New Wave science fiction


The New Wave is a movement in 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. 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.
The New Wave science fiction writers of the 1960s emphasized stylistic experimentation and literary merit over the scientific accuracy or prediction of hard science fiction writers. It was conceived as a deliberate break from the traditions of pulp science fiction, which many of the New Wave writers involved considered irrelevant and unambitious. Academic Brian McHale claimed that the ambition of reaching literary status for SF writers came from its "edge" and from the emergence of postmodernism.
The most prominent source of New Wave science fiction was the magazine New Worlds under the editorship of Michael Moorcock, who assumed the position in 1964. Moorcock sought to use the magazine to "define a new avant-gard] role" for science fiction by the use of "new literary techniques and modes of expression." It was a period marked by the emergence of a greater diversity of voices in science fiction, most notably the rise in the number of female writers, including Joanna Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin and Alice Bradley Sheldon. The New Wave was also influenced by the political turmoil of the 1960s, such as the controversy over the Vietnam War, and by social trends such as the drug subculture and sexual liberation.

Name

The term "New Wave" is borrowed from the French film movement the nouvelle vague. Gary K. Wolfe, professor of humanities and English at Roosevelt University, identifies the introduction of the term New Wave to science fiction as occurring in 1966 in an essay for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction written by Judith Merril, who was indirectly yet it seems unambiguously referring to that term in order to comment on the experimental fiction that had begun to appear in the English magazine New Worlds, after Michael Moorcock assumed editorship in 1964. However, Judith Merril denied she ever used that term.
Merril later popularized this fiction in the United States through her edited anthology England Swings SF: Stories of Speculative Fiction, although an earlier anthology is a key harbinger of New Wave science fiction in the US.

History

Influences and predecessors

Though the New Wave began in the 1960s, some of its tenets can be found in H. L. Gold's editorship of Galaxy, a science fiction magazine which began publication in 1950. James Gunn described Gold's focus as being "not on the adventurer, the inventor, the engineer, or the scientist, but on the average citizen," and according to SF historian David Kyle, Gold's work would lead to the New Wave.
Algis Budrys in 1965 wrote of the "recurrent strain in 'Golden Age' science fiction of the 1940s—the implication that sheer technological accomplishment would solve all the problems, hooray, and that all the problems were what they seemed to be on the surface". The New Wave did not define itself as a development from the science fiction which came before it, but initially reacted against it. New Wave writers did not operate as an organized group, but some of them felt the tropes of the pulp and Golden Age periods had become worn out, and should be abandoned: J. G. Ballard stated in 1962 that "science fiction should turn its back on space, on interstellar travel, extra-terrestrial life forms, galactic wars", and Brian Aldiss said in Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction that "the props of SF are few: rocket ships, telepathy, robots, time travel...like coins, they become debased by over-circulation." Harry Harrison summarised the period by saying "old barriers were coming down, pulp taboos were being forgotten, new themes and new manners of writing were being explored".
New Wave writers began to look outside the traditional scope of science fiction for influence; some looked to the example of beat writer William S. Burroughs – New Wave authors Philip José Farmer and Barrington J. Bayley wrote pastiches of his work, while J. G. Ballard published an admiring essay in an issue of New Worlds. Burroughs' use of experimentation such as the cut-up technique and his appropriation of science fiction tropes in radical ways proved the extent to which prose fiction could prove revolutionary, and some New Wave writers sought to emulate this style.
Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the writers to emerge in the 1960s, describes the transition to the New Wave era thus:
Critic Rob Latham identifies three trends that linked the advent of the New Wave in the 1960s to the emergence of cyberpunk in the 1980s. He said that changes in technology as well as an economic recession constricted the market for science fiction, generating a "widespread" malaise among fans, while established writers were forced to reduce their output ; finally, editors encouraged fresh approaches that earlier ones discouraged.

