(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: airy synth)
Lafferty biography, non-spoiler discussion
JM:
Hello, everyone. This is Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. In this block of episodes, we are continuing to talk about Galaxy magazine. The history of the magazine is something we went into with our first segment. We also talked about Katherine MacLean’s story “Contagion,” C. M. Kornbluth’s story “The Marching Morons,” and Zenna Henderson’s story “Something Bright.” And now it’s time to talk about one of my favorite writers.
This happens sometimes when we do the podcast. I sometimes have a little difficulty, you know, I tend to get a little bit gushy, because I’ve been reading them for a long time, and it’s hard to be completely objective sometimes. And yeah, so like in the case of Fritz Leiber and Jack Vance, we have one here, and I've enjoyed this person’s writing for probably over 20 years now. And yeah, this is the first time I really dug into things. I’m going to try to be a little more critical, because there are a couple of things that we’ll get into later on. But in general, yeah, I really, really like his work a lot.
I just love saying his full name: Raphael Aloysius Lafferty. But this is probably the last time I’ll say it. It’s just so fun to say. He was born in Neola, Iowa, in 1914, and he always wrote under R. A. Lafferty, but to his friends he was Ray. His father was a broker and his mother a teacher, and both were devoutly religious, which would certainly influence his upbringing. He supposed he was either named after Saint Raphael, whose day is October 24, or maybe after the artist. The family moved to Oklahoma, and Lafferty is always considered an Oklahoma writer.
The website RALafferty.org is peppered liberally with fun quotes from both Lafferty and other writers talking about him. I’m going to be reading a lot of those, as well as excerpts from an interview that Lafferty did in 1991. For example, the bio section says, “As to biographical stuff, I am an anonymous maker of medieval miracle plays. Being anonymous, that’s all the biographical stuff I can generate.” I’ve heard him referred to as the “Cranky Old Man from Tulsa,” and I think in this case “cranky” doesn’t necessarily mean ill-tempered, but a little bit of a crank in a charming, irascible sort of way.
Like C. M. Kornbluth, Lafferty seems a bit of a precocious child. There are some further juxtapositions we could make with Kornbluth throughout this section, which are both fun and maybe not so fun. Maybe more on that at the end of the bio bit. But supposedly he memorized a huge multi-volume history of the world at age 14, the same year he graduated from Christ the King Catholic grammar school. He attended night school in the early ’30s, I believe studying mathematics, German, and electrical engineering, and worked for a time in a government office in Washington, D.C. When he moved back to Tulsa, he started at the Clark Electrical Supply Company, and he seems to have maintained work in the electrical field, doing what I’m not exactly sure, until he retired to write full time.
He loved to acquire knowledge as a hobby, especially of languages, and according to his obituary in The New York Times, he taught himself Greek so he could read the books of the New Testament in the original. Like so many others, he enlisted in the Army, and this was in 1942. His training took him all over the U.S., and he was sent overseas to serve in the Pacific areas, spending time in Australia, New Guinea, the Philippines, and Indonesia. He attained the rank of staff sergeant.
His first writing experience seems to have been on newspapers, like many others, but I don’t have any details about this particular phase. His first published story was “The Wagons,” in a 1959 issue of New Mexico Quarterly Review. But his first SF story was “Day of the Glacier,” in the January 1960 issue of The Original Science Fiction Stories. So, not a young man like many of our writers starting out.
During his period of writing, which lasted up until probably the mid-1980s, he published something like 200 short stories and 21 novels, some of which are not really in the SF field. For example, in 1972, the University of Oklahoma Press published his book “Okla Hannali,” a historical-fiction recounting of the Choctaw tribe in Mississippi, the Trail of Tears, and a legendary family. The novel was praised by Dee Brown, author of “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.”
In 1968 — I’m sorry, I’m a bit all over the place here — but in 1968, during an interview, he explained about the beginning of his writing career: “I was a heavy drinker, and I cut down on it, beginning my writing about the same time to fill a certain void.” And yeah, that’s the story I hear pretty often from all kinds of people who have gone through that and have to pick up some other kind of hobby or interest because the drinking was such a big part of their lives, right?
But yeah, his literary agent was Virginia Kidd, former Futurian and wife of James Blish. There are apparently still quite a few unpublished manuscripts, several dozen short stories and about eight novels. The small-press scene has always had a great interest in his work: lots of small and infrequent publications and print runs, lots of chapbooks and small collections. His work is kind of difficult to market, especially, and he never really showed any concern or interest in doing any fixing of that.
He seems, in his writing, to me anyway, a person of many contradictions, which I think makes him a little difficult to get a firm grasp on, but also more interesting. Questions you could ask: is he a moralist? Is he flippant and lighthearted? Does he really believe in global conspiracies? Or is he really just having us on?
He published several short-story collections in the early ’70s, and they have names like “Nine Hundred Grandmothers,” “Strange Doings,” “Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add?: Stories About Secret Places and Mean Men,” and “Through Elegant Eyes: Stories of Austro and the Men Who Know Everything.”
If you ever get a minute, I strongly suggest you take a look through his short-story oeuvre, because some of the titles are just absolutely amazing.
Just off the top of my head, one I saw today in a Damon Knight anthology was “Flaming Ducks and Giant Bread.” Let’s see, what else? “Oh Whatta You Do When the Well Runs Dry?,” “About a Secret Crocodile,” or “Buckets Full of Brains.” Just amazing titles. Truly, truly something.
