New Wave (science fiction)
Encyclopedia
New Wave is a term applied to science fiction
produced in the 1960s and 1970s and characterized by a high degree of experimentation, both in form and in content, a "literary" or artistic sensibility, and a focus on "soft" as opposed to hard science. The term "New Wave" is borrowed from the French film movement known as the nouvelle vague. New Wave writers often saw themselves as part of the modernist tradition and sometimes mocked the traditions of pulp
science fiction, which some of them regarded as stodgy, adolescent and poorly written. Gary K. Wolfe
, professor of humanities and English at Roosevelt University
, identifies the introduction of the term New Wave to SF as occurring in 1966 in an essay for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction written by Judith Merril
, who used the term to refer to the experimental fiction that had begun to appear in the English magazine New Worlds after Michael Moorcock
assumed editorship in 1964. Merril later popularized this fiction in the United States through her edited anthology England Swings SF: Stories of Speculative Fiction (Doubleday 1968), although an earlier anthology (Harlan Ellison
's Dangerous Visions
[Doubleday 1967]) paved the way for Merril's anthology.
However, Professor James Gunn
in his assessment of the genesis of the 1960s New Wave, takes a broad view and stresses continuity rather than fracture. Thus he sees 1949 and 1950 as crucial dates in the transition from the kind of consensus definition of SF built up in the 1940s which he characterizes as “imagination leavened with pragmatism.” The year 1949 saw the creation by Anthony Boucher
and J. Francis McComas
of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction based on the belief that “science fiction could be literate and that a literary approach that included fantasy would be viable on newsstands.” In 1950, H. L. Gold
produced the magazine Galaxy
. Gunn traces the evolution of SF up to this point as follows:
Harry Harrison writing the ‘Introduction’ to an anthology of 1950s SF says of the decade:
Among other authors producing work in the 1950s that broke from the Campbellian
concept of SF were Ray Bradbury
who achieved a level of general fame that was “unprecedented in the field.” Bradbury was hailed as a visionary by the likes of Christopher Isherwood
and C. S. Lewis
; Walter M. Miller, Jr.
’s novel 'A Canticle for Leibowitz
' (1960) … also received favorable attention from outside the field as well as within it. Theodore Sturgeon
(“his story When You’re Smiling, which appeared in Galaxy in the 1950s, is beautiful and brutal, spiked with psychological understanding.”), Fritz Leiber
(for example his novel 'Gather Darkness!' (1950) which is “an amusing and ingenious story of superscience disguised as religion and witchcraft,), Algis Budrys
(especially for his novel 'Rogue Moon' with its use of Freudianism), and Alfred Bester
(“singlehandedly it sometimes seems, he invented both New Wave and ‘cyberpunk.”) can be considered as important precursors of the New Wave.
Naomi Mitchison
's Memoirs of a Spacewoman
(1962) has elements that resemble New Wave, though it's not clear if there was any direct influence. In his introduction to a reprint of Leigh Brackett
's Martian Quest, Michael Moorcock
, the editor of New Worlds
(and thus the New Wave's prime instigator), wrote "With Catherine Moore
, Judith Merril
and Cele Goldsmith
, Leigh Brackett is one of the true godmothers of the New Wave. Anyone who thinks they're pinching one of my ideas is probably pinching one of hers."
Beat
writer William S. Burroughs
would prove very inspirational, so much so that Philip José Farmer
in "The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod" and Barrington J. Bayley
's "The Four Colour Problem" (Bayley's most acclaimed work of fiction, which appeared in New Worlds) wrote pastiche
s of the elder writer's work and J. G. Ballard
published an admiring essay in New Worlds. (Burroughs had earlier expressed admiration for Bayley's short novel Star Virus.) Burroughs' use of experimentation such as the cut-up technique
and his appropriation of science fiction trope
s in radical ways proved the extent to which prose fiction could prove revolutionary. In this, the more extreme New Wave writers sought to emulate his example.
Brian Aldiss
says of this 1950s period:
Ursula K. Le Guin
, one of the women writers to emerge in the 1960s, describes the transition to the New Wave era thus:
This leaves the question as to why “science fiction changed around 1960”, why “all the doors seemed to be opening.” Rob Latham writing in the New York Review of Science Fiction argues that it is possible to identify three trends that must prevail immediately prior to the advent of any new genre movement, and he illustrates his argument by reference to the 1960s New Wave and the emergence of ‘cyberpunk’ in the 1980s. Thus the three trends common to both the 1960s and 1980s, briefly stated were:
Latham points out that
who was appointed editor in 1964 (first issue number 142, May and June)
For example:
1) Luckhurst, Roger. Science Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005)
“What became known as the New Wave in SF was centred in England on the Magazine New Worlds, edited with missionary zeal by Michael Moorcock between 1964 and 1970 …”
2) James, Edward. Science Fiction in the 20th century (Oxford University Press, 1994)
“In April 1963 Michael Moorcock contributes a guest editorial to John Carnell’s New Worlds, Britain’s leading sf magazine, which effectively announced the onset of the New Wave.”
