New Wave science fiction

With negligible exceptions (Wells, Stapledon and who?), nearly every science-fiction writer up to a very few years ago made one very hidden—and indefensible—assumption. They assumed that science changed; that the world changed; that everything you could imagine changed, except one thing. They assumed that the human race did not change at all.

— Frederik Pohl, 1965[9]

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,"[10] and according to SF historian David Kyle, Gold's work would lead to the New Wave.[11]

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".[12] 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, (and) galactic wars",[13] 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."[14] 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".[15]

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 ("The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod" and "The Four Colour Problem", respectively), while J. G. Ballard published an admiring essay in an issue of New Worlds.[16] 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:

Without in the least dismissing or belittling earlier writers and work, I think it is fair to say that science fiction changed around 1960, and that the change tended toward an increase in the number of writers and readers, the breadth of subject, the depth of treatment, the sophistication of language and technique, and the political and literary consciousness of the writing. The sixties in science fiction were an exciting period for both established and new writers and readers. All the doors seemed to be opening.[17]^:18

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 (or, like Isaac Asimov, shifted their emphasis to other subjects); finally, editors encouraged fresh approaches that earlier ones discouraged.[18]

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,[19] 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".[20] Budrys said that in New Wave writers "there are echoes ... of Philip K. Dick, Walter Miller, Jr. and, by all odds, Fritz Leiber".[21] 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 (first issue number 142, May and June[22]^:251)[note 1]

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."[23]^:27 Judith Merril observed:

this magazine [New Worlds] was the publishing thermometer of the trend that was dubbed "the New Wave". In the United States the trend created an intense, incredible controversy. In Britain people either found it of interest or they didn't, but in the States it was heresy on the one hand and wonderful revolution on the other.[24]^:162–163

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."[25]^:141 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.[26]

In 1963 Moorcock wrote:

Let's have a quick look at what a lot of science fiction lacks. Briefly, these are some of the qualities I miss on the whole – passion, subtlety, irony, original characterization, original and good style, a sense of involvement in human affairs, colour, density, depth, and, on the whole, real feeling from the writer...[27]

In 1962 Ballard wrote:

I've often wondered why s-f shows so little of the experimental enthusiasm which has characterized painting, music and the cinema during the last four or five decades, particularly as these have become wholeheartly speculative, more and more concerned with the creation of new states of mind, constructing fresh symbols and languages where the old cease to be valid. …

The biggest developments of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that need to be explored. The only truly alien planet is Earth. In the past the scientific bias of s-f has been towards the physical sciences – rocketry, electronics, cybernetics – and the emphasis should switch to the biological sciences. Accuracy, that last refuge of the unimaginative, doesn't matter a hoot. …

It is that inner space-suit which is still needed, and it is up to science fiction to build it![28]^:197

Moorcock, Ballard, and others engendered much animosity from the established SF community. When reviewing 2001: A Space Odyssey, Lester del Rey described it as "the first of the New Wave-Thing movies, with the usual empty symbolism".[29] When reviewing World's Best Science Fiction: 1966 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".[30] 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":[25]^:146

A story by J. G. Ballard, as you know, calls for people who don't think. One begins with characters who regard the physical universe as a mysterious and arbitrary place, and who would not dream of trying to understand its actual laws. Furthermore, in order to be the protagonist of a J. G. Ballard novel, or anything more than a very minor character therein, you must have cut yourself off from the entire body of scientific education. In this way, when the world disaster – be it wind or water – comes upon you, you are under absolutely no obligation to do anything about it but sit and worship it. Even more further, some force has acted to remove from the face of the world all people who might impose good sense or rational behavior on you, so that the disaster proceeds unchecked and unopposed except by the almost inevitable thumb-rule engineer type who for his individual comfort builds a huge pyramid (without huge footings) to resist high winds, or trains a herd of alligators and renegade divers to help him out in dealing with deep water.[31]

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".[12] Despite his criticism of Ballard and Aldiss ("the least talented" of the four), Budrys called them, Roger Zelazny, and Samuel R. Delany "an earthshaking new kind" of writers.[21] 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",[32] 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".[21]

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 Disch's 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 ("about people who do something about their troubles").[31] Writing in The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, Disch observed that:

