Weekly Short Story: Rainbird by R.A. Lafferty

The 1961 short story Rainbird, by R.A. Lafferty, is one of those quintessential time traveling tales that hit the reader with the obligatory built-in paradox whenever the idea of going back in time is explored.  I first read it a few years ago and came across it again while thumbing through the science fiction anthology Against Tomorrow (ed. by Robert Hoskins, Fawcett Books, 1979).  "Rainbird" in the story is the last name of a Yankee inventor born in the late eighteenth century whose innovations dramatically accelerate the advance of technology well beyond what we know from history...for example, wiring up Philadelphia for electricity by 1799, nuclear fission by 1813, desalinization of seawater by 1817, and later working on Venus to clean up its atmosphere and make it habitable, to mention just a few of the "goodies". Pretty impressive stuff, right? So why aren't we celebrating today the genius of Mr. Higgston Rainbird? Well, turns out that among his more advanced inventions is a "retrogressor" (i.e. time machine)...and that changes everything "forever"...

I guess I could go on about time travel paradoxes, but instead I'd like to make a couple of comments on the idea of human advancement through the growth of science and technology.  First of all, the idea that a single individual by means of just tinkering around could by himself come up with all the complexities of modern technology is absurd...I remember that great old PBS science series Connections, hosted by James Burke, that revealed how our innovations are almost always composites of several earlier innovations that often come together in accidental, happenstance fashion.  When there is credit given to the inventor of a new process or product, almost always he or she is simply building on top of an already-established mountain of progress that others had earlier contributed to, often with no idea of their future applications.  My second comment is about how people living in a relatively technologically-advanced society will treat themselves as being more advanced than others who live in more primitive surroundings...even though the overwhelming majority of them are only users of the improved technology and are in no way responsible for creating it...

Check out Rainbird if you can find it; unfortunately, it apparently isn't in the public domain so I cannot put a link to it here for you to read...