3) Roberts, Adam. The History of Science Fiction (New York: Palgrove Macmillan, 2005)
“It [the New Wave] was initially associated with the London magazine New Worlds, … which was reconfigured as a venue for experimental and unconventional fiction in the 1960s, particularly under the editorship of Michael Moorcock from 1964 …”
While the American magazines Amazing Stories
, with Cele Goldsmith as editor, and the respected Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
had from the very start had a leaning towards unusually literary stories, Moorcock turned that into a concerted policy. No other science fiction magazine sought as consistently to distance itself from traditional science fiction as much as New Worlds. By the time it ceased regular publication it had backed away from the science fiction genre itself, styling itself as an experimental literary journal.
Under Moorcock’s editorship “galactic wars went out; drugs came in; there were fewer encounters with aliens, more in the bedroom. Experimentation in prose styles became one of the orders of the day, and the baleful influence of William Burroughs often threatened to gain the upper hand.” Judith Merril
observed that:
Merril’s “incredible controversy” is characterized by David Hartwell in the opening sentence of a book chapter entitled “New Wave: The Great War of the 1960s” as follows: “Conflict and argument are an enduring presence in the SF world, but literary politics has yielded to open warfare on the largest scale only once.” Science fiction writer Thomas Disch has observed that:
It is instructive therefore to read some of what Ballard and Moorcock were writing that engendered such animosity from the established SF community. For example in 1962 Ballard wrote:
In 1963 Michael Moorcock wrote:
According to David Hartwell, Algis J. Budrys writing in the review column of Galaxy magazine produced "one of the classic diatribes against Ballard and the new mode of SF then emergent." Hartwell notes the "ringing scorn and righteous indignation" with which Budry's discussion vibrates:
Roger Luckhurst points out that Ballard’s essay “Which Way to Inner Space?” “showed the influence of media theorist Marshall McLuhan
and the ‘anti-psychiatry’ of R. D. Laing.” Luckhurst traces the influence of both these thinkers in Ballard’s fiction, in particular The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) Another central concern of the New Wave was a fascination with entropy
– that the world (and the universe) must tend to disorder, to eventually run down to ‘heat death’. Ballard provided
Like other writers for New Worlds Zoline uses “science-fictional and scientific language and imagery to describe perfectly ‘ordinary’ scenes of life”, and by doing so produces “altered perceptions of reality in the reader.”
Judith Merill, “whose annual anthologies were the first heralds of the coming of the [New Wave] cult,” writing in 1967 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction contrasts the SF New Wave (which she here terms ‘The New Thing’) in England and the United States:
Judith Merril’s annual anthologies (1957-1968), Damon Knight’s Orbit series, and Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions featured American writers inspired by British writers (although some of the writers anthologized were British). Brooks Landon, professor of English at the University of Iowa, says of Dangerous Visions that it
The New Wave also had a political subtext.
Eric S. Raymond
, looking at the New Wave with an even narrower political focus, observes:
For example, Judith Merril, “one of the most visible -- and voluble -- apostles of the New Wave in 1960s sf” remembers her return from England to the United States:
Merril records later “At the end of the Convention week, the taste of America was sour in all our mouths,” and “by the end of the Sixties, Merril was a political refugee living in Canada.”
Roger Luckhurst disagrees with those critics (he gives the example of Thomas Clareson) who perceive the New Wave in terms of rupture, suggesting that such a model
But caution is needed when assessing any literary movement, for example science fiction writer Bruce Sterling
, reacting to his association with another SF movement in the 1980s remarked:
Similarly Rob Latham observes:
Bearing this proviso in mind it is still possible to sum up the New Wave in terms of rupture as is done for example by Darren Harris-Fain of Shawnee State University
:
Latham remarks that this analysis by Harlan Ellison “obscures Ellison’s own prominent role – and that of other professional authors and editors such as Judith Merril, Michael Moorcock, Lester Del Rey, Frederik Pohl, and Donald A. Wollheim – in fomenting the conflict,…”
In the early 1970s a number of writers and readers pointed out that
The closing of New Worlds magazine in 1970 "marked the containment of New Wave experiment with the rest of the counter-culture. The various limping manifestations of New World across the 1970s … demonstrated the posthumous nature of its avant-gardism.
In an essay The Alien Encounter Professor Patrick Parrinder
’s states that “any meaningful act of defamiliarization can only be relative, since it is not possible for man to imagine what is utterly alien to him; the utterly alien would also be meaningless.” He continues later:
Veteran science fiction writer Jack Williamson
(1908–2006) when asked in 1991: “Did the [New] Wave's emphasis on experimentalizm and its conscious efforts to make SF more "literary" have any kind of permanent effects on the field?” replied:
It has been observed that
David Hartwell’s maintains that after the New Wave, science fiction had still managed to retain this “marginality and tenuous self-identity”:
Isaac Asimov
, a science fiction writer who began his career with John W, Campbell in Astounding magazine in the 1940s, said of the New Wave: "I hope that when the New Wave has deposited its froth and receded, the vast and solid shore of science fiction will appear once more."
Asimov himself was to illustrate just how that “SF shore” did indeed re-emerged, vast, solid—but changed. A biographer of Asimov noted that during the 1960s
Darren Harris-Fain observes on this return to writing SF by Asimov that
Other themes dealt with in the novel are concerns for the environment and “human stupidity and the delusional belief in human superiority”, both frequent topics in New Wave SF.