Literary movements tend to be compounded, in various proportions, of the genius of two or three genuinely original talents, some few other capable or established writers who have been co-opted or gone along for the ride, the apprentice work of epigones and wannabes, and a great deal of hype. My sense of the New Wave, with twenty-five years of hindsight, is that its irreducible nucleus was the dyad of J. G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock, ...[33]^:105

Roger Luckhurst pointed out that Ballard's essay "Which Way to Inner Space?"[28] "showed the influence of media theorist Marshall McLuhan and the 'anti-psychiatry' of R. D. Laing."[34]^:148 Luckhurst traces the influence of both these thinkers in Ballard's fiction, in particular The Atrocity Exhibition (1970)[34]^:152

Another central concern of the New Wave was a fascination with entropy[31] – that the world (and the universe) must tend to disorder, to eventually run down to 'heat death'. Ballard provided

an explicitly cosmological vision of entropic decline of the universe in his magisterial story "The Voices of Time", which appeared in 1960. It provided a matrix of ideas that subsequent New Wave writing teased out in various contexts. Perhaps the best instance of this elaboration was Pamela Zoline's "The Heat Death of the Universe."[28]^:158

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."[35]^:172

Judith Merril, "whose annual anthologies were the first heralds of the coming of the [New Wave] cult,"[36]^:105 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:

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.[37]^:28

Judith Merril's annual anthologies (1957–1968[38]), 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).[39]^:156 Brooks Landon, professor of English at the University of Iowa, says of Dangerous Visions that it

was innovative and influential before it had any readers simply because it was the first big original anthology of SF, offering prices to its writers that were competitive with the magazines. The readers soon followed, however, attracted by 33 stories by SF writers both well-established and relatively unheard of. These writers responded to editor Harlan Ellison's call for stories that could not be published elsewhere or had never been written in the face of almost certain censorship by SF editors. Among the stories Ellison received were the almost Joycean "Riders of the Purple Wage," by Philip Jose Farmer, "Carcinoma Angels", by Norman Spinrad, and "Aye, and Gomorrah…" by Samuel R. Delany, as well as stories by Brian Aldiss, Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, John Brunner, John Sladek, Roger Zelazny, David R. Bunch, Theodore Sturgeon, Carol Emshwiller, and Sonya Dorman. [T]o SF readers, especially in the United States, Dangerous Visions certainly felt like a revolution ... Dangerous Visions marks an emblematic turning point for American SF.[39]^:157

The New Wave also had a political subtext:

Most of the 'classic' writers had begun writing before the Second World War, and were reaching middle age by the early 1960s; the writers of the so-called New Wave were mostly born during or after the war, and were not only reacting against the sf writers of the past, but playing their part in the general youth revolution of the 1960s which had such profound effects upon Western culture. It is no accident that the New Wave began in Britain at the time of the Beatles, and took off in the United States at the time of the hippies – both, therefore at a time of cultural innovation and generational shake-up …[35]^:167

Eric S. Raymond, looking at the New Wave with an even narrower political focus, observed:

The New Wave's inventors (notably Michael Moorcock, J. G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss) were British socialists and Marxists who rejected individualism, linear exposition, happy endings, scientific rigor and the U.S.'s cultural hegemony over the SF field in one fell swoop. The New Wave's later American exponents were strongly associated with the New Left and opposition to the Vietnam War, leading to some rancorous public disputes in which politics was tangled together with definitional questions about the nature of SF and the direction of the field.[40]

For example, Judith Merril, "one of the most visible -- and voluble -- apostles of the New Wave in 1960s sf"[41] remembers her return from England to the United States:

So I went home ardently looking for a revolution. I kept searching until the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968. I went to Chicago partly to seek out a revolution, if there was one happening, and partly because my seventeen-year-old daughter … wanted to go.[24]^:167

Merril said later "At the end of the Convention week, the taste of America was sour in all our mouths,"[24]^:169 and "by the end of the Sixties, Merril was a political refugee living in Canada."[25]^:142

