New Wave (science fiction)
The New Wave was a science fiction movement of the 1960s and 1970s, characterized by a great degree of experimentation with the form and content of stories, often influenced by the styles of non-science fiction literature, and an emphasis on the psychological and social sciences as opposed to the physical sciences. New Wave authors often considered themselves as part of the modernist tradition of fiction, and the New Wave was conceived as a deliberate change from the traditions of the science fiction characteristic of pulp magazines, which many of the writers involved considered irrelevant or unambitious.
The most prominent source of New Wave science fiction was the British magazine New Worlds, edited by Michael Moorcock, who became editor during 1964. In the United States, Judith Merril's anthologies and Harlan Ellison's 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions are often considered as the best early representations of the movement. Worldwide, Ursula K. Le Guin, Stanisław Lem, J. G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr., Thomas M. Disch and Brian Aldiss were also major writers associated with the movement. Moorcock wanted writers to borrow from the genre's techniques but encouraged writers to develop their own styles. Apart from Moorcock and Ballard, authors included Hilary Bailey, Barrington Bayley, M. John Harrison, Pamela Zoline, Rachel Pollack and Christopher Priest.
The New Wave was influenced by postmodernism, surrealism, the politics of the 1960s, such as the controversy concerning the Vietnam War, and by social trends such as the drug subculture, sexual liberation, and environmentalism. Although the New Wave was critiqued for the self-absorption of some of its writers, it was influential in the development of subsequent movements, including cyberpunk and slipstream. Authors like Michael Chabon and Hari Kunzru are also considered among later authors of New Wave fiction.
Origins and use of the term
Origins
The phrase "New Wave" was used generally for new artistic fashions during the 1960s, imitating the term nouvelle vague used for certain French cinematic styles. P. Schuyler Miller, the regular book reviewer of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, first used it in the November 1961 issue to describe a new generation of British authors: "It's a moot question whether Carnell discovered the ‘big names’ of British science fiction—Wyndham, Clarke, Russell, Christopher—or whether they discovered him. Whatever the answer, there is no question at all about the ‘new wave’: Tubb, Aldiss, and to get to my point, Kenneth Bulmer and John Brunner".Subsequent usage
The term 'New Wave' has been incorporated into the concept of New Wave Fabulism, a form of magic realism "which often blend a realist or postmodern aesthetic with nonrealistic interruptions, in which alternative technologies, ontologies, social structures, or biological forms make their way in to otherwise realistic plots".:76 New Wave Fabulism itself has been related to the slipstream literary genre, an interface between mainstream or postmodern fiction and science fiction.The concept of a 'new wave' has been applied to science fiction in other countries, including for some Arabic science fiction, with Ahmed Khaled Tawfik's best-selling novel Utopia being considered a prominent example, and Chinese science fiction, where it has been applied to some of the work of Wang Jinkang and Liu Cixin, including Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, works that emphasize China's increase of power, the development myth, and posthumanity.