Commenting in 2002 on the publication of the 35th Anniversary edition of the Dangerous Visions anthology edited by Harlan Ellison, the critic Greg L. Johnson remarked that
Isaac Asimov agrees that “on the whole, the New Wave was a good thing.” He describes several “interesting side effects” of the New Wave. Firstly that it brought non-American SF to the fore and that afterwards SF was an international phenomenon. Other changes noted were that
The noted academic writer on science fiction Edward James
sums up the New Wave and its impact as follows:
Several factors may have contributed to the "death" of New Wave science fiction. One factor was its assimilation into the larger science fiction mainstream. A second factor was the passing of the radicalism of the 1960s in art as well as life. The New Wave's demise may have been hastened by conscious reaction against it in the SF mainstream. Lester del Rey
, an influential editor (who had in fact been published in Ellison's first Dangerous Visions anthology), led a conscious effort to re-assert genre traditions in the 1970s and early 1980s. Pioneers such as Larry Niven
(also published in Dangerous Visions) broke new ground with fresh scientific discoveries and imaginative extrapolations. By then, a neo-Campbellian revival of hard science fiction
after 1982 at the hands of David Brin
, Gregory Benford
, Greg Bear
and others had emerged. On the other hand, cyberpunk
, a movement popularized by Gardner Dozois
and editor Ellen Datlow
, had made it clear that "the rebellion" had taken on a new form.
Some have seen the emergence of cyberpunk
literature as a sequel of sorts to the aims of the New Wave movement. Cyberpunk incorporated several of New Wave's "ancestors," namely Burroughs and Alfred Bester and partially embraced New Wave proponents Harlan Ellison and Samuel R. Delany. The New Weird
movement and the genre of slipstream fiction occupies a space similar to that of the New Wave movement, in relationship to the mainstream of science fiction and fantasy. However, they have a far less adversial relationship to their "parent" genres.
A more important effect of the movement was to broaden the range of acceptable themes and styles in genre SF. While the New Wavers never achieved the thorough disruption of genre conventions they were aiming for, they helped make it possible for post-New-Wave SF writers to tackle previously taboo subjects and to more often use techniques such as stream-of-consciousness narration and unreliable narrator
s. Even the neo-Campbellian revivalists who had set themselves most directly against the New Wave's political and aesthetic program eventually benefitted from the new freedom.
is noted as a primary exponent of dystopian New Wave science fiction. Critic John Clute wrote of M. John Harrison
's early writing that it "... reveals its New-Wave provenance in narrative discontinuities and subheads after the fashion of J. G. Ballard". Brian Aldiss
, Harlan Ellison
, Robert Silverberg
, Norman Spinrad
, Roger Zelazny
are writers whose work, though not considered New Wave at the time of publication, later became to be interpreted under the label. Of later authors, the work of Joanna Russ
is considered by scholar Peter Nicholls to bear stylistic resemblance to New Wave. Kaoru Kurimoto
is also considered to be among the New Wave canon.
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
produced in the 1960s and 1970s and characterized by a high degree of experimentation, both in form and in content, a "literary" or artistic sensibility, and a focus on "soft" as opposed to hard science. The term "New Wave" is borrowed from the French film movement known as the nouvelle vague. New Wave writers often saw themselves as part of the modernist tradition and sometimes mocked the traditions of pulp
Pulp magazine
Pulp magazines , also collectively known as pulp fiction, refers to inexpensive fiction magazines published from 1896 through the 1950s. The typical pulp magazine was seven inches wide by ten inches high, half an inch thick, and 128 pages long...
science fiction, which some of them regarded as stodgy, adolescent and poorly written. Gary K. Wolfe
Gary K. Wolfe
Gary K. Wolfe is a science fiction editor, critic and biographer. He is a winner of the World Fantasy Award, the Pilgrim Award, the Eaton Award, BSFA award and been nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Related Book. He has had a monthly review column in Locus since 1991...
, professor of humanities and English at Roosevelt University
Roosevelt University
Roosevelt University is a coeducational, private university with campuses in Chicago, Illinois and Schaumburg, Illinois. Founded in 1945, the university is named in honor of both former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. The university's curriculum is based on...
, identifies the introduction of the term New Wave to SF as occurring in 1966 in an essay for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction written by Judith Merril
Judith Merril
Judith Josephine Grossman , who took the pen-name Judith Merril about 1945, was an American and then Canadian science fiction writer, editor and political activist....
, who used the term to refer to the experimental fiction that had begun to appear in the English magazine New Worlds after Michael Moorcock
Michael Moorcock
Michael John Moorcock is an English writer, primarily of science fiction and fantasy, who has also published a number of literary novels....
assumed editorship in 1964. Merril later popularized this fiction in the United States through her edited anthology England Swings SF: Stories of Speculative Fiction (Doubleday 1968), although an earlier anthology (Harlan Ellison
Harlan Ellison
Harlan Jay Ellison is an American writer. His principal genre is speculative fiction.His published works include over 1,700 short stories, novellas, screenplays, teleplays, essays, a wide range of criticism covering literature, film, television, and print media...
