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.

A number of years ago, a singer named Rick Nelson had a hit song entitled “Garden Party.” A portion of the lyrics follows:

When I got to the garden party, they all knew my name.

No one recognized me, I didn’t look the same…

Played them all the old songs, thought that’s why they came.

No one heard the music, we didn’t look the same…

If you gotta play at garden parties, I wish you a lotta luck

But if memories were all I sang, I’d rather drive a truck…

…it’s all right now, learned my lesson well

You see, ya can’t please everyone, you got to please yourself.

Nelson wrote the song after appearing in a “rock revival” concert at Madison Square Garden, where he was booed when he played and sang songs that weren’t his “golden oldies,” because, apparently, that was all they wanted to hear. Some days, I feel like I really understand what Nelson was driving at.

Now…while singers — or writers — clearly can’t please everyone, it is fairly clear from the bestseller trends and sales figures that the closer a writer, and a singer, I suppose, sticks to a single type of fiction, or song, the higher the sales numbers. Robert Jordan’s other books don’t sell a fraction of what those in the Wheel of Time series do, and I doubt that anything J.K. Rowling writes besides Harry Potter will approach the Potter books in popularity, either. The same is true of popular authors in other fields. Writers who produce series, or “type” books, outsell those who don’t. In my own work, the individual books in a fantasy series outsell the stand-alones by better than three to one. Doubtless, there are some exceptions to the success of literary “type-casting,” but given the overall trends and numbers, there aren’t many. That’s why it’s extremely hard for an author to produce and get published a body of work that’s diverse, let alone do so and be commercially successful.

At the same time, Nelson’s line about not pleasing everyone also rings true. Going through reader comments and critical reviews on my books last week, I came across such comments as “writes fantasy for Republicans”… “libertarian bias”… “left wing tripe”… “ecological leftist”… “solid Republican, as to be expected from a former Reagan appointee”… “always tells the same story, young man going out into the world”… “wish he’d stay away from the arthouse fiction”… Obviously, each one of those comments and many others I haven’t quoted reflect more about the reader than my work, because, after all, I couldn’t always tell the same story, for example, and have so many readers complain in so many different ways.

Although Nelson toured widely for another 12 years after “Garden Party” was released before he was killed in a plane crash, “Garden Party” was his last hit record. I wonder why.

I dislike rap. That, if anything, is an understatement. It’s not because I’m biased against the culture from which it comes, and it’s not because I’m an old curmudgeon — which I may well be — or because it’s “modern,” and I’m not up with the times. It’s because I do indeed understand both rap’s source, its structure, and its implications… and none of them represent the best in human culture.

First, rap does indeed represent modern society — the worst of it. Words are jammed into an insistent forced beat against a set of background sounds so close to monotone that they can scarcely be termed music. Any beauty the words might have is destroyed by the framework in which they are embedded. What rap does best is, in fact, the shock value, the ugly, the “in-your-face” confrontation. In a sense, it’s the musical equivalent of the worst excesses of Fox News on the right and CNN on the left, with a soundtrack having the artistic sense of a jackhammer during rush hour.

One of the key elements of music is something called a melody line, and it’s essential — except to rap and the atonal so-called modernist composers, whose work I dislike possibly even more than that of the rappers, because the modernists had a real education in music and should know better.

Some have called rap merely modern poetry, or the modern urban equivalent to bardic minstrels. I’m sorry; it’s not. In poetry, in comparison to rap, the use and choice of words determines the rhythm… or the metre requires the poet to choose particular words, but, in either approach, they’re fitted together, not forced into a structure with the jack-hammer of an electric bass and the sonic wire mesh of a full drum ensemble.

The fact that the recent Tony awards gave the “best new musical award” to what amounted to a “rap music showcase” in which there was little music, and where much of what were intended as lyrics were unintelligible, suggests that the artistic world has come to point where no one dares to suggest that “the emperor has no clothes,” but then, I doubt that many who voted for the award would even understand that allusion, much less what lies behind it.

