavors.”

A collection of Mr. Bunch’s work. Good Luck, Good Hanging and Good Kicking, will be published shortly by Windfall Press.