's Dangerous Visions
Dangerous Visions
Dangerous Visions is a science fiction short story anthology edited by Harlan Ellison, published in 1967.A path-breaking collection, Dangerous Visions helped define the New Wave science fiction movement, particularly in its depiction of sex in science fiction...
[Doubleday 1967]) paved the way for Merril's anthology.
Influences and predecessors
Antecedents to the New Wave in SF are difficult to identify because of the stated aims of its instigators and followers to break completely with the SF of the past:However, Professor James Gunn
James Gunn (author)
- Further reading :James E. Gunn The Listeners, BenBella Books, ISBN 1-932100-12-1 -External links:*...
in his assessment of the genesis of the 1960s New Wave, takes a broad view and stresses continuity rather than fracture. Thus he sees 1949 and 1950 as crucial dates in the transition from the kind of consensus definition of SF built up in the 1940s which he characterizes as “imagination leavened with pragmatism.” The year 1949 saw the creation by Anthony Boucher
Anthony Boucher
Anthony Boucher was an American science fiction editor and author of mystery novels and short stories. He was particularly influential as an editor. Between 1942 and 1947 he acted as reviewer of mostly mystery fiction for the San Francisco Chronicle...
and J. Francis McComas
J. Francis McComas
Jesse Francis McComas was an American science fiction editor. McComas wrote several stories on his own in the 1950s using both his own name and the pseudonym Webb Marlowe....
of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction based on the belief that “science fiction could be literate and that a literary approach that included fantasy would be viable on newsstands.” In 1950, H. L. Gold
H. L. Gold
Horace Leonard Gold was a science fiction writer and editor. Born in Canada, Gold moved to the United States at the age of two...
produced the magazine Galaxy
Galaxy Science Fiction
Galaxy Science Fiction was an American digest-size science fiction magazine, published from 1950 to 1980. It was founded by an Italian company, World Editions, which was looking to break in to the American market. World Editions hired as editor H. L...
. Gunn traces the evolution of SF up to this point as follows:
Harry Harrison writing the ‘Introduction’ to an anthology of 1950s SF says of the decade:
Among other authors producing work in the 1950s that broke from the Campbellian
John W. Campbell
John Wood Campbell, Jr. was an influential figure in American science fiction. As editor of Astounding Science Fiction , from late 1937 until his death, he is generally credited with shaping the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction.Isaac Asimov called Campbell "the most powerful force in...
concept of SF were Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury
Ray Douglas Bradbury is an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 and for the science fiction stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man , Bradbury is one of the most celebrated among 20th...
who achieved a level of general fame that was “unprecedented in the field.” Bradbury was hailed as a visionary by the likes of Christopher Isherwood
Christopher Isherwood
Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood was an English-American novelist.-Early life and work:Born at Wyberslegh Hall, High Lane, Cheshire in North West England, Isherwood spent his childhood in various towns where his father, a Lieutenant-Colonel in the British Army, was stationed...
and C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis , commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis and known to his friends and family as "Jack", was a novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian and Christian apologist from Belfast, Ireland...
; Walter M. Miller, Jr.
Walter M. Miller, Jr.
Walter Michael Miller, Jr. was an American science fiction author. Today he is primarily known for A Canticle for Leibowitz, the only novel he published in his lifetime. Prior to its publication he was a prolific writer of short stories.- Biography :Miller was born in New Smyrna Beach, Florida...
’s novel 'A Canticle for Leibowitz
A Canticle for Leibowitz
A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel by American writer Walter M. Miller, Jr., first published in 1960. Set in a Roman Catholic monastery in the desert of the southwestern United States after a devastating nuclear war, the story spans thousands of years as...
' (1960) … also received favorable attention from outside the field as well as within it. Theodore Sturgeon
Theodore Sturgeon
Theodore Sturgeon was an American science fiction author.His most famous novel is More Than Human .-Biography:...
(“his story When You’re Smiling, which appeared in Galaxy in the 1950s, is beautiful and brutal, spiked with psychological understanding.”), Fritz Leiber
Fritz Leiber
Fritz Reuter Leiber, Jr. was an American writer of fantasy, horror and science fiction. He was also a poet, actor in theatre and films, playwright, expert chess player and a champion fencer. Possibly his greatest chess accomplishment was winning clear first in the 1958 Santa Monica Open.. With...
(for example his novel 'Gather Darkness!' (1950) which is “an amusing and ingenious story of superscience disguised as religion and witchcraft,), Algis Budrys
Algis Budrys
Algis Budrys was a Lithuanian-American science fiction author, editor, and critic. He was also known under the pen names "Frank Mason", "Alger Rome", "John A. Sentry", "William Scarff", and "Paul Janvier."-Biography:...
(especially for his novel 'Rogue Moon' with its use of Freudianism), and Alfred Bester
Alfred Bester
Alfred Bester was an American science fiction author, TV and radio scriptwriter, magazine editor and scripter for comic strips and comic books...
(“singlehandedly it sometimes seems, he invented both New Wave and ‘cyberpunk.”) can be considered as important precursors of the New Wave.
