History Main / NewWaveScienceFiction

* Creator/JohnBrunner (who is also often credited as a proto-cyberpunk writer) wrote some very successful New Wave works, like the {{Hugo|Award}}-winning ''Literature/StandOnZanzibar''. Some people at the time even denied that it could actually be New Wave, because it was ''good''.

* Paul Kantner of the Music/JeffersonAirplane was a huge SF fan, and his solo album ''Music/BlowsAgainstTheEmpire'' was loosely based on a classic SF novel, Creator/RobertAHeinlein's ''Literature/MethuselahsChildren'', but the protagonists were replaced by a rag-tag band of hippies in search of free love and free music, and the musical experimentation on the album, especially the section where the GenerationShip launches, made it a favorite among New Wave fans. It was nominated for a HugoAward for Best Dramatic Presentation (a category normally reserved for movies), where it came in second to "No Award"--a sign of how strong the controversy was at the time.

* Nicolas Roeg's ''Film/TheManWhoFellToEarth'' (1976), starring Music/DavidBowie, was an experimental work very much in the style of the New Wave. The source novel by Walter Tevis (published in the mid-1960s) is much more straightforward, though the basic premise of an AlienAmongUs who falls prey to humanity's vices is intact.

New Wave Science Fiction was a literary movement of [[TheSixties the 1960s]] and 1970s; a rejection of the simplistic action-adventure stories and scientific sophistication of the "Golden Age" in favor of more [[LitFic literary]] and [[PostModernism experimental]] forms of SF (and Fantasy), with more emphasis on writing and creativity, and less on [[MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness "hard"]] science, and, well, plot.

New Wave Science Fiction was a literary movement of [[TheSixties the 1960s]] and 1970s; a rejection of the simplistic action-adventure stories and scientific sophistication of the "Golden Age" in favor of more [[LitFic literary]] and [[PostModernism experimental]] forms of SF (and Fantasy), with more emphasis on writing and creativity, and less on [[MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness "hard"]] science, and, well, plot. Most such stories rate as 1 on the MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness. In the preface to ''Literature/DangerousVisions'', Harlan Ellison famously refused to even call what he was writing science fiction at all, preferring the term "speculative fiction".

* Creator/WilliamSBurroughs' ''Nova Trilogy'' was a science fiction work by a non-science-fiction writer that was hugely influentual on the New Wave, making it a sort of proto-example.
* Creator/JGBallard was one of the mainstays of ''New Worlds'' magazine, and one whose deliberately surreal post-apocalyptic epics came under strong criticism by the old guard for their lack of realism.

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* MeetTheNewBoss: The author lists of the first great anthologies of "Old Wave" science fiction (such as ''Literature/TheBestOfScienceFiction'' and ''Literature/AdventuresInTimeAndSpace'') are 95% white men. The first great anthologies of New Wave (such as ''Literature/DangerousVisions'') are 85% white men. Despite its desire to be socially groundbreaking, in many ways New Wave had the same old problems of sexism and racism.

The NewWeird movement has been suggested by some as a partial rebirth of the New Wave.

* MeetTheNewBoss: The author lists of the first great anthologies of "Old Wave" science fiction (such as ''TheBestOfScienceFiction'' and ''AdventuresInTimeAndSpace'') are 95% white men. The first great anthologies of New Wave (such as ''DangerousVisions'') are 85% white men. Despite its desire to be socially groundbreaking, in many ways New Wave had the same old problems of sexism and racism.

The writers of the New Wave began looking beyond SF for inspiration, and [[TheBeatGeneration Beat writer]] Creator/WilliamSBurroughs was mentioned by many as a major influence.

New Wave Science Fiction was a literary movement of [[TheSixties the 1960s]] and 1970s; a rejection of the simplistic action-adventure stories and scientific sophistication of the "Golden Age" in favor of more [[LitFic literary]] and [[PostModernism experimental]] forms of SF (and Fantasy), with more emphasis on writing and creativity, and less on [[MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness "hard"]] science, and, well, plot. Most such stories rate as 1 on the MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness, and (in the preface to ''Literature/DangerousVisions'', Harlan Ellison famously refused to even call what he was writing science fiction at all, preferring the term "speculative fiction".

