Moderan. David R. Bunch (Avon, 75¢). The Falling Astronauts. Barry N. Malzberg (Ace, 75¢). In the Pocket and Other SF Stories and Gather in the Hall of the Planets. K. M. O'Donnell (Ace double, 75¢). Humanity Prime. Bruce McAllister (Ace, 95¢). The Committed Men. M. John Harrison (Doubleday, $4.95). Pig World. Charles W. Runyon (Doubleday, $4.95). Can You Feel Anything When I Do This? Robert Shackley (Doubleday, $4.95)

We all know that Reason is superior to Emotion. (After all, look where it's got us.) And that souls ride inside bodies, like people inside Edsels, right? And that Edsels often break down, leaving us to cry like Saint Paul, Who will deliver me from the body of this death? I have actually met engineers who told me (in all sincerity) that they lived their lives according to the dictates of Reason, and when I got them enraged – which is easy to do – they told me I was irrational. In Love and Will Rollo May describes a patient of his, a chemist, who had invented the perfect daydream erection: a metal pipe extending from his brain directly through his penis. The rest of his body was irrelevant.

There has to be a division of labor here, since it is not so easy to throw away your fleshliness, your vulnerability, your emotions, your mortality, your passivity, and your knowledge that you are an object in a world of objects (try falling downstairs). Thus we find Man the Rational and Woman the Emotional, Man the Soul and Woman the Carnal, Man the Active and Woman the Passive, Man as Humanity and Woman as Nature, Man as Strong and Woman as Weak, Man as Tool-maker and Woman as Manadmirer, Man as Political and Woman as Home-oriented. Every man deserves the freedom to have his own abortion. Man bears his young alive. Man is the only animal who menstruates.

David Bunch, a loud, crude good poet, has come up with Moderan, a half-novel, half-collection-of-stories about what it is like to live out the male mystique. Mind and body could not be more split. If you are really somebody in Moderan, you are 97 percent new-steel and only 3 percent flesh…