Naomi Mitchison
Naomi Mitchison
Naomi May Margaret Mitchison, CBE was a Scottish novelist and poet. She was appointed CBE in 1981; she was also entitled to call herself Lady Mitchison, CBE since 5 October 1964 .- Childhood and family background :Naomi Margaret Haldane was...
's Memoirs of a Spacewoman
Memoirs of a Spacewoman
Memoirs of a Spacewoman is a science fiction novel by Naomi Mitchison, a sister of the famous biologist J.B.S. Haldane. It was first published in 1962 by Victor Gollancz Ltd.-Contents:...
(1962) has elements that resemble New Wave, though it's not clear if there was any direct influence. In his introduction to a reprint of Leigh Brackett
Leigh Brackett
Leigh Douglass Brackett was an American author, particularly of science fiction. She was also a screenwriter, known for her work on famous films such as The Big Sleep , Rio Bravo , The Long Goodbye and The Empire Strikes Back .-Life:Leigh Brackett was born and grew up in Los Angeles, California...
's Martian Quest, Michael Moorcock
Michael Moorcock
Michael John Moorcock is an English writer, primarily of science fiction and fantasy, who has also published a number of literary novels....
, the editor of New Worlds
New Worlds (magazine)
New Worlds was a British science fiction magazine which was first published professionally in 1946. For 25 years it was widely considered the leading science fiction magazine in Britain, publishing 201 issues up to 1971...
(and thus the New Wave's prime instigator), wrote "With Catherine Moore
C. L. Moore
Catherine Lucille Moore was an American science fiction and fantasy writer, as C. L. Moore. She was one of the first women to write in the genre, and paved the way for many other female writers in speculative fiction....
, Judith Merril
Judith Merril
Judith Josephine Grossman , who took the pen-name Judith Merril about 1945, was an American and then Canadian science fiction writer, editor and political activist....
and Cele Goldsmith
Cele Goldsmith Lalli
Cele Goldsmith Lalli was an American editor. She was the editor of Amazing Stories from 1959 to 1965, Fantastic from 1958 to 1965, and later the Editor-in-Chief of Modern Bride magazine....
, Leigh Brackett is one of the true godmothers of the New Wave. Anyone who thinks they're pinching one of my ideas is probably pinching one of hers."
Beat
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
writer William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
would prove very inspirational, so much so that Philip José Farmer
Philip José Farmer
Philip José Farmer was an American author, principally known for his award-winning science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories....
in "The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod" and Barrington J. Bayley
Barrington J. Bayley
Barrington J. Bayley was an English science fiction writer.Bayley was born in Birmingham and educated in Newport, Shropshire...
's "The Four Colour Problem" (Bayley's most acclaimed work of fiction, which appeared in New Worlds) wrote pastiche
Pastiche
A pastiche is a literary or other artistic genre or technique that is a "hodge-podge" or imitation. The word is also a linguistic term used to describe an early stage in the development of a pidgin language.-Hodge-podge:...
s of the elder writer's work and J. G. Ballard
J. G. Ballard
James Graham Ballard was an English novelist, short story writer, and prominent member of the New Wave movement in science fiction...
published an admiring essay in New Worlds. (Burroughs had earlier expressed admiration for Bayley's short novel Star Virus.) Burroughs' use of experimentation such as the cut-up technique
Cut-up technique
The cut-up technique is an aleatory literary technique in which a text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. Most commonly, cut-ups are used to offer a non-linear alternative to traditional reading and writing....
and his appropriation of science fiction trope
Trope (literature)
A literary trope is the usage of figurative language in literature, or a figure of speech in which words are used in a sense different from their literal meaning...
s in radical ways proved the extent to which prose fiction could prove revolutionary. In this, the more extreme New Wave writers sought to emulate his example.
Brian Aldiss
Brian Aldiss
Brian Wilson Aldiss, OBE is an English author of both general fiction and science fiction. His byline reads either Brian W. Aldiss or simply Brian Aldiss. Greatly influenced by science fiction pioneer H. G. Wells, Aldiss is a vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society...
says of this 1950s period:
Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin is an American author. She has written novels, poetry, children's books, essays, and short stories, notably in fantasy and science fiction...
, one of the women writers to emerge in the 1960s, describes the transition to the New Wave era thus:
This leaves the question as to why “science fiction changed around 1960”, why “all the doors seemed to be opening.” Rob Latham writing in the New York Review of Science Fiction argues that it is possible to identify three trends that must prevail immediately prior to the advent of any new genre movement, and he illustrates his argument by reference to the 1960s New Wave and the emergence of ‘cyberpunk’ in the 1980s. Thus the three trends common to both the 1960s and 1980s, briefly stated were:
Latham points out that
Movement
It is widely accepted among critics that the New Wave began in England with the SF magazine New Worlds and Michael MoorcockMichael Moorcock
Michael John Moorcock is an English writer, primarily of science fiction and fantasy, who has also published a number of literary novels....
who was appointed editor in 1964 (first issue number 142, May and June)
For example:
1) Luckhurst, Roger. Science Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005)
“What became known as the New Wave in SF was centred in England on the Magazine New Worlds, edited with missionary zeal by Michael Moorcock between 1964 and 1970 …”
2) James, Edward. Science Fiction in the 20th century (Oxford University Press, 1994)
“In April 1963 Michael Moorcock contributes a guest editorial to John Carnell’s New Worlds, Britain’s leading sf magazine, which effectively announced the onset of the New Wave.”
