On Sunday, July 6th, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer played an incredible tennis match at Wimbledon, but what I found most interesting was that no U.S. men reached even the semi-finals, nor did they at the French Open. I also watched the televised celebration of the fourth of July at the U.S. Capitol and was far less than impressed with the performance of “American Idol” Tyler Hicks. On what might seem an unrelated note, the performance of American stock analysts was woefully inadequate in ferreting out and making public the all-too-obvious weaknesses in the mortgage securitization field, and the greed of all too many institutional investors in seeking “quick and unrealistic profits” was a major factor in creating the circumstances that led to the mortgage meltdown and the current recession. And, in the field of F&SF writing, where are the new “great” young American males? I see women with promise; I see comparatively young British writers like Charles Stross. I see a “great” book here and there, but see comparatively little continued production of consistently good books by more than just a few American male writers under 40, while the shelves are exploding with books by American women.

Admittedly, these are semi-anecdotal examples, but from what I’ve seen, they’re definitely representative. In all these cases, American men don’t seem terribly interested in perfecting the full range of talents necessary to excel. Current “top-level” American male tennis players don’t want to put in the hours and effort to perfect back-court ground strokes and work to obtain the conditioning necessary to scrap for every point in the way John McEnroe and Andre Agassi once did. One noted U.S. tennis coach closed his camp with the statement that young Americans didn’t want to work, because it interfered with their social life. Tyler Hicks is good looking, well-dressed, energetic, and enthusiastic, with good dance moves. Unfortunately, he’s supposed to be a singer, and his singing is definitely second-class, if that. So why are Americans focusing so much on appearance and failing to see that his vocal production is lacking? The failure of U.S. financial analysts to consider the full range of factors behind the credit and mortgage boom… and subsequent bust… reflects the same kind of failure — a focus on what is immediate and easy and profitable, rather than on the core requirements for long-term excellence and financial stability — and the results were just as predictable.

All of this applies to writing as well. In its simplest sense, fiction consists of two components — technical skill in putting words on the page and story-telling. Writers who have great technical skill and write beautifully crafted prose with either limited story-telling or none to speak of [such as in the Ghormenghast Trilogy] aren’t complete writers, and won’t sell much, if anything. Writers who are technically deficient but who tell great stories are like the top American tennis players — they’ll make money, but they’ll never be great.

In any field, to excel requires a mastery of the full range of skills, not just what’s easy, or popular, or what brings in the cash, and right now, it seems to me, the interest in popularity and cash is destroying the desire for greatness in all too many fields in the United States, especially those that take great and sustained effort, and particularly among American men.

The necktie manufacturing trade association has closed its doors, because there are no longer enough necktie manufacturers to support it. While I doubt the demise of the association has caused much mourning outside the fashion industry… it does concern me, and not because I always wear a tie. I don’t, except to conventions and other appropriate business and social occasions. But it does concern me because of what it represents. The decline of the necktie might well be likened to the canary expiring in the social coal mine, so to speak.

Fashion is not just the presentation of one’s self through attire. It’s also a form of acknowledgment that there are duties to society which include appropriate clothing. Or put another way, wearing a tee-shirt to church or to a wedding or a tank-top to a restaurant, even McDonalds, is a form of disrespect to those in either place. It’s an attitude best described as “in your face, I’ll wear what I want.”

Interestingly enough, when Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York City, he forced a crackdown on minor offenses, which initially was met with ridicule. But… the results of this type of policing in New York and elsewhere, not surprisingly to me, have shown that it also decreases other types of crime. That may well be because it reinforces societal expectations on behavior.

My late father-in-law was a trucker at a time when truckers were expected to wear uniforms of the company for which they drove [imagine that!], and frankly, in those days, truckers were a great deal more polite, both in person and in the way in which they handled their rigs. I can’t prove it, but I believe those uniforms reinforced their image and their sense of responsibility.

Dressing in an inappropriately sloppy fashion and just for one’s self when going out in public is another form of self-indulgence, the visual equivalent of bad manners. Bad manners lead to bad behavior. Bad behavior tends to undermine societies and social structures, because all successful and enduring societies are based on a degree of mutual respect between individuals within a society, and bad manners are a form of direct and personal disrespect.

Throughout human history, there have been periods where manners and standards of attire declined. Almost invariably, thereafter so did the society. So, if as a writer, you want to portray a collapsing society, just show one where personal sloppiness and bad manners are abundant, and you won’t be far wrong.

And that’s why I worry about the demise of the necktie and the necktie manufacturing trade association.