But his first novel was “Past Master” in 1968, and this is a story about Thomas More traveling into the future on an alien planet and being forced to become world leader. So he gets to try out some of these utopian ideas of his. He’d obviously been working on stuff for a while. Two other novels were published that same year: “The Reefs of Earth” and “Space Chantey,” the latter being a kind of retelling of Homer’s “Odyssey” in the form of a space opera.
So I’ve read mostly Lafferty short stories. I’ve only read a couple of the novels, actually, as yet. I’ve got a lot of stuff yet to experience, which is pretty cool. I’ve certainly read a lot of short stories, but like it says here, he’s got over 200 of them, so yeah, that’s a lot. I’m certainly very interested in reading some of the longer works.
A lot of things were happening for him during this year. It’s also when he had his first real contact with SF fandom at a mini-con in Oklahoma City. In 1969, we got the novel “Fourth Mansions,” inspired by Teresa of Ávila. And he was praised by Roger Zelazny, Samuel R. Delany, Harlan Ellison, and Theodore Sturgeon. According to his introduction to “Land of the Great Horses” in Ellison’s anthology “Dangerous Visions,” Raphael was, quote, “just a boring old man who likes to walk a lot. That’s how I learned stuff, walking everywhere.”
But it seems, though, in 1972, he had some serious health issues, possibly heart-related, that prevented him from traveling anywhere. He also slowed down with the writing, though he’d pick up again in a few years. In ’73, he won the Hugo for his story “Eurema’s Dam,” but he was unable to attend the ceremony in Toronto, even though he had gone to Worldcon in 1969 and apparently had a great time. He continued to attend events when his health somewhat improved, all the way up into the early ’90s. He had effectively retired from writing by 1990. He never married and spent much of his life in Tulsa with one of his sisters, Anna.
So Lafferty had this to say about the editors he experienced: “The only editor who changed many of my stories was Pohl, and none of his changes were fatal. He just had a fetish for leaving his mark on every story he edited.” His favorite editors were H. L. Gold, Terry Carr, and Damon Knight, the last of whom published Lafferty frequently in an anthology series called “Orbit.”
Lafferty said the least perceptive of his panners were James Blish, Christopher Priest, Thomas Monteleone, and Spider Robinson. And he said it’s a quirk of his that he remembers those more than the ones who praised him.
On the Hugo Award for “Eurema’s Dam,” the short story, he said, “Winning the Hugo Award for ‘Eurema’s Dam’ puzzled me completely, and I’m still puzzled by it. It was a pleasant little story, but I had four or five better stories published that year. And moreover, it was tied with a story by Fred Pohl, which, out of common decency, I will not name. It was one of the worst stories ever written by anybody anywhere. Still, I was glad to have a Hugo. I don’t believe it had much effect on my career. I think the effect of Hugos is greatly exaggerated. And I’ve heard four or five different writers express puzzlement over winning Hugos with stories that were pretty ordinary, and being passed over on stories which they really believed were earth-shaking."
And if you’re curious to know, the Pohl story is actually a collaboration with Kornbluth — posthumous, of course, in Kornbluth’s case — called “The Meeting.” I haven’t read it, but Lafferty thinks it’s really bad. I was curious about it before doing this, because it came up during my Kornbluth reading, so I especially would like to read it now and see why Ray thinks it’s so terrible.
And this is fun, too. About reading science fiction, Lafferty says, “No, I don’t read much science fiction these days. I never did read much, except for a few months period, when I read several hundred of what were supposed to be the best science fiction books ever. This was when I first decided to major in science fiction, as it was selling for me and other stuff wasn’t. Well, it was a good crash course, and I was glad that I absorbed it. And I read quite a bit of science fiction during several of the Golden Ages, or little Golden Ages. But the present time is not a little Golden Age, and I do not read much science fiction.
“Of the current SF writers, I probably like Gene Wolfe the best, and Gregory Benford, David Brin, Greg Bear — the three busy Bs — John Shirley. I don’t like his opinions or the movements he attaches himself to, but he can write. Madeleine L’Engle, Robert Bloch — he’s been doing it for more than 50 years, but he’s still good — James Hogan, I think of him as a young writer, but he’s 48, Michael Bishop, Ed Bryant, and Ray Bradbury, who is still at the top of whatever it is that he writes. I have no idea why so many writers on this shortlist have names beginning with B. I had nothing to do with naming them.”
It seems to me like he read quite a bit of science fiction, protesting too much there.
Nate:
Yeah, his comments about Pohl are certainly interesting there, because from what I got, Gold was the much heavier editor and rewriter of stories. So it’s kind of interesting that he wasn’t really too thrilled with Pohl’s edits, and didn’t really like “The Meeting,” which appears in the “Best of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth” book that I have. So I don’t know, I guess it’s just the case of life, of some people not really getting along with other people.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I don’t know. It sounds kind of playful to me. I don’t know. It seems like he has nothing against Fred Pohl. But yeah, it’s funny that he mentions John Shirley, for example, because I can’t imagine two more different writers. John Shirley is like this mad punk-rock kind of guy. It’s cool that Lafferty noticed him positively, even though he has to say, “Oh, I disagree with everything he says, but he can write.”
