The New Wave (c. 1964-72) is essentially an attempt to bring science fiction into the literary mainstream

• Origins and Attributes
• Leading New Wave Authors
• Authors Influenced by the New Wave

The New Wave started in England when Michael Moorcock became the editor of the magazine New Worlds (which had been founded in 1946).

The movement was supposedly named by Judith Merrill in an essay in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1966; she preached its cause vigorously.

Harlan Ellison, editor of the Dangerous Visions anthologies, is called the chief prophet of the New Wave.

Basically the New Wave is an attempt to bring science fiction into the literary mainstream.

All New Wave writers generally exhibit a greater concern for style than the writers of the Golden Age.

The movement is marked by experimental writing with more attention to literary style and less to scientific accuracy.

Editors involved with the movement
encouraged literary experimentation. The movement became the focus for a re-evaluation of the standards of the genre.

Many New Wave authors write "soft" science fiction; that is, they are primarily concerned with sociological and psychological themes.

Themes that generally appear in New Wave works include:

• the gloom emanating from a shared conviction that things are getting worse, not better;
• a general distrust of both science and technology as well as of mankind itself
• a lack of faith in man's intelligence to get us out of our current predicament
• often the belief that mankind's intelligence is what got us into our current predicament
• disbelief in the perfectibility of mankind or even its essential goodness.
• a perception that mankind is fatally flawed and that man is essentially contemptible or of no consequence

In many ways the New Wave merely exaggerated earlier trends:

• the shift in emphasis from physical to social sciences
• increasingly radical visions of society
• awareness of the darker side of science and technology
• convergence with the literary mainstream

Moorcock is a writer as well an editor.

• Jerry Cornelius books, beginning with The Final Programme (1968), a dark comedy about space and time
• Behold the Man, a retelling of the crucifixion of Christ as a time travel story

Aldiss is a critic and historian, author of Billion Year Spree (1973) and its update, Trillion Year Spree (1986).

His popular fiction includes Helliconia Spring (1882), Helliconia Summer (1983), and Helliconia Winter (1985).

Ballard is a short story writer also known for his novels of catastrophe such as The Drowned World (1962).

Also famous is his autobiographical novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), made into a film in 1987 by Steven Spielberg.

Iconoclastic, acerbic, and never boring, Ellison is an editor, short story writer, screenwriter, essayist, author of anti-technological fiction, and promulgator of the New Wave.

Key short stories include:

• "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman"
• "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream"
• "A Boy and His Dog," made into a film starring Don Johnson.

Ellison sponsored and edited two anthologies of the New Wave, collections of short stories purporting to challenge long-established, mostly sexual, taboos in science fiction:

• Dangerous Visions (1967)
• Again, Dangerous Visions (1972).

He has supposedly been working on a third anthology, Last Dangerous Visions.

Dick can be described as an intellectual with pulp origins.

Brian Aldiss calls him a hybrid of Dickens and Dostoevsky.

Key Works:

• The Man in the High Castle (1962), an alternate history in which the Axis powers win World War II, winner of the Hugo
• The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), an apocalyptic tale of alien invasion
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), filmed by Ridley Scott as Blade Runner
• "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" filmed as Total Recall

Le Guin is probably best known for The Earthsea Trilogy, a series of fantasies for juveniles which has now grown to five volumes.

Many of her stories and novels take place in a Hainish Empire:

• The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), winner of both the Hugo and the Nebula
• The Lathe of Heaven (1971), an homage to Philip K. Dick in which a man can dream changes in reality; was filmed for public television; another made for television film will air in the 2002-2003 season.
• The Dispossessed (1974), winner of both the Hugo and the Nebula

Le Guin is also an editor, a critic, and a poet.

Farmer is known for:

• sexually explicit science fiction such as "The Lovers" (1952)
• the Riverworld series beginning with To Your Scattered Bodies, Go (1971)
• the World of Tiers series about a multi-leveled alternate universe

Delany is the first science fiction writer to enter the field as a novelist rather than a short story writer.

He writes on a border between science fiction and fantasy, a middle ground he calls speculative fiction.

Also a critic and an academic, Delany brings an esthetic sensibility to genre material.

Openly homosexual, he is also rare as a black writer of science fiction.

Key works include:

• The Jewels of Aptor (1962)
• Babel-17 (1966), winner of the Nebula
• The Einstein Intersection (1967), winner of Nebula
• Nova (1968), a recasting of the Prometheus myth

Like Delany, Zelazny also uses myth as an underpinning for his stories.

Key works include:

• "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" (1963)
• The Dream Master (1966)
• This Immortal (1966), Hugo winner
• Lord of Light (1967), Hugo winner, an investigation of Hindu mythology on an alien planet where gods are actualities among the technologically repressed masses

By the late 1970s science fiction had become dominated by the new technologies:

• computer science
• ecology
• cloning and other advances in biotechnology
• psionics
• experiments with mind-altering substances

New Wave had by now firmly established literary criteria for science fiction.

Scientists began to write hard science fiction that was also literary in style and character development.

Frederik Pohl

Pohl, who came to prominence in the Golden Age, returned to science fiction after an extended absence.

Key Works from the Modern Era:

• Man Plus (1976), a Hugo winner
• Gateway (1977), the Hugo and Nebula winning first novel in a series about the Heechee

Haldeman used his Vietnam experience to great effect in The Forever War (1975), a Hugo and Nebula winner and a homage to Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers from the left wing of the political spectrum.

Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California at Irvine.

Key works include Timescape (1980), a Nebula winner.

Benford is now writing a series of novels which take place in Isaac Asimov's Foundation universe.

Brin has won acclaim with his Uplift series which begins with Startide Rising and The Uplift War (1988), a Nebula winner.

Brin also wrote The Postman, about a post-apocalyptic society.

Wolfe is best known for The Book of the New Sun, a tetralogy beginning with The Shadow of the Torturer.

The second book in the series, The Claw of the Conciliator (1981), won the Nebula.

Bear's key works include:

• Eon
• Queen of Angels (1990)
• Moving Mars
• Darwin's Radio

Card moves easily between science fiction and fantasy.

• Ender's Game (1985) and its sequel Speaker for the Dead (1986) both won both the Hugo and the Nebula. Two more books, Xenocide and Children of the Mind, complete the series.
• Recently Card has been writing prequels and parallel books in Ender's universe, including Ender's Shadow.
• The Lost Boys (1993)

Levin is a mainstream author of science fiction and horror; many of his novels have been made into very successful popular films.

• Rosemary's Baby (1967)
• The Stepford Wives (1972)
• The Boys from Brazil (1976), about Hitler clones

King is immensely popular, successful, and prolific.

He is known mostly as a horror writer, but his books sometimes straddle science fiction and he has written fantasy.

Key works include:

• Carrie (1974)
• The Dead Zone
• Firestarter (1980)
• The Stand (1978; expanded 1990)

Writing under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in the early 1980's, King produced four novels that are more demonstrably science fiction, most notably The Running Man.

A favorite of mine is Eye of the Dragon, a fairy tale.

Martin creates romantic science fiction with love as its theme.

He is best known as the creator of Beauty and the Beast, more fantasy than science fiction, for television.