Next in my sequence of joint winners of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, these two shorter pieces were published in 1990 and awarded in 1991. They also mark the beginning and end of my previous project of writing up the joint winners of both awards; back in the early 2000s, I decided to go through them in alphabetical order of title, and although since then American Gods, Among Others, Ancillary Justice and All Systems Red have picked up both awards, back in 2001 that was not yet the case and “Bears Discover Fire” was the first in line. And when I ran out of steam with that project a few years later, I had started but nowhere near finished a write-up of “The Hemingway Hoax”.

The second paragraph of the third section of “Bears Discover Fire” is:

The school bus let Wallace Jr. off at my house on Wednesday, the day they left. The boy doesn’t have to pack much of a bag when he stays with me. He has his own room here. As the eldest of our family, I hung onto the old home place near Smiths Grove. It’s getting run down, but Wallace Jr. and I don’t mind. He has his own room in Bowling Green, too, but since Wallace and Elizabeth move to a different house every year (part of the Plan), he keeps his .22 and his comics, the stuff that’s important to a boy his age, in his room here at the home place. It’s the room his dad and I used to share.

First time around, I was not super enthusiastic about the story, but I was enthusiastic enough about the project to give it a long write-up:

“Bears Discover Fire” is described by John Clute in The Encyclopedia 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. [I don’t think that was really fair of me.])

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. His website gives a good feel for the man. 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 [dead link to Asimov’s readers forum]. It took me a couple of rereadings 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 reservations) of the interstate highways, surviving on a newly evolved fruit called a “newberry”. The narrator’s elderly mother disappears from her nursing home, and he and his nephew find her sitting around a fire with a silent group of bears. They fall asleep together, and wake in the morning to find that the bears have gone and she has died in the night.

The most sensitive element (in what is anyway quite a sensitive story) is the portrayal of the narrator’s relationships with his mother and his nephew. The nephew, Wallace Jr, is “old enough to want to help and not old enough (yet) to think he knows it all. If I’d married and had kids, he’s the kind I’d have wanted.” Wallace Jr stands up for his uncle against his father; his uncle responds by correcting his grammar, not wanting him to end up talking like “what Mother used to call ‘a helock from the gorges of the mountains.'” It’s beautifully portrayed. The mother, on the other hand, is long prepared for her own death, and the narrator is gradually coming to terms with it. Bisson (introducing the story in Nebula Awards 26) comments that the story was his own way of coming to grips with the deaths of his mother and a favourite uncle.

The tone is elegiac throughout. The narrator’s brother chides him for wasting time on fixing old tyres rather than using the new radials. The brother himself is introduced to us as a preacher, but it turns out he makes two-thirds of his living in real estate. The bears seem to be gaining something that we humans have lost, the art of enjoying company by a warm fire in the woods perhaps. “It looked like only a few of the bears knew how to use fire, and were carrying the others along. But isn’t that how it is with everything?” The scientists who try to explain the bears’ new behaviour are at a total loss; it’s a phenomenon which is only really understood by the narrator’s mother. “It would be rude to whisper around these creatures that don’t possess the power of speech, she let me know without speaking.”

The bears are individuals: “Though they were gathered together, their spirits still seemed solitary, as if each bear was sitting alone in front of its own fire.” That “gathered together” is very Biblical, particularly reminiscent of Matthew 18:20, “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Even the narrator is astonished to find the new natural paradise that is in the median, “all tangled with brush and vines under the maples, oaks and sycamores. Even though we were only a hundred yards from the house, I had never been there, and neither had anyone else that I knew of. It was like a created country.” The bears are truly in Eden.

Meanwhile the average human is just insensitive. The nursing home tell the narrator that he will have to keep paying for his mother’s care for another two days even though she has disappeared. The state troopers who arrive in the morning after the bears have gone “scattered the bears’ fire ashes and flung their firewood away into the bushes. It seemed a petty thing to do.” Hunters in Virginia (not Kentucky, I notice!) complain that the bears have burnt down their house. The narrator clearly feels that if the bears did it, they had a right to do so: “The state hunting commissioner came on and said the possession of a hunting license didn’t prohibit (enjoin, I think, was the word he used) the hunted from striking back… I’m not a hunter myself.”

John Kessel notes [dead link] in particular an exchange between the narrator and his nephew where the nephew wants to shoot one of the bears (for me, the horror I feel at the idea of a twelve-year-old running around with a rifle illustrates yet another cultural difference with America). “I explained why that would be wrong. ‘Besides,’ I said, “a .22 wouldn’t do much more to a bear than make it mad.'” New paragraph. “‘Besides,’ I added, “it’s illegal to hunt in the medians.'” Kessel says that “This combination of the legal, the practical and the moral sums up something about the voice of Terry Bisson.” I think Kessel has it right, but in the wrong order: it’s significant that the moral reasoning, God’s law, is mentioned first; then the practical, Nature’s law; and the legal issues, Man’s law, are an afterthought.

John Kessel [kindly] sent me an email in response to this paragraph: “I think you have it exactly right, and I was trying to say exactly that – that for Bisson, the issues are moral, practical and legal, in descending order of importance. This reflects a rather Emersonian and typically American faith in the idea of a “natural” virtue that only coincidentally has any connection with the law, and is often in opposition to law.”