So Lafferty does have this to say about being called a surrealist, which has happened quite often. He says, “I don’t regard myself as a Surrealist in the sense of the ‘Surrealist Manifesto’ published by André Breton in 1924. To me, that Manifesto is somewhat dated, being a recoil from World War I, and being too heavily Freudian. My own unconscious is more Jungian than Freudian. But if Breton hadn’t staked claim to the name, I would probably call myself a Surrealist in the ‘Remembrance of Things Within’ sense, but not in the ‘world of dream and fantasy joined to the everyday rational world, becoming an absolute reality, a surreality.’ I suppose that I believe in another sort of a surreality or super-reality. But it would have to be on a wider basis than the encounters of myself and me. As often as not, it is the subconscious that supplies the rational element, and the exterior world that supplies the dream and fantasy feeling.”
So yeah, all this stuff was published in “Lan’s Lantern,” an SF fanzine, in issue 39, in 1991, and you can find that online on, I believe, Tom Jackson’s blog.
As well as the Hugo, he won a World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1990, the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oklahoma Department of Libraries, and in 2002, right after his death, the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award. Previously, he’d also won the Invisible Little Man Award in California in 1972, and the Seiun Award for short fiction in Japan in 1975, which I thought was kind of interesting. He died at a nursing home in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, at age 87.
When asked by Tom Jackson about his retirement, and about the greatest thrill he’d had as a writer, he said,
“Yes, it’s true that I’ve been retired from writing, except for a little bit of revision when old and unsold books finally pushed themselves into the accepted category. Yes, when a baseball player retires, he’s usually asked what his biggest thrill was. But most of them are uncomfortable with the question, unless they have won the seventh game of a World Series with a homer. And I’ve never done that. I am reasonably happy with what I have written and with the reception that it has had. But I can’t think of any one work or event that makes it to the ‘greatest thrill’ category.
“It’s a little bit like asking a man who has loved his breakfast eggs for 60 years to name the most thrilling egg he ever ate. He might hesitate a bit and come out with something no better than, ‘There was a really superior egg on June the 9th of 1932, and another on February 8 of 1947, and in 1951, it was either April 4 or April 5, I had two absolutely perfect eggs. But no, it would be presumptuous of me to name the most thrilling egg I ever ate. They were all so good.’”
While he may have always been a cult writer, it does seem like interest in his work has only increased since his death. There have been several articles in major newspapers, including The Guardian in 2014, some scholarly work, and collector’s-edition volumes from Centipede Press, which seem very pricey and have low print runs. So it’s not exactly something that the average reader can easily acquire.
There are translations into other languages, especially Japanese. I mention this because there seems to be a strong Japanese Lafferty fandom. Also, in 2014, the magazine Hayakawa SF released a Lafferty centennial issue. You can find pictures of that online, but I don’t think any of the stuff inside it has been translated.
In 2011, the copyright to a huge portion of his work was for sale, and the Locus Science Fiction Foundation acquired it under the auspices of Neil Gaiman, who always championed his work and even wrote a story inspired by tonight’s episode pick, entitled “Sunbird.” In his introduction to that story, Gaiman wrote, “There was a writer from Tulsa, Oklahoma. He died in 2002. And he was, for a little while in the late 1960s and early ’70s, the best short story writer in the world. His name was R. A. Lafferty, and his stories were unclassifiable and odd and inimitable. You knew you were reading a Lafferty story within a sentence. When I was young, I wrote to him, and he wrote back. I sent him a Lafferty pastiche I had written, and he was not rude about it, but he was encouraging and informative and took me very seriously, which is good, because I was about 20 and took myself very seriously as well.”
Among the other praise, Roger Zelazny says, “Lafferty has the power which sets fire behind your eyeballs. There is warmth, illumination, and a certain joy attendant upon the experience.” Theodore Sturgeon, a writer we’ll be talking about more later on, says, “Like ‘Gulliver’s Travels,’ almost all of Lafferty can be read as enchanting entertainments, or as sharply etched political cartoonery, or as analogues of a superbly thought-out philosophy concerning human nature and human conduct. In other words, you get out of Lafferty, as out of Swift, whatever you’re equipped to bring in.”
Now, I will have to say there’s a new podcast about Lafferty, mostly about him anyway, and it’s created by somebody named Daniel Otto Jack Petersen, or as he calls himself, Daniel Otto Jack Petersen, also known as Dr. Rockter. This guy has done a PhD on Lafferty as it relates to monster theory and ecology, I believe. The name of the podcast is “The Hole on the Corner,” which is one of Lafferty’s stories. The man clearly loves Lafferty’s work, and the enthusiasm on display is just really great. I did have a chat about this subject with him, and he was very forthcoming. We had a nice little dialogue, and it was really cool.
But unfortunately, I do have to share something less than enthusiastic. This was something that Petersen himself revealed in what I think is still the last “Hole on the Corner” episode. This comes from an examination of Lafferty’s correspondence. If this sort of thing had come up in one of Lafferty’s stories, I would have doubted it, and I would probably have said, well, who knows if this is really what he believes? But it seems like this is something that he wrote about to a publisher friend, and he apparently had several journals about the subject in his collection, basically.
I had no idea about this before we decided to do this podcast, so you can imagine that it’s made me more than a little — well, I really think sad is probably the best word. A bit angry, but I’m not sure what the point is in being angry with a dead man, really.