3) Roberts, Adam. The History of Science Fiction (New York: Palgrove Macmillan, 2005)
“It [the New Wave] was initially associated with the London magazine New Worlds, … which was reconfigured as a venue for experimental and unconventional fiction in the 1960s, particularly under the editorship of Michael Moorcock from 1964 …”
While the American magazines Amazing Stories
Amazing Stories
Amazing Stories was an American science fiction magazine launched in April 1926 by Hugo Gernsback's Experimenter Publishing. It was the first magazine devoted solely to science fiction...
, with Cele Goldsmith as editor, and the respected Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is a digest-size American fantasy and science fiction magazine first published in 1949 by Mystery House and then by Fantasy House. Both were subsidiaries of Lawrence Spivak's Mercury Publications, which took over as publisher in 1958. Spilogale, Inc...
had from the very start had a leaning towards unusually literary stories, Moorcock turned that into a concerted policy. No other science fiction magazine sought as consistently to distance itself from traditional science fiction as much as New Worlds. By the time it ceased regular publication it had backed away from the science fiction genre itself, styling itself as an experimental literary journal.
Under Moorcock’s editorship “galactic wars went out; drugs came in; there were fewer encounters with aliens, more in the bedroom. Experimentation in prose styles became one of the orders of the day, and the baleful influence of William Burroughs often threatened to gain the upper hand.” Judith Merril
Judith Merril
Judith Josephine Grossman , who took the pen-name Judith Merril about 1945, was an American and then Canadian science fiction writer, editor and political activist....
observed that:
Merril’s “incredible controversy” is characterized by David Hartwell in the opening sentence of a book chapter entitled “New Wave: The Great War of the 1960s” as follows: “Conflict and argument are an enduring presence in the SF world, but literary politics has yielded to open warfare on the largest scale only once.” Science fiction writer Thomas Disch has observed that:
It is instructive therefore to read some of what Ballard and Moorcock were writing that engendered such animosity from the established SF community. For example in 1962 Ballard wrote:
In 1963 Michael Moorcock wrote:
According to David Hartwell, Algis J. Budrys writing in the review column of Galaxy magazine produced "one of the classic diatribes against Ballard and the new mode of SF then emergent." Hartwell notes the "ringing scorn and righteous indignation" with which Budry's discussion vibrates:
Roger Luckhurst points out that Ballard’s essay “Which Way to Inner Space?” “showed the influence of media theorist Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CC was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar—a professor of English literature, a literary critic, a rhetorician, and a communication theorist...
and the ‘anti-psychiatry’ of R. D. Laing.” Luckhurst traces the influence of both these thinkers in Ballard’s fiction, in particular The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) Another central concern of the New Wave was a fascination with entropy
Entropy
Entropy is a thermodynamic property that can be used to determine the energy available for useful work in a thermodynamic process, such as in energy conversion devices, engines, or machines. Such devices can only be driven by convertible energy, and have a theoretical maximum efficiency when...
– that the world (and the universe) must tend to disorder, to eventually run down to ‘heat death’. Ballard provided
Like other writers for New Worlds Zoline uses “science-fictional and scientific language and imagery to describe perfectly ‘ordinary’ scenes of life”, and by doing so produces “altered perceptions of reality in the reader.”
Judith Merill, “whose annual anthologies were the first heralds of the coming of the [New Wave] cult,” writing in 1967 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction contrasts the SF New Wave (which she here terms ‘The New Thing’) in England and the United States:
Judith Merril’s annual anthologies (1957-1968), Damon Knight’s Orbit series, and Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions featured American writers inspired by British writers (although some of the writers anthologized were British). Brooks Landon, professor of English at the University of Iowa, says of Dangerous Visions that it
The New Wave also had a political subtext.
Eric S. Raymond
Eric S. Raymond
Eric Steven Raymond , often referred to as ESR, is an American computer programmer, author and open source software advocate. After the 1997 publication of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Raymond was for a number of years frequently quoted as an unofficial spokesman for the open source movement...
, looking at the New Wave with an even narrower political focus, observes:
For example, Judith Merril, “one of the most visible -- and voluble -- apostles of the New Wave in 1960s sf” remembers her return from England to the United States:
Merril records later “At the end of the Convention week, the taste of America was sour in all our mouths,” and “by the end of the Sixties, Merril was a political refugee living in Canada.”
Roger Luckhurst disagrees with those critics (he gives the example of Thomas Clareson) who perceive the New Wave in terms of rupture, suggesting that such a model
But caution is needed when assessing any literary movement, for example science fiction writer Bruce Sterling
Bruce Sterling
Michael Bruce Sterling is an American science fiction author, best known for his novels and his work on the Mirrorshades anthology, which helped define the cyberpunk genre.-Writings:...