Last week, like many other travelers, my wife went on a business trip. Also, like many other travelers, she experienced the trip from hell. After three hours en route, her first flight was put in a holding pattern over west of Charlotte, N.C., for another two hours, because of thunderstorms, then landed at Greensboro, where it sat on the tarmac for an hour until a gate that could refuel the plane was available — except the gate where the plane was parked didn’t have that capability, and the plane had to wait for yet another gate. Some four hours later, she finally arrived in Charlotte at 2 a.m, for a connecting flight that had left four hours earlier. The next available flight left at 7:15. She was there, two hours early for security, only to be told that, because the same crew that had flown them in late was the crew to take them to Nashville, the flight would be delayed three hours to meet federal turn-around-time standards. And, oh yes, even though she’d called the hotel and asked them to hold her room — and that she’d pay for it, the hotel canceled her reservation, and she had to commute to the conference from another hotel. The return after her conference in Nashville wasn’t much better. First, because she had picked up some scholarly materials at the academic conference, her suitcase was ten pounds overweight — an additional $50 fee. Then, without the excuse of weather, her flight to Dulles, for a connection to Las Vegas [which is a 3 1/2 hour drive from our house] was an hour and a half late, causing her to miss her connecting flight. She was rebooked through Los Angeles, some 200 plus miles west of Las Vegas, and arrived in Las Vegas five hours late — and her luggage didn’t make it, even though it made it to L.A. and there was a two hour layover in L.A. So it had to be sent to our house arriving another day later. She finally arrived home some 24 hours after she first left for the airport after being up all night, twice in a week.

Now… first of all, her experiences are far from unique. They’re not even rare. At least half a dozen other academics at the conference who arrived on different flights had similar tales, and certainly the several hundred other passengers on these flights were also greatly inconvenienced. And it’s easy to blame the airlines, most of which are either slightly badly mismanaged or horribly mismanaged, but the reason for this mismanagement lies deeply imbedded in our society, and it’s very simple. Simple, but profound.

While there are exceptions, in the vast majority of cases, as a society, we seek the cheapest prices for everything, no matter what the long-term costs may be. We reward short-term greed and refuse to consider the long term societal and personal costs of such short-term thinking. The airline mess is a perfect example of what can happen.

Now, it’s not exactly a secret that oil supplies are tight, nor has it been unexpected that oil prices would rise over the long-term. Some few airlines, such as Southwest, locked in lower fuel prices through hedging and long-term contracts. Most did not, because they didn’t want to pay the short-term associated costs of such hedging. So… now they’re slapping fees on everything because fuel costs are up, and the prices they charged for tickets bought months ago don’t cover operating costs.

When weather conditions are bad, congestion gets far worse than it would have to be because the United States has a terribly antiquated air-traffic control system, again because no one wants to pay the price for a modern system, not the airlines, and not the federal government. So delays and messes such as those experienced by my wife become even greater and cost small businesses and individuals millions. Larger businesses charter jets, and that increases congestion and costs in a different way.

Then, there are the other costs. Although Southwest flies only one type of aircraft [the 737], most airlines not only fly differing aircraft, but differing models from different manufacturers. This has the effect of increasing maintenance costs, and that’s exacerbated by the fact that even different model aircraft from the same manufacturer aren’t always exactly engineered for parts and maintenance compatibility. Seeking the “best deal” every time one upgrades one’s fleet may reduce procurement costs, but it also increases maintenance costs and may actually require purchasing more aircraft because maintenance delays result in aircraft being out of service.

In the interests of short-term profitability, the major airlines, again except for Southwest, developed the hub and spoke system where their flights and feeder regional aircraft congregate at regional hubs. This not only increases regional air congestion, but also ensures that any time there is a major weather problem, entire sections of the country suffer loss or significant reduction in air travel capacity. In addition, the combination of deregulation and the hub-and-spoke routing encourages “specialty” lower-cost carriers to “cherry-pick” the more highly traveled routes, forcing prices down on those routes and redistributing higher costs to routes where there’s less competition. This is out-and-out geographic discrimination, and it’s largely not based on the costs of providing service, but the degree of competition, which is limited by the fact that commercial air travel can never be a free market.

Airline deregulation was adopted in the ostensible interests of reducing airfares, but those pushing and supporting it seemed unable or unwilling to accept that so-called free market competition has extremely high indirect costs to everyone when the market isn’t truly free. In the case of the airlines, the available routes are limited and controlled by the government. The major airports located near population centers are also limited, both in numbers and in their ability to handle more than a certain number of aircraft. The barriers to entering the industry are extremely high, because passenger aircraft each cost hundreds of millions, and trained pilots and crew are not inexpensive, not to mention the costs of leasing or buying terminals, reservation systems, etc., and, of course, fuel. This is not a classical free market in any sense of the word, but everyone jumped on board because deregulation promised cheaper fares “now.”

It’s also not a traditional free market because there’s often a tremendous lag time between when the service is purchased and when the cost of supplying it is incurred. If costs increase, such as has happened in the case of rapidly rising fuel costs, the supplier can’t pass on the costs to the consumer, and, in fact, will probably never totally recover them, which is why virtually all the major airlines who cannot or will not hedge their fuel costs risk bankruptcy… because fuel costs will continue to rise.

In a nutshell, the airline mess is exactly what we as a high-tech society can expect with ever-increasing frequency and with ever-increasing costs and frustrations so long as we continue to focus on the “cheapest price,” this quarter’s balance sheet, and the idea that “free competition” solves everything. Total regulation doesn’t, either, but that’s another story for another time.