As alluded to before, there is a propensity for conspiracies in Lafferty tales. Usually I get the sense that it isn’t something that he takes all that seriously, but it does appear that he was fascinated by cabals, mysterious elites, and global, historically massive conspiracies. Now, I don’t know if he falls into the general bracket of people who believe in this particular heinous conspiracy idea, but it’s one that has been promulgated for a long time, and really goes back to before the Second World War. So we won’t talk about all that here, since I think it’s way beyond the scope of the podcast and a pretty unpleasant subject, too.
But I hate to cap off the talk about him like this. As Nate said the other day, we are a warts-and-all podcast. So basically, in this letter, which I won’t quote, unlike some of the fun stuff earlier, Lafferty outed himself pretty flagrantly and casually as a Holocaust denier. Now, I’ve no doubt that Lafferty would have fought, “on the side of the angels” anyway during World War II, regardless and all. But he does what a lot of these people do and focuses obsessively on the numbers, and on how it doesn’t add up, and the Germans needed workers, blah, blah, blah, and the diaspora of Jewish people after the war meant that it couldn’t have been six million who were deliberately exterminated. So basically, Jews died because of famine and disease, and the camps were work camps, not death camps.
For someone who went to school as a kid in local Jewish communities, it’s especially somewhat of a hard pill to swallow. I kind of thought about it, and it made me sad to read this. I’m still going to read Lafferty, but I guess now, when I recommend him, I have to keep this in mind as well. It’s unfortunate.
Nate:
Yeah, it is an unfortunate taint over the work. I mean, the story we’re getting into tonight really doesn’t go into that stuff at all, really. We can tie it to some conspiracy stuff that I’ll get into in a little bit when we talk about the story, but there’s certainly no antisemitism or racism, really, anywhere in the story that we’re talking about tonight. But yeah, it is definitely an unfortunate taint over the man himself.
Gretchen:
Yeah, we have covered in an earlier episode, “Triumph of Mechanics,” where you can make a connection between the ideology of the author that is obviously much more extreme than this, but in a similar vein. I feel like that one is more easily connectable to that than this story is to Lafferty’s beliefs, although it does, as you said, Nate, cast the person himself in a different light.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
JM:
Yeah, it’s just puzzling to me, because when I read his work, I can see the Catholicism. I can see a conservative streak. After reading a lot of his short stories over a period of several months, I started to get this feeling, like sometimes he was reprimanding “the kids today” sort of thing. This was in the 1960s, right? And taking a stance against what he considered, I guess, moral laxitude and drug use — of course, not alcohol. That’s cool. But anything else, right?
I don’t know. I mean, it didn’t really bother me, I guess, because I just kind of thought, well, you know, I don’t have to agree. I think he does it in a really fun way, even if ideologically we would be at odds, right? Just seeing him praise John Shirley kind of makes me think, yeah, I would probably go the other way too, right? But it just doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of hate in his work. It was honestly kind of a shock to me to read this.
It’s interesting because I’ve listened to a fair number of musicians who have some pretty reprehensible views, and I’m a little less easygoing about that than I think I used to be. But at the same time, it never really bothered me as much. I think it’s because when you read a writer and you get really attached to their work, you kind of feel a special connection with them and what they say.
The thing about Lafferty — and you guys probably didn’t get a chance to do this — but this story, for example, I had a chance to read it aloud to somebody when we were getting ready to record. To me, his stories are definitely meant to be read in that way. They’re meant to be spoken. They’re something that you just really enjoy doing. If you read a lot of his stories, you want to share them because they’re meant to be read aloud. And now having to consider this, all of that, I’m annoyed about it.
It is true that the name of his complete short-story collection, which is only available online because it’s absolutely massive, and I guess it would be impossible to print it all together in one book, is “The Man Who Told Tales.” He’s really interested in all these different themes. I actually wrote down a whole bunch of Lafferty — what I think are, I guess, like Lafferty themes, not just themes, but little things that he does that are distinctly him, or what he wants to talk about kind of thing.
So it was kind of brought on by reading this story. The first item is lists. It’s not really necessarily in any order, but he likes to make lists of things. Some of the lists are really, really outrageous, and some of them go on for a really long time. They’re a lot of fun. There’s one in one of his stories that’s like a page and a half long or something like that, and it’s a list of things that a statue that suddenly comes to life smells, or something like that. It’s everything from the most simple, honest thing to some really crazy stuff.
So we also have ecology. We have the tall tales. We have not being able to take anything at face value. We have languages, wordplay, hoaxes, mythology, Christianity, Catholicism specifically, Native American lore, Irish traditions, “impure science,” conspiracies, special individuals from previous races, maybe evolution or not, the kids today and their follies, and the follies of moral relativism. And yeah, also poetry, and also a lot of really, really awesome sentences and structures, the way he puts things together.
So this was a pretty simple story. It’s a really straightforward one by his standards, but it fits into the tall-tale thing very well. It really does feel like a fable. I don’t know. I really enjoyed this one. What do you guys think?
Nate:
Yeah, this was cool. It touches on some interesting things, specifically the myth of the lone inventor. We talked about Nikola Tesla in particular a couple of times in the past, especially when we did the Edisonade episode, but also a bit when we talked about “The First Men in the Moon,” where Tesla himself was specifically cited by Wells as receiving communications from Mars, which is something that Tesla actually claimed in real life in a newspaper.
But Tesla has a pretty big cult following. There’s really no other way to put it. Nowadays, that basically claims that Tesla singlehandedly invented all of modern technology and had everything stolen from him by Edison, Marconi, the powers that be, the big financiers and whatnot. There is definitely a lot of conspiratorial bent to all that. I don’t really want to get into all that here. We talked about that at length in the Edisonade episode. But a lot of it is a great oversimplification at best and just total bullshit at worst.