, reacting to his association with another SF movement in the 1980s remarked:
Similarly Rob Latham observes:
Bearing this proviso in mind it is still possible to sum up the New Wave in terms of rupture as is done for example by Darren Harris-Fain of Shawnee State University
Shawnee State University
Shawnee State University is a public university in southern Ohio. It is Ohio's newest state-supported university and lies on the north bank of the Ohio River in the city of Portsmouth in Scioto County.Shawnee State University was established in 1986...
:
Decline and Lasting Influence
In the opening paragraph of an essay on the New Wave Rob Latham relates thatLatham remarks that this analysis by Harlan Ellison “obscures Ellison’s own prominent role – and that of other professional authors and editors such as Judith Merril, Michael Moorcock, Lester Del Rey, Frederik Pohl, and Donald A. Wollheim – in fomenting the conflict,…”
In the early 1970s a number of writers and readers pointed out that
The closing of New Worlds magazine in 1970 "marked the containment of New Wave experiment with the rest of the counter-culture. The various limping manifestations of New World across the 1970s … demonstrated the posthumous nature of its avant-gardism.
In an essay The Alien Encounter Professor Patrick Parrinder
Patrick Parrinder
Patrick Parrinder is an academic, currently Professor of English at the School of English and American Literature at the University of Reading, having been educated at Leighton Park School before going on to King's College, Cambridge. He has written books of literary criticism on James Joyce and...
’s states that “any meaningful act of defamiliarization can only be relative, since it is not possible for man to imagine what is utterly alien to him; the utterly alien would also be meaningless.” He continues later:
Veteran science fiction writer Jack Williamson
Jack Williamson
John Stewart Williamson , who wrote as Jack Williamson was a U.S. writer often referred to as the "Dean of Science Fiction" following the death in 1988 of Robert A...
(1908–2006) when asked in 1991: “Did the [New] Wave's emphasis on experimentalizm and its conscious efforts to make SF more "literary" have any kind of permanent effects on the field?” replied:
It has been observed that
David Hartwell’s maintains that after the New Wave, science fiction had still managed to retain this “marginality and tenuous self-identity”:
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000...
, a science fiction writer who began his career with John W, Campbell in Astounding magazine in the 1940s, said of the New Wave: "I hope that when the New Wave has deposited its froth and receded, the vast and solid shore of science fiction will appear once more."
Asimov himself was to illustrate just how that “SF shore” did indeed re-emerged, vast, solid—but changed. A biographer of Asimov noted that during the 1960s
Darren Harris-Fain observes on this return to writing SF by Asimov that
Other themes dealt with in the novel are concerns for the environment and “human stupidity and the delusional belief in human superiority”, both frequent topics in New Wave SF.
Commenting in 2002 on the publication of the 35th Anniversary edition of the Dangerous Visions anthology edited by Harlan Ellison, the critic Greg L. Johnson remarked that
Isaac Asimov agrees that “on the whole, the New Wave was a good thing.” He describes several “interesting side effects” of the New Wave. Firstly that it brought non-American SF to the fore and that afterwards SF was an international phenomenon. Other changes noted were that
The noted academic writer on science fiction Edward James
Edward James (historian)
Edward James is Professor of Medieval History at University College, Dublin. He received a BA 1968; DPhil in 1975. He was a Lecturer, then College Lecturer, at the Department of Medieval History, University College Dublin from 1970-1978...
sums up the New Wave and its impact as follows:
Several factors may have contributed to the "death" of New Wave science fiction. One factor was its assimilation into the larger science fiction mainstream. A second factor was the passing of the radicalism of the 1960s in art as well as life. The New Wave's demise may have been hastened by conscious reaction against it in the SF mainstream. Lester del Rey
Lester del Rey
Lester del Rey was an American science fiction author and editor. Del Rey was the author of many of the Winston Science Fiction juvenile SF series, and the editor at Del Rey Books, the fantasy and science fiction branch of Ballantine Books, along with his fourth wife Judy-Lynn del Rey.-Birth...
, an influential editor (who had in fact been published in Ellison's first Dangerous Visions anthology), led a conscious effort to re-assert genre traditions in the 1970s and early 1980s. Pioneers such as Larry Niven
Larry Niven
Laurence van Cott Niven / ˈlæri ˈnɪvən/ is an American science fiction author. His best-known work is Ringworld , which received Hugo, Locus, Ditmar, and Nebula awards. His work is primarily hard science fiction, using big science concepts and theoretical physics...
(also published in Dangerous Visions) broke new ground with fresh scientific discoveries and imaginative extrapolations. By then, a neo-Campbellian revival of hard science fiction
Hard science fiction
Hard science fiction is a category of science fiction characterized by an emphasis on scientific or technical detail, or on scientific accuracy, or on both. The term was first used in print in 1957 by P. Schuyler Miller in a review of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Islands of Space in Astounding Science...
after 1982 at the hands of David Brin
David Brin
Glen David Brin, Ph.D. is an American scientist and award-winning author of science fiction. He has received the Hugo, Locus, Campbell and Nebula Awards.-Biography:...
, Gregory Benford
Gregory Benford
Gregory Benford is an American science fiction author and astrophysicist who is on the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine...