New Wave Science Fiction was a literary movement of [[TheSixties the 1960s]] and 1970s; a rejection of the simplistic action-adventure stories of the "Golden Age" in favor of more [[LitFic literary]] and [[PostModernism experimental]] forms of SF (and Fantasy), with more emphasis on writing and creativity, and less on [[MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness "hard"]] science, and, well, plot.

Much like the Youth Movement, the New Wave gradually faded away as its members got older and/or found that ''really'' experimental writing had a very limited market. It ''did'' have a major lasting impact on the field, though, opening up science fiction to all sorts of new ideas and styles, many of which are still common today. And it left in its wake several works that are still very highly regarded. But as a distinct movement, it soon disappeared, to be replaced with the {{Cyberpunk}} controversies of the eighties.

Two anthologies, ''England Swings SF'', edited by Judith Merril, and ''DangerousVisions'' by Creator/HarlanEllison, helped crystalize the movement. ''DangerousVisions'', in particular, which called for "stories that could not be published elsewhere or had never been written in the face of almost certain censorship by SF editors," helped make what had been a primarily British movement into an international one.

* SF gadfly Creator/HarlanEllison, in addition to publishing the famous anthology, ''DangerousVisions'' (and [[AgainDangerousVisions its sequel]]), made his own contributions, like the stories "Literature/IHaveNoMouthAndIMustScream", "A Boy and His Dog" (see Film), and "The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World".

New Wave Science Fiction was a literary movement of [[TheSixties the 1960s]] and 1970s; a rejection of the simplistic action-adventure stories of the "Golden Age" in favor of more [[LitFic literary]] and [[PostModernism experimental]] forms of SF (and Fantasy), with more emphasis on writing and creativity, and less on [[MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness "hard"]] science, and, well, story.

* Paul Kantner of the Music/JeffersonAirplane was a huge SF fan, and his solo album ''Blows Against the Empire'' was loosely based on a classic SF novel, Creator/RobertAHeinlein's ''Literature/MethuselahsChildren'', but the protagonists were replaced by a rag-tag band of hippies in search of free love and free music, and the musical experimentation on the album, especially the section where the GenerationShip launches, made it a favorite among New Wave fans. It was nominated for a HugoAward for Best Dramatic Presentation (a category normally reserved for movies), where it came in second to "No Award"--a sign of how strong the controversy was at the time.

-->''But probably the great work in science-fiction is still to come''
-->CSLewis, ''Unreal Estates''

* Nicolas Roeg's ''Film/TheManWhoFellToEarth'', starring Music/DavidBowie, was an experimental work very much in the style of the New Wave.

The Sixties were a turbulent time (to put it mildly), and the SF community in those days was a small and relatively insular one, so the New Wave became massively controversial within that community. The New Wave was strongly associated with the Youth Movement of the sixties, and was regarded with much the same distrust and fear by older and more conservative types.

-->-- Judith Merril, ''The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy'', 1967

* While the [[RussianReading Soviet sci-fi literature]] developed largely independently of the Western scene, it also saw a major shift in TheSixties from action-adventure takes based around fantastic inventions (in the vein of Creator/AlexanderBelyayev and Creator/AlexanderKazantsev) towards "softer" and much more psychological science fiction codified by the Creator/StrugatskyBrothers' ''Franchise/NoonUniverse'' series, which focused less on scientific progress than on the moral dilemmas raised by it. IvanYefremov's ''Literature/AndromedaNebula'' (1956) is usually considered the watershed between the old style Soviet sci-fi and the new wave.

New Wave Science Fiction was a literary movement of [[TheSixties the 1960s]] and 1970s; a rejection of the simplistic action-adventure stories of the "Golden Age" in favor of more [[LitFic literary]] and [[PostModernism experimental]] forms of SF, with more emphasis on writing and creativity, and less on [[MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness "hard"]] science, and, well, story.

->''"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."''