But yeah, in this story we get the lone inventor who singlehandedly invents all of modern technology by himself.
JM:
Which is incredible, right? I know it’s incredible. It’s just like, yeah, go with it.
Nate:
And I guess it’s an interesting twist of who takes it away from him — the credit, that is.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I also thought this was a really interesting story. And going back to your point, JM, about how this is like a story that’s meant to be read, it does read as a story with a lot of potential as an oral tale, like an oral storytelling tradition that it feels like it comes from. I really do like that style quite a lot.
Going into the story, I’d not read Lafferty before, although I had been wanting to read something beforehand. Before getting to the story, I had been meaning to read some of his work. I knew that he had this whimsical, or like surrealism — that’s sort of what he mentions as something that, if it hadn’t already been coined by Breton, he would have called his stories. I think that more out-there quality isn’t necessarily seen in this story, but that same wonder is apparent in this one.
JM:
This story, again, you can’t really take any of it at face value. There’s certainly whimsy, but it’s also spinning this weird fable around technology. And also, yeah, it has the traditional three passes of a fairy tale, like a folktale. It’s always in threes, right? You get three chances to get it right, or on the third strike you’re done, kind of thing. Or maybe it’s a success.
He’s written some other stories like this. Gretchen, I told you about one that I think is a favorite, and I was pleasantly surprised because, in an interview, Lafferty listed some of the stories that he thought were among his best. One of them was a story called “Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies.” It’s a story about imagining what if somebody invented television in the 1800s, and they were selling these TV sets. There were only like ten of them ever made, and the programs were part of the set. They were all difficult to make out, and they were supposed to be silent, but occasionally sound would leak through.
It’s basically a story of the troupe that created these 1800s TV programs, and the weird stuff that happened to them, and the chronicling of about twelve different programs that they made. A lot of the programs are very silly. They have different genres that they’re playing with, like Westerns, comedy, a murder mystery, different things. So Lafferty is playing with different types of story.
It just kind of occurred to me while reading that, and while listening to one of Daniel Petersen’s podcast episodes, where he’s talking about a story called — oh no, what’s it called? — “Barnaby’s Clock.” It’s a story that I read a while ago. He starts the story in about five different ways before settling down on a specific way to tell the story. It reminds me a lot of “If on a winter’s night a traveler” by Italo Calvino, you know, and the way he plays around with stuff like that. It’s really fun.
And so this isn’t the only inventor fable that he’s told. I don’t know if this one is quite as wild and crazy as “Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies,” which is actually a story that he wrote later on, but it’s a lot of fun.
Yeah, why don’t we just get into it then? I’ll just do the summary and we can talk more about it. I’m going to sprinkle in a bunch of actual Lafferty quotes from the story. To just try to summarize a Lafferty story does no good. You have to read it. You have to listen to somebody tell it a lot. That’s what it’s all about. So if you haven’t read the story, I mean, really, we can say this for almost pretty much everything good that we talk about on the podcast, but go read the story and come back.
(music: machinery)
spoiler summary and discussion
JM:
Higgston Rainbird in the late 1700s: the story is about him. He’s only known for a few modest inventions today: a plowhead, a chestnut roaster, a log splitter, and a nutmeg grater with a new safety feature. But things apparently could have been different.
Actually, though, folks don’t know it, he pioneered the steam automobile, the dynamo, the steel industry, ferro-concrete construction, the internal combustion engine, electric light and power, the wireless, the televox, petroleum and petrochemical industries, the monorail, the airplane, world-wide monitoring, fission power, space travel, group telepathy, and political and economic balance. So yeah, Ayn Rand would have probably been very attracted to him if she were alive in the 1700s, because he does everything.
As well as making great strides toward immortality and the ever-nebulous apotheosis of man, he also built a retrogressor. What’s that, you may well ask? Well, you’ll find out shortly. It isn’t fair that nobody knows all this stuff. Even the once-solid facts are no longer so solid.
It all starts on a June afternoon in 1779. Now, Rainbird loves to hawk from the summit of Devil’s Head Mountain. It’s his favorite thing in the world. But Rainbird knows nobody can have everything, and he’s working on a sparker in his shed that he really needs to finish. At the moment, the hawking and the copper-strip sparker are about of equal balance in his fascinations. But after that point, he’s less of a hawker and more of a builder, and he is an inventor, dedicated and single-minded, for 65 years.
The hand-crank sparker was not a success, but looked cool. And it was just the beginning. Everything he made is a progression of every previous thing, and so the ultimate retrogressor couldn’t have existed without the hand-crank sparker.
Steam and iron and power: those are the things, with many mistakes along the journey. He married, “a shrew,” because he knew a man could not achieve without a goad as well as a goal. But he had no heir, and at a certain point this became worrisome to him.
His achievements are really incredible, literally, and there’s no reason for someone like this to think his life was a waste. And yet now, the old, peevish Rainbird wishes he’d worked on expanding the capabilities of the human mind.
Morosely, he goes back and works on his sparker. All his many achievements start to seem like nothing but toys. The retrogressor, though, that’s something.
“I would do much more along this line had I the time. But I’m pepper-bellied pretty near the end of the road. It is like finally coming to a gate and seeing a whole greater world beyond it, and being too old and too feeble to enter.”