Description
The early proponents of New Wave considered it to be a major change from the genre's past, and that is the way that it was experienced by many readers during the late 1960s and early 1970s. New Wave writers often considered themselves as part of the modernist and then postmodernist traditions and sometimes mocked the traditions of older science fiction, which many of them regarded as stodgy, adolescent and badly written. Many also rejected the content of the Golden Age of Science Fiction; rejecting an emphasis on physical science and adventures in outer space, they preferred to examine human psychology, subjectivity, dreams, and the unconscious. Nonetheless, during the New Wave period, traditional types of science fiction continued to appear, and in Rob Latham's opinion, the broader genre had absorbed the New Wave's agenda and mostly neutralized it by the conclusion of the 1970s.Format
The New Wave coincided with a major change in the production and distribution of science fiction, as the pulp magazine era was replaced by the book market; it was in a sense also a reaction against typical pulp magazine styles.Topics
The New Wave interacted with a number of themes during the 1960s and 1970s, including sexuality; drug culture, especially the work of William S. Burroughs and the use of psychedelic drugs; and the popularity of environmentalism. J. G. Ballard's themes included alienation, social isolation, class discrimination, and the end of civilization, in settings ranging from a single apartment block to entire worlds. Rob Latham noted that several of J. G. Ballard's works of the 1960s, engaged with the concept of eco-catastrophe, as did Disch's The Genocides and Ursula K. Le Guin's short novel The Word for World Is Forest. The latter, with its description of the use of napalm on indigenous people, was also influenced by Le Guin's perceptions of the Vietnam War, and both emphasized anti-technocratic fatalism instead of imperial hegemony via technology, with the New Wave later interacting with feminism, ecological activism and postcolonial rhetoric.One characteristic of New Wave authors was a fascination with entropy, i.e. with the idea that the world and the universe tend to disorder and must eventually end in "heat death". The New Wave also engaged with utopia, a common theme of science fiction, offering more nuanced interpretations.:74–80
Style
Transformation of style was part of the basis of the New Wave fashion.:286 Combined with controversial topics, it introduced innovations of form, style, and aesthetics, involving more literary ambitions and experimental use of language, with significantly less emphasis on physical science or technological themes in its content. For example, in the story "A Rose for Ecclesiastes", Roger Zelazny introduces numerous literary allusions, complex onomastic patterns, multiple meanings, and innovative themes, and other Zelazny works, such as "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth" and He Who Shapes involve literary self-reflexivity, playful collocations, and neologisms. In stories like "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman, Harlan Ellison is considered as using gonzo-style syntax. Many New Wave authors used obscenity and vulgarity intensely or frequently. Concerning visual aspects, some scenes of J. G. Ballard's novels reference the surrealist paintings of Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí.Differences between American and British New Waves
The British and American New Wave trends overlapped but were somewhat different. Judith Merril noted that New Wave SF was being called "the New Thing". In a 1967 article for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction she contrasted the SF New Wave of England and the United States, writing:They call it the New Thing. The people who call it that mostly don't like it, and the only general agreements they seem to have are that Ballard is its Demon and I am its prophetess—and that it is what is wrong with Tom Disch, and with British s-f in general... The American counterpart is less cohesive as a "school" or "movement": it has had no single publication in which to concentrate its development, and was, in fact, till recently, all but excluded from the regular s-f magazines. But for the same reasons, it is more diffuse and perhaps more widespread.:105
The science fiction academic Edward James also discussed differences between the British and American SF New Wave. He believed that the former was, due to J. G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock, associated mainly with a specific magazine with a set programme that had little subsequent influence. James noted additionally that even the London-based American writers of the time, such as Samuel R. Delany, Thomas M. Disch, and John Sladek, had their own agendas. James asserted the American New Wave did not reach the status of a "movement" but was rather a concordance of talent that introduced new ideas and better standards to the authoring of science fiction, including through the first three seasons of Star Trek. In his opinion, "...the American New Wave ushered in a great expansion of the field and of its readership... it is clear that the rise in literary and imaginative standards associated with the late 1960s contributed a great deal to some of the most original writers of the 1970s, including John Crowley, Joe Haldeman, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree, Jr., and John Varley."
History
Influences and predecessors
Though the New Wave began during the 1960s, some of its tenets can be found in H. L. Gold's editorship of Galaxy, which began publication in 1950. James Gunn described Gold's emphasis 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 result in the New Wave.:119-120The New Wave was partly a rejection of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. 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 was not defined 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 magazine and Golden Age periods had become over-used, 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 use non-science fiction literary themes, such as 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 use of science fiction tropes in new manners proved the extent to which prose fiction could seem revolutionary, and some New Wave writers sought to emulate this style.
Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the newer writers to be published during the 1960s, describes the transition to the New Wave era thus:
Other writers and works seen as preluding or transitioning to the New Wave include Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, Walter M. Miller's 1959 A Canticle for Leibowitz, Cyril M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl's anti-hyper-consumerist The Space Merchants, Kurt Vonnegut's mocking Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan, Theodore Sturgeon's humanist More Than Human and the hermaphrodite society of Venus Plus X, and Philip José Farmer's human-extraterrestrial sexual encounters in The Lovers and Strange Relations.