New Wave (science fiction)

New Wave science fiction was characterised by a high degree of experimentation, both in form and in content, and a highbrow sensibility. The term "New Wave" is borrowed from film criticism's nouvelle vague: films characterised by the work of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and others. It was later applied to 1970s punk rock in the UK and to new wave music.

Predecessors

Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, Algis Budrys (especially for his novel Rogue Moon with its use of Freudianism), and Alfred Bester can be considered as important precursors of the movement.

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 and his cut-up technique and radical approach to the themes and tropes of science fiction also proved inspirational. J.G. Ballard published an essay of appreciation of Burroughs in New Worlds. New Worlds later published Barrington J. Bayley's pastiche of Burroughs, "The Four Colour Problem". Burroughs had himself earlier expressed his appreciation of Bayley's novel Star Virus.

History

Growing as a trickle more than a flood, New Wave began in 1964, when Michael Moorcock took over as editor for the British science fiction magazine New Worlds. While the American magazines Amazing Stories with Cele Goldsmith as editor and the respected The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction had had a tendency to publish unusually literary stories, Moorcock turned this into a concerted policy. Nor would any other periodical seek as consistently to distance itself from traditional science fiction as much as New Worlds.

The content of New Wave rejected the core concerns of traditional science fiction ("outer space"), in favour of a focus on taboo breaking and a more people focused approach ("innerspace"). One of the central ideas of the New Wave was entropy, the idea that the universe will irrevocably run down, and its reflection in human society. The New Wave writers saw themselves as part of the general literary tradition and often openly mocked the traditions of pulp science fiction, which they regarded as stodgy, irrelevant and unambitious.

The New Wave also had a political subtext. Brian Aldiss, Thomas Disch, Michael Moorcock and other key figures in the British New Wave came from various Marxist and socialist political traditions; their disdain for genre SF was partly a maneuver against American cultural hegemony and what the New Wavers considered 'conservatism' in "Campbellian" SF. In the U.S., the New Wave would be closely associated with opposition to the Vietnam War and New Left thought.

The New Wave peaked around 1971; by 1975, the year the war ended, it was played out. Most of its fruits proved to be more interesting to academics and literary theorists than actual readers. Tellingly, of the writers closely associated with it only Philip K. Dick developed a significant fan base and proved able to maintain that popularity after the end of the movement.

The New Wave movement started to explore many subjects, including sex in science fiction, in ways that were previously unthinkable. Harlan Ellison's anthology Dangerous Visions was an important milestone. With its publication in 1967, the New Wave broke--it smashed taboos relentlessly, holding no regard for any sort of boundaries. The styles of the authors varied, but one thing held common for everyone: they had something to say, and they said it. What was more, it also collected numerous awards for its being, including three Hugo Awards (Best Anthology, Best Novelette, and Best Novella).

Though not identified with the New Wave or any other literary movement, the American anthology series Orbit, edited by Damon Knight. The later New Wave-influenced writers Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann would get published here. Orbit serve as a latter-day showcase of experimental science fiction, to relatively little notice. New Worlds itself ended its days as a paperback anthology, rather than a magazine.

Anthologies were particularly important because most of the best work of the New Wave was produced in short-story length. This is partly because magazines buying primarily short fiction were to remain the most most important SF market until the post-Star Wars publishing boom around 1980, but there were artistic reasons as well. The stylistic daring and experimentalism the movement valued were more difficult to sustain at novel length, and all too many of the attempts became ambitious flops.

Here is a sampling of major works in the New Wave oeuvre: Philip Jose Farmer's Riders of the Purple Wage; Langdon Jones's The Great Clock; Harlan Ellison's I have No Mouth And I Must Scream; J.G. Ballard's The Voices Of Time; Brian Aldiss's The Dark Light Years; Fritz Leiber's One Station of the Way. The Dangerous Visions anthology (and its sequel, Again, Dangerous Visions) remain especially noteworthy; they have survived the test of time better than most of what came after them.

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 himself enough had a story in Ellison's first Dangerous Visions anthology), led a conscious effort to reassert genre traditions in the 1970s and early 1980s. By 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, cyperpunk, a movement popularized by Gardner Dozois and editor Ellen Datlow had made it clear that "the rebellion" had taken on a radical new form.

After-effects

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 proponents Harlan Ellison and Samuel R. Delany.

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 thoroughgoing disruption of genre conventions they were aiming for, they helped make it possible for post-New-Wave SF writers to tackle previously tabooed subjects and to use techniques such stream-of-consciousness narration and unreliable narrators. 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.

Other Significant New Wave authors

• Brian Aldiss
• John Brunner
• Samuel R. Delany
• Philip K. Dick
• Thomas M. Disch
• Harlan Ellison
• Philip José Farmer
• Harry Harrison
• M. John Harrison
• R.A. Lafferty
• Ursula LeGuin
• Keith Roberts
• Joanna Russ
• Robert Silverberg
• Norman Spinrad
• James Tiptree, Jr, a.k.a. Racoona Sheldon, Alice Sheldon
• Roger Zelazny

Reference

• Colin Greenland, The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the British New Wave in Science Fiction. Routledge, 1983. ISBN 0-710-09310-1