He kicked a chair and broke it.
“I never even made a better chair. Never got around to it. There are so clod-hopping many things I meant to do.”
If I’d only had a mentor, he thinks. But there was nobody. Except, he starts to write a list of the things he’d have done better. A better pen, better whisky. Dang it. He turns on the retrogressor, gets in, and goes back 65 years and up 2,000 feet. And I picture this a lot like Wells’s “The Time Machine,” which is pretty cool.
Now, on that June day in 1779, an old man appears to young Higgston, just as the hawk reappears with that passenger pigeon in its maw.
“It’s fun,” said the old man, “but the bird is tough, and you have a lot to do. Sit down and listen, Higgston.”
“How do you know the bird is tough? Who are you, and how did an old man like you climb up here without my seeing you? And how in hellpepper did you know that my name was Higgston?”
“I ate the bird, and I remember that it was tough. I am just an old man who would tell you a few things to avoid in your life, and I came up here by means of an invention of my own. And I know your name is Higgston, as it is also my name; you being named after me, or I after you, I forget which. Which one of us is the oldest anyhow?”
And that’s really funny, because it reminded me of something that I read in a “Doctor Who” story once. The Doctor was talking about his older incarnations, as in his earlier ones, and I’m like, surely the older ones would be the present ones, the current ones. But anyway, yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, “The Three Doctors” and “The Five Doctors” and any of the serials where the Doctors interact with one another aren’t like my all-time favorites, but it’s always funny to have them give little quips to one another like that.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, right.
So the old Rainbird commences to tell the young Rainbird of all the connections, all the blind alleys, and all the bright avenues. Young Higgston is a little impatient, but he listens to the old man gab on for five hours.
He tells him steam isn’t everything — this before he knows that it was anything. You can see why this might be a little bit of a mistake already. Don’t waste time trying to devise the perfect apple-corer, because there never will be a perfect apple-corer.
He told him a bejammed lot of things about a confounded huge variety of subjects. Oh, and mathematics too. It’s slow to be self-taught. But he didn’t push it too far this time, and so young Higgston goes to work.
This time Rainbird progresses faster than ever, having hydroelectric power for his own shop that same year, and incandescent light bulbs by 1783. Three years later, his village of Knobknocker is all lit up. The first diesel locomotive? Now, that happened in 1796, as everyone should, but doesn’t, know.
At the turn of the century: wireless telegraphy, televoxes, radio, film, a transcription machine, and indefinite meat preservation at any temperature. A rocket to England at seven cents a hundredweight. Fissionable power in 1813. A Think Machine to work out the problems he was too busy to solve, and a Prediction Machine to pose new ones.
In 1830, the first Martian tobacco goes on the market. Venus is awful, so he founds the Institute for the Atmospheric Rehabilitation of Venus in 1836. He made an automaton drinking buddy to tell him he was the man.
Yet for all that, he realizes the field of human engineering would never really be finished. Certainly not by him. But he does manage to build a retrogressor.
And one day he looks in the mirror and frowns.
“I never did get around to making a better mirror. This one is hideous. However (to consider every possibility) let us weigh the thesis that it is the image and not the mirror that is hideous.”
So he calls up an acquaintance.
“Say, Ulois, what year is this anyhow?”
“1844.”
“Are you sure?”
“Reasonably sure.”
“How old am I?”
“Eighty-five, I think, Higgston.”
“How long have I been an old man?”
“Quite a while, Higgston, quite a while.”
Higgston Rainbird hung up rudely.
“I wonder how I ever let a thing like that slip up on me?” he said to himself.
Too late, he realizes he should have worked on corporeal immortality a little earlier. The Prediction Machine says he’ll die that very year, and he feels he’s bungled everything.
“What a saddle-galled splay-footed situation to find myself in!”
So he goes back and up in his retrogressor, and it’s a June afternoon in 1779 at Devil’s Head Mountain.
Young Higgston sure does love hawking. “Forget the bird,” says the subtly appearing old man, “and give a listen with those outsized ears of yours.” And the old man is a bit strident and insistent, and kind of just makes Higgston want to do more bird hunting.
Old Man Rainbird begins a rang-dang-do of a spiel, a mummywhammy of admonition and exposition. Young Higgston almost forgets the hawk. But not really. The hawk has caught a dove.
“Listen to me, you spraddling jack,” says the frustrated old Rainbird. He tells Higgston incredible things about the cosmos while the hawk goes down the mountain one more time. When he comes back, the hawk has a rainbird. And that’s either a cuckoo or a legendary bird of Native American mythology. Not sure what it looks like, but apparently you can find the design on all kinds of pottery and stuff like that. And it’s supposed to be the bringer of life, according to many tribal traditions.
So Old Rainbird, the man, has an epiphany.
“Nobody ever gives up pleasure willingly,” he said, “and there is always the sneaking feeling that the bargain may not have been perfect. This is one of the things I have missed. I haven’t hawked for sixty-five years. Let me fly him this time, Higgston.”
And he does, one last time. And I like to think that maybe this is one of Old Rainbird’s happiest moments before he winks out of existence, canceling out himself, all his marvelous inventions, and the once-solid facts of their existence.