All too often, sometimes more often than not, those who make the innovations or who create something new aren’t the ones recognized for it. Robert Fulton, for example, didn’t build the first steamboat; Robert Fitch did, but he went bankrupt, while Fulton made money. Galileo certainly wasn’t the first scientist to propose the heliocentric solar system, nor was Guttenberg the first one to come up with the idea of moveable type and the printing press. The listing of those recognized as “firsts” who weren’t is long, and, given human nature, that’s probably not surprising, because, for someone to be recognized as a “first achiever,” it’s necessary that the knowledge of that achievement be disseminated, both about the action, and with some supporting information explaining why the act or achievement is worthy of recognition. Sometimes, explanation isn’t all that necessary, but knowledge of the act is vital for societal recognition.

In addition, sometimes a figure well-known for popular achievements never receives his or her true due for other substantial accomplishments. Benjamin Franklin certainly falls into this category. With all the notice about his political successes, his scientific career is reduced to the story of the key, the Leiden jar, and the kite. Yet Franklin also invented bifocals, the lightning rod, the Franklin stove, a flexible urinary catheter, not to mention the armonica [glass harmonica], and, with his cousin, was the first to name and to chart the Gulf Stream. He was the first to document and write up many of the basics of electrical behavior, and the first to document the principles of evaporative cooling.

These examples suggest that often what we “know” about innovation or about people happens all too often to be incomplete, or sometimes close to a complete lie.

In the field of fantasy and science fiction, this is also true. Popular recognition of “innovation” often has not coincided with reality. As I wrote almost a year ago, Fred Saberhagen was a very innovative writer, but one who never truly received his due for all the innovation and uniqueness in his work, perhaps because he accomplished it without bells and whistles, without overwhelming self-promotion and rhetorical excesses.

Although “alternative history” dates back to the Roman writer and historian Livy, H. Beam Piper was one of the first twentieth century SF writers to create more than one or two works of alternate history, beginning with “He Walked Around the Horses” in 1948, but comparatively few readers today would recognize his name, and most of those would likely do so because of the tributes of current writers to his legacy.

Even with popular and well-known writers, at times, works of a high caliber are overlooked or lost behind the clamor about popular works. Examples of this include, in my opinion, Roger Zelazny’s Creatures of Light and Darkness, Michael Moorcock’s The War Hound and the World’s Pain, David Drake’s The Forlorn Hope, George R.R. Martin’s The Dying of the Light, and Gordon R. Dickson’s The Way of the Pilgrim. Of course, in accord with the trend noted in a recent blog, these are all stand-alone works unrelated to the more popular series of these writers.

So… on a day of remembrance, some remembrance for works and achievement forgotten or not remembered as they should be, including all those I haven’t cited.

Science fiction in particular has tended to mix a combination of elements — a sense of transition from where we’ve been as a society, a commentary on the present, and an extrapolation depicting one of any number of possible futures. Given the current popularity and market place domination of the F&SF genres by fantasy, it’s often hard, especially for new readers, to realize that for almost a century, science fiction was certainly far more prevalent and dominant than fantasy.

How did it come to be that in a comparatively short period of time, fantasy has literally swamped science fiction?

First, let’s take a look at Jane Austen. Over the past few years, there’s been a resurgence in the popularity of Jane Austen, manifested especially in endless cinematic and video remakes of her books, as well as the continued popularity of more than a few romance take-offs on her “world.”

I can certainly understand the Austen period fascination. The clothes were fashionable and elegant, and people didn’t board their carriages in tank tops and flip-flops. The conversation was well-mannered, even when vicious. The dances were truly dances and not frenzied athletic competitions or public pseudo-orgies. Dinners were a time for dining and not gulping fast food after a rushed trip through a drive-in service window. Even revenge was thoughtfully and carefully planned in a way that makes most current “pay-backs” seem crude and boorish. The music had melodies, and young men and women were pleased to master difficult instruments, and not just bang out repetitive chords on an electrically amplified, yet simplified guitar.

By comparison, we live in a world of cheap pleasures and cheaper thrills, gulped down like fast food, time after time, because, somehow, they never satisfy. Americans in particular have more “toys” than ever before, and yet surveys show that they’re not any happier, and in fact may be less so.

And what does all this have to do with science fiction and fantasy?

Among the chief attractions of the genre are inspiration and, frankly escapism, and it’s clear that a growing number of readers want to escape the ugliness of the present, but, from what I’ve seen and read, comparatively little science fiction offers hopeful escapism. Most of it’s pretty grim. Twenty years ago, there were more well-written SF books like Walter Jon Williams’s House of Shards, which deftly mixed SF with manners. I still write books in which the future still has culture, and so do a handful of others, such as Lois McMaster Bujold, but, in general, those tend to be the exception, whereas fantasy tends to offer, if not exclusively, more hopeful endings, or at least endings where there is a glimmer of light. In passing, I would also note that even Devention, the World Science Fiction Convention in Denver in early August, is featuring a “Summerfair Reception in Barrayar” and a Dowager Duchess of Denver’s Regency Dance.. and both are based on “mannered” societies, if fictional ones.

And we could all use more manners, more culture, and more inspiration toward excellence and beauty… especially in our fiction.