Roger Luckhurst disagreed with those critics (he gives the example of Thomas Clareson) who perceived the New Wave in terms of rupture, suggesting that such a model

doesn't quite seem to map onto the American scene, even though the wider conflicts of the 1960s liberalization in universities, the civil rights movement and the cultural contradictions inherent in consumer society were starker and certainly more violent than in Britain. The young turks within SF also had an ossified 'ancient regime' to topple: John Campbell's intolerant right-wing editorials for 'Astounding Science Fiction' (which he renamed 'Analog' in 1960) teetered on the self parody. In 1970, when the campus revolt against American involvement in Vietnam reached its height and resulted in the National Guard shooting four students dead in Kent State University, Campbell editorialized that the 'punishment was due', and rioters should expect to be met with lethal force. Vietnam famously divided the SF community to the extent that, in 1968, 'Galaxy' magazine carried two adverts, one signed by writers in favour and one by those against the war.[34]^:160[42]

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:

When did the New Wave SF end? Who was the last New Wave SF writer? You can't be a New Wave SF writer today. You can recite the numbers of them: Ballard, Ellison, Spinrad, Delaney, blah, blah, blah. What about a transitional figure like Zelazny? A literary movement isn't an army. You don't wear a uniform and swear allegiance. It's just a group of people trying to develop a sensibility.[43]

Similarly Rob Latham observed:

... indeed, one of the central ways the New Wave was experienced, in the US and Britain, was as a "liberated" outburst of erotic expression, often counterpoised, by advocates of the "New Thing"(as Merril called it), with the priggish Puritanism of the Golden Age. Yet this stark contrast, while not unreasonable, tends ultimately, as do most of the historical distinctions drawn between the New Wave and its predecessors, to overemphasize rupture at the expense of continuity, effectively "disappearing" some of the pioneering trends in 1950s sf that paved the way for the New Wave's innovations.[41]^:252

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:

The split between the New Wave and everyone else in American SF during the late 1960s was nearly as dramatic as the division at the same time between young protesters and what they called "the establishment," and in fact, the political views of the younger writers, often prominent in their work, reflect many contemporary concerns. New Wave accused what became de facto the old wave of being old-fashioned, patriarchal, imperialistic, and obsessed with technology; many of the more established writers thought the New Wave shallow, said that its literary innovations were not innovations at all (which in fact, outside of SF, they were not), and accused it of betraying SF's grand view of humanity's role in the universe. Both assertions were largely exaggerations, of course, and in the next decade both trends would merge into a synthesis of styles and concerns. However, in 1970 the issue was far from settled and would remain a source of contention for the next few years.[44]^:13–14

In the opening paragraph of an essay[45]^:296 on the New Wave, Rob Latham relates that

In the August 1970 issue of the SFWA Forum, a publication circulated to members of the Science Fiction Writers of America, Harlan Ellison remarked that the controversy over the New Wave, which had consumed the field during the late 1960s, seemed to have been "blissfully laid to rest." There never was, he claimed,

any real conflict among the writers. It was all a manufactured controversy, staged by fans to hype their own participation in the genre. Their total misunderstanding of what was happening (not unusual for fans, as history … shows us) managed to stir up a great deal of pointless animosity and if it had any real effect I suspect it was in the unfortunate area of causing certain writers to feel they were unable to keep up and consequently they slowed their writing output.[46]

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, …"

[45]^:296

In the early 1970s a number of writers and readers pointed out that

winners of the Nebula Awards, created by the Science Fiction Writers of America (SWFA) in 1965, tended to be very different from recipients of the Hugo Awards, given by fans at the annual World Science Fiction Convention (the Worldcon), arguing that this highlighted the fact that many writers had departed from readers' tastes into self-indulgence. … While some writers and fans continued to argue about the New Wave until the end of the 1970s – in The World of Science Fiction, 1926–1976: The History of a Subculture, for instance, Lester Del Ray devotes several pages to castigating the movement – for the most part the controversy died down as the decade wore on.[44]^:20

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.[34]^:168

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."[47]^:48 He continues later:

Within SF, however, it is not necessary to break with the wider conventions of prose narrative in order to produce work that is validly experimental. The "New Wave" writing of the 1960s, with its fragmented and surrealistic forms, has not made a lasting impact, because it cast its net too wide. To reform SF one must challenge the conventions of the genre on their own terms.[47]^:55–56