Young Higgston says, “I wonder where he went? And where in apple-knockers’ heaven did he come from? Or was he ever here at all? That’s a danged funny machine he came in, if he did come in it. All the wheels are on the inside. But I can use the gears from it, and the clock, and the copper wire. It must have taken weeks to hammer that much wire out that fine. I wish I’d paid more attention to what he was saying, but he poured it on a little thick. I’d have gone along with him on it if only he’d have found a good stopping place a little sooner, and hadn’t been so insistent on giving up hawking. Well, I’ll just hawk here till dark, and if it dawns clear, I’ll be up again in the morning. And Sunday, if I have a little time, I may work on my sparker or my chestnut roaster.”
Higgston Rainbird lived a long and successful life. Locally, he was known for hawking and horse racing. As an inventor, he was recognized as far as Boston. And that’s the end of the story.
And yeah, what could have been? But yeah, a lot of fun, really, really enjoyable, funny, but kind of wistful. Somehow the sadness isn’t really — I don’t know. I mean, that last moment of the two of them sharing the moment with the bird and everything like that, it’s quite touching. And it feels kind of like it undercuts the sort of ridiculous, almost, sadness that Old Rainbird feels about not having achieved all this stuff. And yeah, now he’s erased himself from all his glorious inventions. But hey.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, it has a nice message there where work isn’t everything, and personal recognition isn’t everything. It kind of reminds me of “Citizen Kane,” you know, like the only time Kane was legitimately happy in his life was when he was playing with his sled as a kid. Sometimes the workaholic impulse can really drain everything out of you. And that’s pretty much what the, I guess, second incarnation of Rainbird was, when he basically invented everything and feels like he has to improve on himself. He realizes at the end that, well, this isn’t everything to life. When he starts hawking again, he realizes that he missed out on so much, or the things that really do matter in life with these simple pleasures. So it was kind of a nice touch.
I also liked the notion that technology gets more and more complex as it progresses, which is why the final incarnation of Rainbird couldn’t really understand anything of what he was saying, as opposed to the previous incarnation of Rainbird, where the technology wasn’t as far progressed and was a little bit more simple. Just like I feel confident, if I went back into the 1700s, I could probably reasonably explain the principles behind electromagnetic induction, even though I don’t have all the formulas in front of me. You know, the basic idea really isn’t that difficult to wrap your head around, whereas nanoscale fabrication of modern transistors is way beyond what I’d be able to explain, or what somebody would be able to reasonably do.
Gretchen:
So yeah, that aspect of the story did remind me a bit of the Poul Anderson story that we read for the time-travel episode, “The Man Who Came Early.” But that one — because kind of like this whole idea of, at least with the first return of Old Rainbird, he has experienced the sorts of things that can make his knowledge relatable to the young Rainbird, but you can’t really do that, as you said, Nate, with the complexity that the second incarnation has reached.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, if you don’t have the basic foundation — I mean, in this case, it would be a lot more than a basic foundation. It would be basically an entire lifetime’s worth of experience to understand the technical complexities of all that. It’s just going to sound like complete and utter nonsense. And you can just picture somebody from the 1700s hearing all this stuff. It would just sound like the ravings of a madman.
Gretchen:
Yeah, and I think it’s also interesting that it’s because the first returned Rainbird not only has technology simpler, so it’s easier to relate to his younger self, but he does have the life experience. He did experience the joys of hawking for longer. And he’s able to say, well, I know that that bird is going to be bad because it’s tough, because I ate it. And the second one wasn’t able to say anything like that, or relate to his younger self in that same way, because he just learned it from his other self. He didn’t have that life experience.
Yeah, all work, work, work. And the first one has some kind of sense of balance between the two. Yeah, it’s an interesting story. And yeah, it’s kind of neat how it is fairy-tale-esque in a way. It does touch on some very interesting themes in its very short length. I mean, I think this is maybe like 5,000 words or so. It’s really not a long story at all. It’s another one of these that you could easily read in like 20 minutes.
JM:
Yeah, it’s really short, right? Some of the stories are tonight.
Obviously, literally speaking, we can’t really imagine how one person could do all this stuff. I mean, it does kind of suggest that he had a lot of people behind him eventually. But yeah, the whole idea of industrial operation takes teams of thousands of people to get from one point to another, right? And it just seems incredible. But at the same time, again, he’s just asking us to go with it. It’s a fable, right?
So that also reminds me of a type of dream that I always have, getting a bit personal here. But I didn’t do very well in school. I think that I could have done a lot better. I mean, it is true that there were some actual obstacles in my way, but the biggest obstacle was probably myself, and just not really caring about deadlines, and not wanting to do assignments when I was at home, being distracted by other stuff, and so just not doing very well in school.
I don’t know when this started. It probably started sometime maybe in my thirties or something like that. But I started having these dreams about going back to school. And somehow in the dreams, they seem to get younger and younger, right? But at the same time, I have the knowledge that I have now. So I’m going back, and I’m like, okay, now you have to do this, and you have to do this right. And I’m telling myself, you have to do it properly this time so you can achieve more stuff and be better at this.
And then I'm telling myself all this, in the usual kind of messed-up time fashion of dreams, or at least my dreams, all of a sudden it’s later, right? Like maybe many months later. And it’s like I wake up all of a sudden and realize, oh no, I haven’t actually gone to any of these classes. I don’t even know what time I’m supposed to be in class right now. Oh, I’m going to screw this up all over again. And reading this just kind of reminds me of that. There are lots of movies about this too.
Nate:
Yeah, the high-school-type dreams, I think, are a lot more common than you think. It’s been a while since I’ve had one, but I’ve definitely had a couple of those as an adult. And they take on ridiculous forms.
