This term, as applied to sf, is borrowed from film criticism, where it was much used in the early 1960s as a translation of the Frenchnouvelle vague to refer to the experimental cinema associated with Jean-Luc Godard (1930-    ), François Truffaut (1932-1984) and others. (It was also later applied to music around 1977 as a synonym for Punk.) The term was first used with reference to UK sf writers by P SchuylerMiller in his regular book-review column "The Reference Library" (November 1961Analog), though in a sense fairly remote from its eventual import (BrianAldiss and JohnBrunner were identified as "new wave" but so too were KennethBulmer and E CTubb). Jim Linwood in "The Fanalytic Eye" (January 1964Les Spinge #12) used "new wave" to point in general terms to the aspirations of young UK writers and critics like CharlesPlatt; AvramDavidson reviewed DonaldBarthelme's collectionCome Back, Dr Caligari (coll1964) inF&SF (October 1964) and disparaged its avant-garde aspects as belonging "to the New Wave, or New Ripple, or perhaps New Drip, school of short story writing"; ChristopherPriest – in "New Wave – Prozines" (March 1965Zenith-Speculation 8) (seeSpeculation) – associated the term specifically with the sort of fiction being published inNew Worlds, where – as with the French film makers and critics of a decade earlier – a combination of critical advocacy and illustrations of that advocacy through works of art soon made the term descriptive of an actual movement; and JudithMerril in an somewhat perplexed book review (May 1965F&SF) remarked on William SBurroughs's popularity in "the new wave ofavant garde 'fanzine' publishing". The term soon came to be used more by sf proselytizers than by the writers concerned – especially by JudithMerril, now a major advocate, in her anthologyEngland Swings SF (anth1968; cut vtThe Space-Time Journal1972) and elsewhere.

The kind of story to which the term refers is in fact rather older than the (late-1960s) term, which anyway has never been defined with any precision. The first writers whose work was later subsumed under the New Wave label were British, notably Brian WAldiss and J GBallard. These two were publishing stories inNew Worlds while it was still under the editorship of JohnCarnell, but it was not until MichaelMoorcock took over with the May/June 1964 issue that the kind of imagistic, highly metaphoric story, inclined more towardsPsychology and theSoft Sciences than toHard SF, that both men wrote (in quite different styles) was given a setting where it seemed at home.

TraditionalGenre SF had reached a crisis point in both the UK and the USA by the middle 1960s; too many writers were working with the same few traditional sf themes, and both the style and content of sf were becoming generally overpredictable. Many young writers entering the field came to feel, either instantly, like Thomas MDisch, or after some years' slogging away at conventional commercial sf, like HarlanEllison and RobertSilverberg, that genre sf had become a straitjacket; though widely supposed to emphasize change and newness, sf had somehow become conservative. Young Turks, of course, conventionally exaggerate the sins of their seniors, but this time they had a real case. It was not as if the market were shrinking; on the contrary, hardcover publishers were more willing than ever to add sf to their lists. There was no reason to suppose that publishers would not be grateful for sf becoming rather more flexible in style and content.

By 1965, then, sf was ripe for change. In fact, many of the so-called sf experiments of the period were not experiments at all, but merely an adoption of narrative strategies, and sometimes ironies, that had long been familiar in theMainstream novel (seeModernism). Thus Philip JoséFarmer's "Riders of the Purple Wage" (inDangerous Visions, anth1967, ed HarlanEllison) echoed the manner of the "Aeolus/Cave of the Winds" segment ofUlysses (1922) by James Joyce (1882-1941), while JohnBrunner'sStand on Zanzibar (1968) homaged the narrative andInfodump techniques used by John Dos Passos (1896-1970) inUSA (1930-1936 3vols); both Joyce and Dos Passos are mentioned, along with marihuana and Salvador Dalí (1904-1989), in AvramDavidson's above-cited grumbling "New Wave" review. In the event, some of the sf writers who felt they now had the freedom to experiment, especially Ballard and perhaps (rather later) Moorcock, were to add something new to the protocols of prose fiction generally; the New Wave may have taken from the Mainstream, but it gave something back in return (this is now a truism ofPostmodernist criticism, but it was by no means clear at the time), and certainly New-Wave sf did more than any other kind of sf to break down the barriers between sf and mainstream fiction.

Because it was never a formal literary movement – perhaps more a state of mind than anything else – New-Wave writing is difficult to define. Perhaps the fundamental element was the belief that sf could and should be taken seriously as literature. Much of it shared the qualities of the late-1960s counterculture, including an interest in mind-alteringDrugs and orientalReligions, a satisfaction in violatingTaboos, a marked interest inSex, a strong involvement in Pop Art and in theMedia Landscape generally, and a pessimism about the future that ran strongly counter to genre sf's traditionalOptimism, often focused on the likelihood ofDisaster caused byOverpopulation and interference with theEcology, as well as byWar, and a general cynicism about thePolitics of the US and UK governments (notably the US involvement in Southeast Asia and elsewhere). The element ofDystopia in New-Wave writing was particularly dramatic in the case of JohnBrunner, much of whose earlier work had been relatively cheerfulSpace Opera. New-Wave sf often concerned itself with theNear Future; but it often turned inward, too, and one of the buzzwords of the period wasInner Space.

