Three Things You Must Know About Terry Bisson (May Stalin Bless His Soul)

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"I enjoyed working as an auto mechanic," Terry Bisson, who would later ghost-write a book for the Car Talk guys, once told me. "But one Saturday, when it was raining and I'd been working on this car for hours and I had just barked my knuckles on a bolt that refused to turn, I looked over to the mechanic on a creeper the next car over and said, 'Manuel, why are we doing this to ourselves?'

"And Manuel grinned and said, "You think this is hard? Try chopping cane.'"

So there's the first thing you should know about Terry. He was grounded in reality. He could fix a car or write a book with equal facility.

Another time, I was at a Worldcon in the SFWA suite with Terry and Sheila Williams and Terry started talking about attending the first (and, as it turned out, only) science fiction convention in the Soviet Union. ("As we got off the boat, they handed us all watermelons and we wandered into the woods, carrying them, as if we were in a surrealist painting...") He said, "I told them, 'I know you guys are all capitalists now, but I'm still a Stalinist. I hold to the old ways.'"

Then he got up and walked off. Sheila looked after him, smiled sweetly, and said, "I really had a hard time not saying, 'You and Fidel, Terry.'"

That's the second thing you should know about Terry. He was a committed Communist. As a member of the May 19th Communist Organization, an offshoot of the Weather Underground, he was sentenced to three months in jail for refusing to rat out friends who had gone on the lam.

You don't have to agree with his politics to admire him for that. He walked the walk.

"I'm writing a story with Terry Bisson," I told Gardner Dozois. Gardner looked astonished. Then, savvy editor that he was, he said, "No, you're not."

Gardner was right, of course. When I proposed that we collaborate, Terry had given me some notes he had made for a story in which the protagonist was griping about everything around him even as he was living, as Terry put it, "in a fucking Utopia." I took the notes, wrote a solid beginning to the story, and sent it to him for continuation. And... He apologized that he couldn't do it, and gave me full ownership and carte blanche of the story. So I named the protagonist "Terry Bissel" and published it. 

"Walking Out" placed on the Hugo ballot. At the time, I joked that it would have won if Terry had participated. But awards aren't what matters. What matters is that if he'd participated, it would have been a better story.

That's the third thing you need to know about Terry Bisson. He was a hell of a good writer. "Bears Discover Fire" was one of the best stories of the nineties. Talking Man deserves a place on the Pantheon of Fantasy Fiction. 

Terry wrote far too little and far too rarely. But what he did write was of the finest quality.

And here's a fourth thing you don't need to know but all his friends were aware of: He was one sweet guy.

Vayo con dios, mi amigo. May Stalin himself welcome you into Commie Heaven.

And from Terry's New Yorker profile . . .

On his Web site, Bisson once quoted the Surrealist and communist Paul Eluard: “There is another world, but it is in this one.” When asked about it, he said, gently, “That’s the world I want to be in.”

You can read the profile by Margret Grebowicz here. Read  today, it's a first-class obituary. But it was published while Terry was alive and so he got to read it. Thank you and God bless you for that, Ms. Grebowicz.

And a glimmer of good news  . . .

If you're a subscriber to Locus, you know that Terry has been publishing a series of mini-micro masterpieces of sf under the title of This Month in History, a future history in the form of two or three sentence entries. All are witty, most are satiric, and by slow degrees I found them addictive.

The last time I communicated with Terry, I asked if they would ever see book form. He told me that a small press (I forget its name) would publish them in 2024.

When they do, whoever they are, I'm going to buy a copy.

Above: This picture of Terry Bisson was taken from the PM  Press site. PM Press is leftist, sincere, literary. Terry did a lot of work for and with them. Start here and search for their science fiction publications. You won't be disappointed.

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