Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories

by Terry Bisson

Overview

Bears Discover Fire is the first short story collection by the most acclaimed science fiction author of the decade, author of such brilliant novels as Talking Man and Voyage to the Red Planet. It brings together nineteen of Bisson's finest works for the first time in one volume, among them the darkly comic title story, which garnered the field's highest honors, including the Hugo, Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, and Locus awards.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312890353
Publisher:	Tor Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/15/1994
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.57(d)

About the Author

Terry Bisson is an American science fiction and fantasy author, born on February 12, 1942, in Owensboro, Kentucky. His many novels include Talking Man (1986), Fire on the Mountain (1988), Voyage to the Red Planet (1990), Pirates of the Universe (1996), and The Pickup Artist (2001). His 1990 short story “Bears Discover Fire” won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards, and his all-dialogue story “They're Made Out of Meat” is one of the most widely-reprinted SF stories of the last several decades. He has published several volumes of short fiction, including Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories (1993), In the Upper Room and Other Likely Stories (2000), and Greetings (2005).

Read an Excerpt

From Canción Auténtica de Old Earth:

"Quietly," our guide said.

Quietly it was.

We glided over ancient asphalt, past ghost-gray buildings that glowed in the old, cold light of a ruined Moon that seemed (even though we have all seen it in pictures a thousand times) too bright, too close, too dead.

Our way was lighted by our photon shadow guide, enclosing us and the street around us in an egg of softer, newer light.

At the end of a narrow lane, four streets came together in a small plaza. At one end was a stone church; at the other a glass and brick department store façade; both dating (my studies coming through at last) from the High European.

"There's no one here," one of us said.

"Listen ..." said our guide.

There came a rumbling. A synthesizer on a rubber-tired wood-and-wire cart rolled into the plaza out of an alley beyond the department store. It was pulled by an old man in black sweaters, layered against the planet's chill, and a boy in a leather jacket. An old woman, also all in black, and a smiling man who looked to be about forty walked behind. His smile was the smile of the blind.

"They still live here?" someone asked.

"Where else could they live??

Editorial Reviews

"'Bears Discover Fire' evokes climate change and the otherness of nature. It captures the mix of blitheness and curiosity with which we often apprehend the world shifting around us. It’s not quite sci-fi; it’s more like a parable."—The New Yorker

"Bisson's stock in trade is whimsy where, at his best, he combines a splendidly loopy inventiveness with real poignancy, a hard-edged sense of wonder and a grasp of the genuinely alien...Bisson's distinctive style and priceless imagination lift his work to an altogether more exalted plane." —Kirkus

"Highly recommended . . . brilliantly original . . . every story showcases Bisson's keen intelligence and distinctive gift for deliciously wry prose.” —Booklist

“Bisson's prose is a wonder of seemingly effortless control and precision; he is one of science fiction's most promising short story practioners.” —Publisher's Weekly

“His quick jabs to the funny bone and the intellect often are more powerful than many a lesser artist's attempt at a knockout punch.” —San Diego Union-Tribune

From the Publisher