One of the roles of speculative fiction is to make us look again at our world and re-evaluate what we are doing to it. “Bears Discover Fire” has been described by Robert Sawyer and Bob Sabella [dead link] as a “tall-tale”. I think it’s actually a fable, in the Aesopian sense of a moral story featuring animals which behave as humans. But whereas we were meant to look at Aesop’s animals and laugh at their failings while realising that we share them, Bisson’s bears are in fact on a spiritual plane which may or may not be higher than ours, but is certainly better.

Michael Swanwick has [also kindly] sent an reaction by email: “I was dumbfounded that you couldn’t see the humor in ‘Bears Discover Fire,’ particularly since the opening is structured as a shaggy-dog joke. Every time I reread it, that last line, ‘”Looks like bears have discovered fire,” he said,’ makes me laugh out loud. And those triads of explanations the narrator offers, always ending with the anteclimactic: ‘Besides, it’s illegal to hunt in the medians.’ Or: ‘Also, old people tend to exaggerate.’ (You were spot-on about the hierachy of values, incidentally; one of the things I love about this story is how many virtues Bisson layered atop each other.) I think it’s a profoundly funny story, one whose humor lies in its wisdom and vice versa.

“Oh, and did you notice that the last line of the story is implicitly the last statement of one of his triads with the prior two omitted? Terry’s a sly guy.”

I must say that on rereading it more than twenty years later, I still don’t see it as very funny. I guess that this is an American thing.

You can get the story in the collection of the same name here.

“Bears Discover Fire” was the only story to be on both Hugo and Nebula ballots in the Short Story category that year. The other Hugo finalists were “Cibola”, by Connie Willis; “Godspeed”, by Charles Sheffield; “The Utility Man”, by Robert Reed; and “VRM-547”, W. R. Thompson. I don’t think I have read any of these – “Cibola” has not been republished in any of the Connie Willis collections. W[illiam] R[och] Thompson was born in 1955 and has published precisely one story since 1996.

The other Nebula finalists were “Before I Wake”, by Kim Stanley Robinson; “Lieserl”, by Karen Joy Fowler; “Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates”, by Pat Murphy; “The Power and the Passion”, by Pat Cadigan; and “Story Child”, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. I think I have read “Lieserl”; I note that four of the five losing stories were by women.

There was more overlap in the Best Novelette category that year. The Hugo was won by “The Manamouki”, by Mike Resnick, and the Nebula by “Tower of Babylon”, by Ted Chiang. Both were on both shortlists, as were “Over the Long Haul”, by Martha Soukup, and “The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured His Larinks, A Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skunk”, by Dafydd ab Hugh.

The Hugo and Nebula for Best Novella were jointly won by “The Hemingway Hoax”, by Joe Haldeman. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

John left the place soon, walking slowly through the afternoon heat. He was glad he hadn’t brought the bicycle; it was pleasant to walk in the shade of the big aromatic trees, a slight breeze on his face from the Gulf side.

As mentioned above, I hit a permanent block when trying to write about this story fifteen years ago, which I think was much more because of family and work circumstances at the time than due to any difficulty with the story itself. It’s complex, but not overly so; an English literature professor and Vietnam veteran, in a marriage that is less happy than he realises, gets inveigled by his wife and a conman into forging the papers lost by Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, on a train leaving Paris in 1922. (The Hemingways were members of the same library as my grandmother.) This scheme attracts the attention of time-travelling entities, one of whome keeps reappearing in the form of Hemingway, for whom it is crucially important that Hemingway’s early writing history remains unchanged and unchallenged, because of his importance to the development of civilisation. Sex, violence and time paradoxes ensue, as the Hemingway entity kills the protagonist only to find him resurrected in a slightly different universe. I enjoyed it without being entirely clear what had happened at the end.

The one element that really has dated is the notion of Hemingway’s exceptionalism.

“the accelerating revival of interest in Hemingway from the seventies through the nineties is vitally important. In the Soviet Union as well as the United States. For some reason, I can feel your pastiche interfering with it.”

When I first read The Hemingway Hoax I had not read any of Hemingway’s books; in the interim, I have in fact read several, and I’ll agree that they are great literature, but really not as earth-shattering as all that. I think we’re meant to take seriously the notion that Hemingway’s writing is central to the present and future of Western civilisation; and I can’t.

On the plus side, the story is clearly also Haldeman working out his own feelings about Vietnam and literature, and both of those are deep wells to draw from. The women characters (wife and lover) wobble on the edge of stereotype but don’t quite fall over. I felt that while it has dated, it’s still very good. You can get a standalone version, slightly expanded from the original publication, here.

Two other novellas were on both Hugo and Nebula ballots that year; “Bones”, by Pat Murphy, and “Fool to Believe”, by Pat Cadigan. The others on the Hugo ballot were Bully!, by Mike Resnick, and A Short, Sharp Shock, by Kim Stanley Robinson; and the others on the Nebula ballot were “Mr. Boy”, by James Patrick Kelly, and “Weatherman”, by Lois McMaster Bujold, which is the only one of these that I am sure I have read (see next para).

The only novel on both Hugo and Nebula final ballots was The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons, which I liked when I first read it but didn’t like so much on rereading, though it won the BSFA Award. The Hugo for Best Novel was won by Bujold’s The Vor Game, which incorporates “Weatherman”, and the Nebula by Le Guin’s Tehanu.

The Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation went to Edward Scissorhands.

Next in this sequence is “Beggars in Spain”, by Nancy Kress.