Gretchen:
Yes. Yeah, I’ve definitely had my fair share of school dreams.
JM:
Yeah, being able to undo your mistakes, having the second chance and then blowing it. Because for some reason, you just do, right? Because it’s in your nature or something like that. You can’t escape who you are, kind of thing. And yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know how it would really go.
I was trying to think of something. My friend is recently reading a book, I think it’s called “Cassandra in Reverse.” Yeah, but I don’t remember the name of the author. And it’s a book about a woman who gets to relive things in her life and try to maybe do things differently, if she can. I don’t know if she’s going to succeed or not. But yeah, it’s interesting, because I guess that’s a feeling a lot of people have. You don’t want to spend too much time thinking about that because you’ll get lost in regrets. It’ll just never end, right? But yeah, sometimes when you’re sleeping at night, your unconscious comes up with this stuff and you can’t really avoid it.
But yeah, really fun story. I don’t know. It’s really hard picking a Lafferty story to read because he’s got so many, and what’s representative? But I think this is a good starting point. I told Daniel Petersen that we were going to do this story, and he seemed to think it was a good choice. It’s got a lot of his trademarks. It doesn’t really get too weird. It doesn’t get into the conspiracy stuff. It’s fairly straightforward in a narrative sense, and it’s still got the humor. It’s still got the tall-tale aspect. And yeah, I like it a lot.
Welcome to Lafferty. And yeah, I mean, the man might not appeal to everyone on certain levels. Certainly, the first thing I noticed after a while was that I started to realize, oh, he and I wouldn’t agree on some stuff. Obviously, the conservative Catholic mindset and everything. But it doesn’t come through in everything. And also, again, I think when he expresses it, generally, you don’t feel like you’re being attacked just for being a more agnostic, atheistic, or liberal-minded person or something like that. He puts a lot of humor into it, and he kind of makes it feel gentle, almost, in a way.
And I certainly don’t think there’s any overt antisemitism in any of the stories that I’ve read, although Daniel Petersen does say, if you read enough of this stuff, you might see it eventually. But yeah, I don’t know. That’s something that I don’t really feel equipped to comment on yet.
Nate:
Yeah, I certainly enjoyed this one. And again, it doesn’t really have any negative taints on it, aside from the background stuff on the author, which you wouldn’t really get the vibe from just reading the story.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. And I know, as we go through the podcast and we cover more authors, we will be talking about people who maybe we don’t agree with, to put it mildly, or maybe, more intensely, are really horrible people. I don’t know. I mean, we did talk about the writer of “The Triumph of Mechanics” a while ago. And yeah, I kind of made a game of that one. I waited until after the story to mention his allegiances and stuff like that. And I couldn’t do that with this just because it’s too personal, right?
I mean, that’s not even as bad. We could talk about L. Ron Hubbard at some point. We could talk about, and I know this is like a controversial thing, but from a lot of what I’ve read, Robert Heinlein doesn’t seem like a very good guy.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
We’re going to be talking about him at some point. We’re going to be talking about possibly others who, yeah, they may have some not-even-skeletons in the closet, but some stuff that’s right out there in the open. So just something that you have to adjust to when you’re talking about artists.
But unfortunately, what I’ve found in these kind of situations, and I’ve explained this to people when it comes to music as well, is that, yeah, it’s all fine. Everything’s fine until it’s personal. And then it’s not, right? Then suddenly it’s not fine. It’s not cool anymore. And you can’t just laugh about it and be like, oh yeah, what a crazy guy, right? It gets personal really quick.
Sometimes this is what I find in the music scene and stuff, when you think about the people who have to promote the shows, and that it’s not just one guy getting out there doing his stuff. There are a whole bunch of people behind that who are organizing that. Is everybody just going to sit down and take whatever they have to say? Or is somebody going to at some point say, no, that’s not cool, I don’t want you doing your stuff here, I don’t want you playing the show, or whatever? It’s something I think a lot of us who are into weirder, maybe more extreme art stuff have to face up to eventually at some point.
Yeah, I generally can’t think too ill of Lafferty, because he’s a favorite, I guess. But the comments that he made — he was also an old man when he made them. And who knows? We covered it. And I don’t know, maybe I’d like to do one of the longer works at some point, maybe “The Reefs of Earth,” maybe “Fourth Mansions” or something like that. Sometime in the future, probably not for a while. But yeah, I’d like to do one of the longer works at some point on the podcast, or maybe for a host choice or something like that. So hopefully you guys are amenable to that.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I mean, I really enjoyed this story, and I would like to read more Lafferty, keeping in mind what you’ve learned about him. And maybe, as you said, JM, if you read enough stories, you may see some of that in his writing. But I think, keeping that critical eye about it, I definitely would enjoy reading more of his work.
Nate:
Well, speaking of keeping a critical eye and taking the warts-and-all approach, should we move on to the next one?
Gretchen:
Yes.
JM:
Yeah. So let’s talk about Margaret St. Clair.
Bibliography:
Arrive at Easterwine blog https://www.arriveateasterwine.com/portfolio
Jackson, Tom - "My interview with R.A. Lafferty" https://sanduskyregister.com/news/166265/my-interview-with-ra-lafferty/
Otto Jack Petersen, Daniel - "The Hole on the Corner" podcast https://www.youtube.com/@Doctor_Rockter
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