Veteran science fiction writer Jack Williamson (1908–2006) when asked in 1991: "Did the [New] Wave's emphasis on experimentalism and its conscious efforts to make SF more 'literary' have any kind of permanent effects on the field?" replied:

After it subsided -- it's old hat now -- it probably left us with a sharpened awareness of language and a keener interest in literary experiment. It did wash up occasional bits of beauty and power. For example, it helped launch the careers of such writers as [Samuel R] Chip Delany, Brian Aldiss, and Harlan Ellison, all of whom seem to have gone on their own highly individualistic directions. But the key point here is that New Wave SF failed to move people. I'm not sure if this failure was due to its pessimistic themes or to people feeling the stuff was too pretentious. But it never really grabbed hold of people's imaginations.[48]

It has been observed that

there is something efficacious in sf's marginality and always tenuous self-identity -- its ambiguous generic distinction from other literary categories -- and, perhaps more importantly, in its distinction from what has variously been called realist, mainstream, or mundane fiction.[49]^:289

Hartwell maintained that after the New Wave, science fiction had still managed to retain this "marginality and tenuous self-identity":

The British and American New Wave in common would have denied the genre status of SF entirely and ended the continual development of new specialized words and phrases common to the body of SF, without which SF would be indistinguishable from mundane fiction in its entirety (rather than only out on the borders of experimental SF, which is properly indistinguishable from any other experimental literature). The denial of special or genre status is ultimately the cause of the failure of the New Wave to achieve popularity, which, if it had become truly dominant, would have destroyed SF as a separate field.[25]^:153

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.[50] 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".[32][51]^:388 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

stories and novels that Asimov must not have liked and must have felt were not part of the science fiction he had helped to shape were winning acclaim and awards. He also must have felt that science fiction no longer needed him. His science fiction writing, … became even more desultory and casual. Asimov's return to serious writing in 1972 with The Gods Themselves (when much of the debate about the New Wave had dissipated) was an act of courage …[52]^:105

Darren Harris-Fain observed on this return to writing SF by Asimov that

the novel [The Gods Themselves] is noteworthy for how it both shows that Asimov was indeed the same writer in the 1970s that he had been in the 1950s and that he nonetheless had been affected by the New Wave even if he was never part of it. His depiction of an alien ménage a trois, complete with homoerotic scenes between the two males, marks an interesting departure from his earlier fiction, in which sex of any sort is conspicuously absent. Also there is some minor experimentation with structure.[44]^:43

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.[44]^:44

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

if the New Wave did not entirely revolutionize the way SF was written, (the exploration of an invented world through the use of an adventure plot remains the prototypical SF story outline), they did succeed in pushing the boundaries of what could be considered SF, and their use of stylistic innovations from outside SF helped raise standards. It became less easy for writers to get away with stock characters spouting wooden dialogue laced with technical jargon. Such stories still exist, and are still published, but are no longer typical of the field.[53]

Asimov agreed that "on the whole, the New Wave was a good thing".[54]^:137 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 New Wave encouraged more and more women to begin reading and writing science fiction…. The broadening of science fiction meant that it was approaching the 'mainstream' … in style and content. It also meant that increasing numbers of mainstream novelists were recognizing the importance of changing technology and the popularity of science fiction, and were incorporating science fiction motifs into their own novels.[54]^:138–139

The noted academic writer on science fiction Edward James described the New Wave and its impact as follows:

The American New Wave was, on the whole, quite unlike the British. The latter was effectively a group of people associated with a magazine that had a particular programme …, whereas even those American writers who gathered in London at the time, like [Samuel R] Delaney, [Thomas M] Disch, and [John] Sladek, were individuals pursuing their own ends, not those of Ballard or Moorcock. As a 'movement', the American New Wave was even less real than the British; it was no more than a concatenation of talent flourishing at the same time and bringing new ideas and new standards to the writing of sf. The British New Wave had few lasting effects, even in Britain; the American New Wave ushered in a great expansion of the field and of its readership. No doubt the writers did not achieve this success on their own. It may be noted, for instance, that this burst of originality occurred at almost exactly the same times as the three seasons of Star Trek, which certainly contributed to the expansion of sf's readership. Whether or not much of this boom can be attributed to the American New Wave, 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.[35]^:176