As Kipling suggested in “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” nearly a century ago, worshipping the “Gods of the Marketplace” and the current fad, whatever it may be, instead of striving for excellence based on experience, inevitably leads to disaster, as when “the lights had gone out in Rome.”

But who am I to stand against the thunderous applause for “music” that has no grace and no melody? Or to suggest that art should inspire men and women to strive for excellence, rather than graphically describe degradation in all its sordid forms?

With each passing day of the on-going and seemingly endless presidential election campaign, I get more and more distressed by the way in which the candidates and the media deal with the issue of “wealth.” In thinking about this, I also realized that all too many writers have similar problems, but that the writers are more adept at avoiding the issue and concealing either their ignorance or their biases… if not both.

Those on the left tend to claim that any family that earns more than somewhere in the $200,000-$250,000 range is wealthy. Now, I’d be the first to admit that such families are not poor… but to claim that they’re wealthy?

Somehow, I don’t think most doctors, lawyers, engineers, dentists and other professionals in that income range, many of whom make that income only by dint of hard work by two parents, think of themselves as “wealthy,” particularly when compared to those who truly are, like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, George Soros, or like the millionaire athletic figures such as Tiger Woods, Shaquille O’Neal, or Peyton Manning.

Then, too, when you use a flat number for defining who is wealthy, that number doesn’t reflect the cost-of-living. A family income of $100,000 in New York City, which has a cost-of-living more than twice the national average of all U.S. cities, has the same purchasing power as $30,000 in Laredo or McAllen, Texas, or other small towns across the United States. So… an income of $100,000 is less than mid-middle-class in New York, but signifies being well-off in, say, small towns in the mid-west or mountain states [provided they’re not resort towns inhabited by the truly wealthy]. Some 20 years ago, the Washingtonian magazine published an article entitled “How to Go Bankrupt on $100,000 A Year.” The article detailed how difficult it was for a family to make ends meet in our nation’s capital on that income, merely by attempting to hold to what one might have called a middle-class lifestyle. Given inflation and devaluation of the dollar, the income cited in that article would probably have to be well over $200,000 today. Families that earn $250,000 in New York, San Francisco, Honolulu, and the like aren’t poor by any means, but claiming that they’re “wealthy” is absurd.

Again… I am not claiming families who make such incomes are poor; I am claiming that anyone who thinks they’re rich is either deluded or a demagogue. Why are such claims being made? Because the politicians know that there aren’t enough “truly rich” to pay for the debts already incurred and the programs they think their constituents want, and by defining the upper end of the middle class as wealthy, they can claim that they’re not taxing the middle-class, but the “undeserving” wealthy, rather than hard-working professionals, with mortgages and children in college and the like

Just as the politicians and the media don’t seem to know what wealth is, or want to discuss it factually, so do more than a few SF writers have problems understanding and in dealing with wealth. Over the years, we’ve seen “millionaire” heroes with their own spacecraft, their own extensive private laboratories, and the like. Currently, a single high-tech atmospheric fighter seating just two pilots for a few hours of flight time costs over $200 million, and the industrial complex required to build it represents a number of entities representing more than $100 billion in assets. All that for a craft that flies at speeds a fraction of those required for interplanetary travel and without all the other additional systems necessary. Currently, according to Forbes, there are roughly 500 billionaires in the entire world, and most of them are worth less than $15 billion, with the wealthiest worth considerably less than $100 billion.

I’ve read very few books that even suggest the records and expertise necessary to handle vast wealth, or the limitations that such wealth imposes. Steven King, for heaven’s sake, hardly in the wealth class of Bill Gates, had to give up attending events such as World Fantasy Convention, and these days most companies spend millions of dollars in various ways to protect their CEOs.

So why do we have this strange dichotomy in our culture and our fiction where people who are merely affluent are considered rich, and where no one seems to understand how few really are truly rich and how isolated those comparative few are?