Synopsis

In rural Virginia, people start seeing bears carrying burning torches.

History

First publication: Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1990

1990 Nebula winner for best short story.

1991 Hugo winner for best short story.

Review

The story has a mysterious quality, but it doesn’t really connect the different things that are going on. It seems incidental, like okay, you can repair a tire by hand, and bears discover fire, and these people have a grandma who dies. What does any of it have to do with each other or anything else? Sampling reviews around the internet, whether the reviewer loves the story or hates the story there seems to be a consensus. That the bears are one story, the death of grandma and the family dynamic is another. They have little to do with each other. If you remove the bears from the backdrop of the story, you have what is described as a banal little story about family and loss. The bears are just added to the background and seem only there to justify getting published in a science fiction magazine. There is a bit of comment about how we see our world of convenience as better than being able to do for ourselves, or is it better? By discovering fire, are the bears going down the road to self-sufficiency or are they going down the road we did to relying on convenience? None of this is answered and none of it seems to have anything to do with grandma dying. This was an award winner, but I don’t care for it. I have come up with my own theory that ties the three stories together. Start with the bears and fire. The discovery of fire was a major step leading us down the road of technology to where we are today. At that time it was good and we needed it for survival. The second story is the one guy insisting on repairing his own tires. Our technology has gotten to a point where the average person can’t do a lot of things for themselves, such as changing a car tire. We hand it off to people who have expensive machinery to do the job. The third story is grandma leaving the nursing home. She does not like the nursing home and the things that are still keeping her alive, but unable to do for herself. She leaves the safe home to go into the forest, away from technology, to die.