Who Goes There?

Terry Bisson, unlike a lot of authors, started out as a novelist before working his way “down” to short stories—a good move, given the latter is where his legacy now rests. His story “Bears Discover Fire” is one of only three to win the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award; and it has the unique honor of being the first story I reviewed for this site. Can you believe that was a year and a half ago? It’s (in my opinion) one of the few certified classics of SFF short fiction to come out since 1990, and the thing is, there’s more where that came from. Sadly Bisson died last month (exactly to the day, as it turns out), and now the field is forevermore deprived one of its best short fiction writers. “First Fire” has a few issues which I’ll get to, but it does show off Bisson’s feverish and witty potential as a short story craftsman. I suspect there are worse stories I could’ve picked as a way of paying tribute to one of the field’s unsung heroes.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the September 1998 issue of Science Fiction Age, which is on the Archive. It has only been reprinted in English once, in the Bisson collection In the Upper Room and Other Likely Stories.

Enhancing Image

Emil is a young scientist with an invention, a “spectrachronograph,” which can trace the age of a flame down to the second. This may sound incredibly niche, but consider that while flames often may last a few hours, or a few days, a flame without enough care and cultural significance could last for years—possibly centuries. Certainly fire carries a lot of implicit meanings, from man often being said to have risen above his fellow mammals when he discovered fire to the Olympics having a literal passing of the torch. There’s some value in aging flames that, if genuine, could tell humans a little about their own history. The Tycoon (he might have a name, but I forget, and anyway the story always calls him that) takes a keen interest in Emil’s invention, which he insists on calling a “time-gun.” That Emil’s device is not a gun makes the new name a bit humorous, but it also foreshadows what kind of person the Tycoon is. Together they travel to the Middle East, to put Emil’s so-called time-gun to the test: aging the Flame of Zoroaster, which should be several centuries old if genuine.

(I just wanna point out that I worried at first if this story was too short to really dig into, since it only takes up a few pages in Science Fiction Age. For better or worse this magazine’s type size was meant for insects, so a lot of wordage can be fit on the page. Still, Bisson covers a good deal of ground, hopping from scene to scene, in about 4,000 words.)

We meet a few other characters, namely Kay, an assistant working on the Tycoon’s digging project. Emil and Kay quickly develop a friends-with-benefits relationship wherein, somehow, Kay has a long-distance boyfriend and is also fucking the Tycoon, which Emil doesn’t seem to mind. The characters more serve the themes of the story than work as people with interiority and what have you, but Kay definitely draws the short stick even by this standard. There’s also a colleague of Kay’s, Claude, a black Frenchman who is intentionally written as pretentious and randomly injecting French words into his English. But ultimately there’s Emil, the scientist, the man of discovery, who becomes quite rich from his dealings with the Tycoon, who, in turn, literally buys out the Flame of Zoroaster and ships it to the US. The Tycoon compares himself to Alexander the Great, and even his underlings seem to think of him as a modern-day conqueror. Of course, what we’re told about Alexander within the story does not show him in the best light; rather it emphasizes Alexander as a destroyer—a man who, despite having died so young, crushed entire cultures underfoot and turned them to dust. The Tycoon shows a similar irreverence with other cultures, which should be a warning sign for Emil. Alas…

Calling “First Fire” science fiction might be a bit of a stretch, since it is very much couched more in mythology than any real science, despite the utility of Emil’s time-gun. The Tycoon is not a real person, but a stand-in for the ultra-wealthy as a whole, and Emil is not a real person either when you get down to it, but a stand-in for the kind of person who is brilliant at one specific thing and a total dumbass in every other part of his life. He’s a fine inventor but he is tragically unable to foresee how his invention might be abused. And then there’s Kay, who has it the worst. If you’ve read enough of Robert Silverberg’s material, especially his “peak” era of the late ’60s to the mid-’70s, then you become familiar with how Silverberg wrote women at that point in his career. Which is to say, not very well. You get used to it, but it’s a weird caveat to make. Bisson, who doesn’t strike me as a horndog like young Silverberg (or indeed middle-aged Silverberg), pulls some “she breasted boobily” nonsense with Kay and it was something that stopped me in my tracks a few times as I was reading. Don’t get me wrong, this is still not as bad as Piers Anthony on a good day; but it dampens what is otherwise a fairly serious narrative, about something as grandiose as the birth of the human race. Also, Claude is annoying.

I’m quibbling, and admittedly part of that is I waited too long to write about “First Fire” after I had read it. Nobody’s fault but mine. I procrastinated but then got called into work much earlier than expected and now I’m getting this review out at the last minute. This story has soured a bit for me in parts, although interestingly the ending has gone up in my estimation, despite my kneejerk reaction to it. Another thing is that I didn’t understand at first that we’re not supposed to take all this on a literal level, but are meant to take it as allegorical. I wish Bisson only called Emil the Scientist within the story (like in the introductory blurb), because it would’ve made such a reading easier to discern. This is a tragic tale about how wealth can (and often does) corrupt science, and how scientists have a moral obligation to their discoveries and inventions. Kurt Vonnegut cooks this theme to perfection in Cat’s Cradle, and Bisson here makes a solid go at it.

There Be Spoilers Here

The Tycoon and company next head to Africa, to a temple alleged to keep the oldest ongoing flame in human history—a flame so old that it might actually predate homo sapiens. True enough, when Emil use his time-gun on the flame, it turns out to be over 800,000 years old. The Tycoon seems to be fascinated by this, only for him to reach forth and—without anyone noticing at first—extinguish the flame with his fingertips. He has snuffed out the oldest flame in the world, and for what purpose? Everyone is justifiably outraged, but whilst Emil and Claud go to beat the Tycoon, possibly to death, something far grander in scale is happening at the same time. “Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out, one by one.” The Tycoon, without having any way of knowing this in advance, has not only brought about the end of the world but caused the universe to reset itself. This is about as apocalypse an ending as is conceivable.

To point out the elephant in the room, the ending is one big shoutout to Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God,” with that aforementioned quote being taken almost word-for-word from Clarke’s story. Now, I’m sorry to be spoiling a short story that is not only very old by now but one of the most famous in the genre’s history, but my initial reaction to this homage, and Bisson’s choice to end his own story like this, was tinged with disgust. Maybe “disgust” is too strong a word. Obviously Bisson had by this point earned the right to reference such a beloved story, and to reappropriate that story’s ending. A bit of a hot take, but I’ve never been a fan of Clarke’s story, although I was also not big on “The Star” when I finally read it. “The Nine Billion Names of God” is an ideas story, without a real plot or characters; it’s an idea (a pretty good one) punctuated with one of the most famous short story endings of all time. But that’s all it really is: half a dozen pages containing a setup and a punchline. This works for a lot of people, evidently, but often I require at least a bit more substance in my short fiction. “First Fire” is a more flawed story than “The Nine Billion Names of God,” but it does have more material. Bisson wanted to build on top of Clarke’s premise and he basically succeeded.

A Step Farther Out

“First Fire” is tangentially SFnal, but it registers more strongly as a borderline fantasy allegory. The introductory blurb hints that this is not a realistic tale, but an allegorical one, with characters fitting into certain archetypes in order for Bisson to make a certain point. The ending certainly makes it hard to take as straight science fiction, even if it’s a transparent reference to one of the all-time classic SF stories. Even though it was published in 1998, and even though Bisson is a very different writer from Robert Silverberg, it does read in part like an homage to early ’70s Silverberg. How much you’ll enjoy that will depend on how much you like early ’70s Silverberg and how well you can cope with his shortcomings.

See you next time.