Moorcock'sNew Worlds published most of the notable figures of the New Wave at one time or another, including the work of several US writers who lived for a time in the UK, such as Samuel RDelany, Disch, JamesSallis, John TSladek and PamelaZoline. Other USNew Worlds contributors often subsumed under the New-Wave label were Ellison, NormanSpinrad and RogerZelazny; other UK contributors were Barrington JBayley, M JohnHarrison, LangdonJones and CharlesPlatt, and one would add ChristopherPriest, although he was less closely associated withNew Worlds.

Despite the various excesses ofNew Worlds, whose stories sometimes embracedEntropy with a fervour reminiscent of Edgar AllanPoe's "The Masque of the Red Death" (May 1842Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine as "The Mask of the Red Death"), there is no doubt that it was influential on sfPublishing generally, and it was not long at all before various US markets were adopting a far less exclusive attitude to what they would or would not publish, a symptom being the appearance ofOriginal-Anthology series likeDangerous Visions,New Dimensions,Orbit andQUARK/, which included a good quota of experimental work – indeed, they demonstrated clearly (though the point hardly needed to be made) that as much US sf as UK had come to be New Wave in style and content.

All this naturally horrified some of sf's more conservative spokesmen, as a glance at sf histories written by DavidKyle, SamMoskowitz and Donald AWollheim will demonstrate. Wollheim commented, inThe Universe Makers (1971), that "the readers and writers that used to dream of galactic futures now got their kicks out of experimental styles of writing, the free discussion of sex, the overthrow of all standards and morals (since, if the world is going to end, what merit had these things?)". It is easy to feel some sympathy with the conservative viewpoint in one respect; with few exceptions the New-Wave writers avoidedHard SF, and it must have seemed to some observers of the scene as if the very thing that most centrally defined sf by its presence – the science (to simplify) – was disappearing.

But in fact the battle was quickly over (though hard sf never quite regained its former position of prominence). The better New-Wave sf writers were soon accepted by sf readers generally, and often found an audience outside sf as well; the bad writers (and it must be said that some were terrible) mostly fell by the wayside. By the 1970s there no longer seemed very much point to the term, although newly prominent figures like GardnerDozois, Barry NMalzberg, JoannaRuss, JamesTiptree Jr and GeneWolfe clearly wrote in styles or modes that would have been called New Wave only a year or so earlier. Later in the decade all sorts of quite different new writers emerged who had clearly absorbed the positive lessons of the New Wave, along with some of its attitudes, ranging from MichaelBishop and JohnVarley in the USA to IanWatson in the UK.

There can be no doubt that during the late 1960s genre sf found new freedoms, while the market showed a greater readiness to accept sophisticated writing. As with all ideological arguments, one uses whatever ammunition comes conveniently to hand, and it suited many friends (and foes) to see the New Wave as a kind of homogeneous, monolithic politico-literary movement. It was never that in the minds of most of its writers, many of whom resented being categorized. Disch commented, in an open letter published in 1978: "I have no opinion of the 'New Wave' in sf, since I don't believe that that was ever a meaningful classification. If you mean to ask – do I feel solidarity with all writers who have ever been lumped together under that heading – certainly I do not."

It was common during the 1970s and 1980s, especially for those (like Disch) who resisted stereotyping, to dismiss the importance of the New Wave, or even to deny that it ever existed. From the perspective of the 1990s and the second edition of this encyclopedia, however, it seemed and still seems fair to say that the New Wavewas real and liberating. New-Wave excesses – including its sometimes miasmic gloom – have largely dropped away in subsequent sf, while the New Wave's grasp of the complexities of the world has remained. The 1960s were indeed a maturing period for genre sf; if we see the 1960s as sf's puberty, then we also have an explanation of why some of it, at the time, was so irritating (especially in its tone of voice): most adolescents are. One reason why the particular perspective of the 1990s was useful is that we had, meanwhile, been able to observe yet another New Wave in action: theCyberpunk movement.

Four of the manyAnthologies of New Wave sf areEngland Swings SF: Stories of Speculative Fiction (anth1968; vtThe Space-Time Journal1972) edited by JudithMerril,The New SF (anth1969) edited by LangdonJones,The New Tomorrows (anth1971) edited by NormanSpinrad andNew Worlds: An Anthology (1983) edited by MichaelMoorcock. Also of note are Moorcock's variousBest of New Worlds anthologies published from 1965 to 1974. A nonfiction study of the subject isThe Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the UK "New Wave" (1983) by ColinGreenland. [PN/DRL]

see also:Arts;New Weird;SF Music.

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