, Greg Bear
Greg Bear
Gregory Dale Bear is an American science fiction and mainstream author. His work has covered themes of galactic conflict , artificial universes , consciousness and cultural practices , and accelerated evolution...
and others had emerged. On the other hand, cyberpunk
Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk is a postmodern and science fiction genre noted for its focus on "high tech and low life." The name is a portmanteau of cybernetics and punk, and was originally coined by Bruce Bethke as the title of his short story "Cyberpunk," published in 1983...
, a movement popularized by Gardner Dozois
Gardner Dozois
Gardner Raymond Dozois is an American science fiction author and editor. He was editor of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine from 1984 to 2004...
and editor Ellen Datlow
Ellen Datlow
Ellen Datlow is an American science fiction, fantasy, and horror editor and anthologist.-Biography:Datlow was the fiction editor of Omni magazine and Omni Online from 1981 through 1998, and edited the ten associated Omni anthologies...
, had made it clear that "the rebellion" had taken on a new form.
Some have seen the emergence of cyberpunk
Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk is a postmodern and science fiction genre noted for its focus on "high tech and low life." The name is a portmanteau of cybernetics and punk, and was originally coined by Bruce Bethke as the title of his short story "Cyberpunk," published in 1983...
literature as a sequel of sorts to the aims of the New Wave movement. Cyberpunk incorporated several of New Wave's "ancestors," namely Burroughs and Alfred Bester and partially embraced New Wave proponents Harlan Ellison and Samuel R. Delany. The New Weird
New Weird
The New Weird is a literary genre that began in the 1990s and developed in a series of novels and stories published from 2001 to 2005. The writers involved are mostly novelists who are considered to be parts of the horror and/or speculative fiction genres but who often cross genre boundaries...
movement and the genre of slipstream fiction occupies a space similar to that of the New Wave movement, in relationship to the mainstream of science fiction and fantasy. However, they have a far less adversial relationship to their "parent" genres.
A more important effect of the movement was to broaden the range of acceptable themes and styles in genre SF. While the New Wavers never achieved the thorough disruption of genre conventions they were aiming for, they helped make it possible for post-New-Wave SF writers to tackle previously taboo subjects and to more often use techniques such as stream-of-consciousness narration and unreliable narrator
Unreliable narrator
An unreliable narrator is a narrator, whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been seriously compromised. The term was coined in 1961 by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction. This narrative mode is one that can be developed by an author for a number of reasons, usually...
s. Even the neo-Campbellian revivalists who had set themselves most directly against the New Wave's political and aesthetic program eventually benefitted from the new freedom.
Authors
John BrunnerJohn Brunner (novelist)
John Kilian Houston Brunner was a prolific British author of science fiction novels and stories. His 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar, about an overpopulated world, won the 1968 Hugo Award for best science fiction novel. It also won the BSFA award the same year...
is noted as a primary exponent of dystopian New Wave science fiction. Critic John Clute wrote of M. John Harrison
M. John Harrison
M. John Harrison , known as Mike Harrison, is an English author and critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories, , Climbers , and the Kefahuchi Tract series which begins with Light . He currently resides in London.-Early years:Harrison was born in Rugby,...
's early writing that it "... reveals its New-Wave provenance in narrative discontinuities and subheads after the fashion of J. G. Ballard". Brian Aldiss
Brian Aldiss
Brian Wilson Aldiss, OBE is an English author of both general fiction and science fiction. His byline reads either Brian W. Aldiss or simply Brian Aldiss. Greatly influenced by science fiction pioneer H. G. Wells, Aldiss is a vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society...
, Harlan Ellison
Harlan Ellison
Harlan Jay Ellison is an American writer. His principal genre is speculative fiction.His published works include over 1,700 short stories, novellas, screenplays, teleplays, essays, a wide range of criticism covering literature, film, television, and print media...
, Robert Silverberg
Robert Silverberg
Robert Silverberg is an American author, best known for writing science fiction. He is a multiple nominee of the Hugo Award and a winner of the Nebula Award.-Early years:...
, Norman Spinrad
Norman Spinrad
Norman Richard Spinrad is an American science fiction author.Born in New York City, Spinrad is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science. In 1957 he entered City College of New York and graduated in 1961 with a Bachelor of Science degree as a pre-law major. In 1966 he moved to San Francisco,...
, Roger Zelazny
Roger Zelazny
Roger Joseph Zelazny was an American writer of fantasy and science fiction short stories and novels, best known for his The Chronicles of Amber series...
are writers whose work, though not considered New Wave at the time of publication, later became to be interpreted under the label. Of later authors, the work of Joanna Russ
Joanna Russ
Joanna Russ was an American writer, academic and feminist. She is the author of a number of works of science fiction, fantasy and feminist literary criticism such as How to Suppress Women's Writing, as well as a contemporary novel, On Strike Against God, and one children's book, Kittatinny...
is considered by scholar Peter Nicholls to bear stylistic resemblance to New Wave. Kaoru Kurimoto
Kaoru Kurimoto
was the pen name of , an award-winning Japanese novelist. Imaoka also used the pen name to write criticism. She was known for her record-breaking 126-volume Guin Saga series, which has been translated into English, German, French, Italian and Russian...
is also considered to be among the New Wave canon.