Movement

There is no consensus on a precise starting point of the New Wave – Adam Roberts refers to Alfred Bester as having singlehandedly invented the genre, and in the introduction to a collection of Leigh Brackett's short fiction, Michael Moorcock referred to her as one of the genre's "true godmothers". Budrys said that in New Wave writers "there are echoes... of Philip K. Dick, Walter Miller, Jr. and, by all odds, Fritz Leiber". However, it is widely accepted among critics that the New Wave began in England with the magazine New Worlds and Michael Moorcock. who was appointed editor in 1964
While the American magazines Amazing Stories, with Cele Goldsmith as editor, and Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction had from the start printed 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:
As an anthologist and speaker Merril with other authors advocated a reestablishment of science fiction within the literary mainstream and higher literary standards. Her "incredible controversy" is characterized by David Hartwell in the opening sentence of a book chapter entitled "New Wave: The Great War of the 1960s": "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." The heresy was beyond the experimental and explicitly provocative as inspired by Burroughs. In all coherence with the literary nouvelle vague although not in close association to it, and addressing a much less restricted pool of readers, the New Wave was reversing the standard hero's attitude toward action and science. It illustrated egotism - by depriving the plot of all motivation toward a rational explanation.
In 1963 Moorcock wrote:
In 1962 Ballard wrote:
Moorcock, Ballard, and others engendered much animosity from the established SF community. When reviewing ', Lester del Rey described it as "the first of the New Wave-Thing movies, with the usual empty symbolism". When reviewing ' Budrys mocked Ellison's "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" and two other stories as "rudimentary social consciousness... deep stuff" and insufficient for "an outstanding science-fiction story". Hartwell noted Budrys's "ringing scorn and righteous indignation" that year in "one of the classic diatribes against Ballard and the new mode of SF then emergent":
Budrys in Galaxy, when reviewing a collection of recent stories from the magazine, said in 1965 that "There is this sense in this book... that modern science fiction reflects a dissatisfaction with things as they are, sometimes to the verge of indignation, but also retains optimism about the eventual outcome". Despite his criticism of Ballard and Aldiss, Budrys called them, Roger Zelazny, and Samuel R. Delany "an earthshaking new kind" of writers. Asimov said in 1967 of the New Wave, "I want science fiction. I think science fiction isn't really science fiction if it lacks science. And I think the better and truer the science, the better and truer the science fiction", but Budrys that year warned that the four would soon leave those "still reading everything from the viewpoint of the 1944 Astounding... nothing but a complete collection of yellowed, crumble-edged bewilderment".
While acknowledging the New Wave's "energy, high talent and dedication", and stating that it "may in fact be the shape of tomorrow's science fiction generally — hell, it may be the shape of today's science fiction", as examples of the movement Budrys much preferred Zelazny's This Immortal to Thomas Dischs The Genocide. Predicting that Zelazny's career would be more important and lasting than Disch's, he described the latter's book as "unflaggingly derivative of" the New Wave and filled with "dumb, resigned victims" who "run, hide, slither, grope and die", like Ballard's The Drowned World but unlike The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Writing in The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, Disch observed that:
Roger Luckhurst pointed 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
Another central concern of the New Wave was a fascination with entropy – that the world 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 Merril, "whose annual anthologies were the first heralds of the coming of the cult," writing in 1967 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction contrasts the SF New Wave in England and the United States:
Judith Merril's annual anthologies, Damon Knight's Orbit series, and Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions featured American writers inspired by British writers. 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, observed:
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 said 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 disagreed with those critics who perceived the New Wave in terms of rupture, suggesting that such a model
Caution is needed when assessing any literary movement. Science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, reacting to his association with another SF movement in the 1980s, remarked:
Similarly Rob Latham observed:
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:

Decline and lasting influence

In the opening paragraph of an essay on the New Wave, Rob Latham relates that
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 stated 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 when asked in 1991: "Did the Wave's emphasis on experimentalism and its conscious efforts to make SF more 'literary' have any kind of permanent effects on the field?" replied:
It has been observed that
Hartwell maintained that after the New Wave, science fiction had still managed to retain this "marginality and tenuous self-identity":
Scientific accuracy was more important than literary style to Campbell, and top Astounding contributors Asimov, Heinlein, and L. Sprague de Camp were trained scientists and engineers. Asimov said in 1967 "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 noted that during the 1960s
Darren Harris-Fain observed 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
Asimov agreed that "on the whole, the New Wave was a good thing". He described several "interesting side effects" of the New Wave. Non-American SF became more prominent and the genre became international phenomenon. Other changes noted were that
The noted academic writer on science fiction Edward James described the New Wave and its impact as follows:

Authors

is 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 associated with the label. Of later authors, the work of Joanna Russ is considered by scholar Peter Nicholls to bear stylistic resemblance to New Wave. Thomas M. Disch repudiated the "new wave" label: "If you mean to ask--do I feel solidarity with all writers who have ever been lumped together under that heading--certainly I do not."