Bears Discover Fire

"Bears Discover Fire" is described by John Clute in The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction as a story that "elegizes the land, the loss of the dream of America; it is also very funny". I appreciated the story but didn't see the joke at all. Obviously others enjoyed it more: apart from the Hugo and Nebula, "Bears Discover Fire" won four other awards and was nominated for another two, probably a record. (Having said that, the competition from other short stories in 1990-91 was not very strong).

Terry Bisson writes very American science fiction, rooted in a strong sense of place (Owensboro, Kentucky) and time (the present day, or something very like it); his best-known books include Talking Man and Fire on the Mountain, set in an alternate history where the US Civil War had a quite different course. I really dislike his story "macs", even though I completely agree with the political point of the story. Perhaps a non-American inevitably has difficulty in accessing Bisson's work. I notice that I am not alone here. It took me a couple of rereading of "Bears Discover Fire" to realise that the "torches" held by the bears at the end of the first section were not battery operated, and this despite the whacking great clue in the story's title.

Bisson has described "Bears Discover Fire" as being about exactly what the title says. This is not true. The narrator, his brother and his nephew suffer a flat tyre one night; their flashlight goes out, and the narrator changes the tyre in "a flood of dim orange flickery light... coming from two bears at the edge of the woods, holding torches." It seems that the bears have given up hibernating and are instead settling in the wooded medians (what I would call the central ...