Indeed do many things come to pass

Posted by Michael Swanwick

http://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2026/03/the-new-wave-explained-in-fewer-words.html

 .

Several-to-many years ago, an editor at Science Fiction World in Chengdu, China, asked me to write an essay explaining the New Wave to the magazine's audience. Since I loved the New Wave and had a rudimentary understanding of the Chinese publishing industry's view of what could and could not be published there, I was happy to oblige. 

The essay I wrote was never published. There are many reasons why this might have happened so I will not speculate. But, having run across it while reorganizing my files, I thought I would share it with you.

Oh! and, since SFW is not only a magazine but a publishing house, I was asked to suggest some New Wave books they might consider publishing. The list I provided will be posted here on Monday.

Here's the essay. This is its first publication ever:

The New Wave in a Nutshell: Inner Space, Sharks on Leashes, the Acid-Head Wars, Genius Jailbirds, a Pregnant King, Shattered Taboos, a Morose Telepath, Shocking Excess, Literary Success, the End of the World and Its Aftermath, and Long, Long Titles

by

Michael Swanwick

At the time it felt like a revolution. A literary revolution, that is, which is the best kind of revolution because nobody dies in it and only feelings get hurt. The New Wave lasted for a decade (from 1965 to 1975, give or take a few years), during which it was all anybody in science fiction talked about, argued over, or denounced. My first fan letter, after it was all over, asked if I thought there would be another New Wave anytime soon. There is no doubt that it changed science fiction forever.

But what exactly was the New Wave?

Tough question.

Science fiction writers had always had a difficult relationship with literary writers and critics who, as a rule, looked down on them. They responded by declaring the supremacy of adventure fiction, asserting a need for heroes and straightforward stories plainly written, and declaring that literary fiction was “boring.” But in the early Sixties, some genre writers felt that the literary establishment had a point – that science fiction could be a lot better than it was and that the way to improve it was by using the techniques of serious fiction. They were a varied group and not all of them got along well. But they shared a common ambition to write SF both better than and significantly differently from what had come before.

In 1964, a young writer became editor of the British science fiction magazine New Worlds. Michael Moorcock had a new vision of science fiction. It would be centered not on outer space but on “inner space.” It would be set in the near future and deal not with spaceships and robots but with the workings of the human psyche. Its protagonists would be regular people, not scientists and explorers. And it would be comfortable with experimental prose, dystopias, entropy, and a pessimistic view of the future. Luckily for Moorcock, someone writing exactly what he was looking for was at that moment just hitting his stride.

J. G. Ballard was a boy when the Japanese overran Shanghai and placed him and his parents in an internment camp for the duration of WWII. He had no illusions about human nature. Ballard’s early books were disaster novels, like The Crystal World wherein plants, animals, and even people are slowly turning to crystal. He also wrote surreal stories collected in Vermillion Sands, about a resort town in which elegant women walk genetically modified land sharks on leashes, boutiques sell living dresses, and artists use gliders to sculpt clouds. But his work grew increasingly involved in psychological space. His novels include Concrete Island, in which a man is marooned, like Robinson Crusoe, only on a traffic island, and the extremely controversial Crash, about a subculture of people who are sexually aroused by automobile accidents.

Almost as central to the movement was Brian Aldiss. His Greybeard takes the form of a quest novel. But it is set decades after a massive nuclear accident has sterilized everyone on Earth. In a world without children, there can be no purpose to the voyage that Greybeard and his wife make other than to find a quiet place in which to live out humanity’s last days. Aldiss’s most astonishing work, Barefoot in the Head, is set in the aftermath of the Acid-Head War, fought with psychochemical aerosols that still linger in the environment. Everybody in Europe is continually in a drug-altered state, a fact reflected by the novel’s prose. Into this madhouse comes a young savior, Charteris, with a new mode of thinking based on the philosophy of Gurdjieff. But as he gains followers, Charteris comes to realize that they’re all looking forward to his martyrdom. He must find an alternative or die.

Moorcock himself tackled a similar theme in Behold the Man. A religious fanatic travels in time to study at the feet of Jesus, only to find that there is no such person. Disillusionment drives him half-mad, and he finds himself assuming the role of Christ, even though he knows how it must inevitably end.

The New Worlds crowd included some American writers then living in England. John Sladek was a brilliant satirist in an age almost too absurd to satirize. (He wrote a “nonfiction” satire of New Age mysticism, Arachne Rising, asserting that there is a thirteenth constellation in the Zodiac whose existence has been hushed-up by scientists, only to see the gullible accept it as fact.) Self-replicating machines run out of control in Mechasm, threatening to destroy civilization. Unfortunately, the only man who can stop them is locked in his office cafeteria, crouched atop a table floating in a lake of bad coffee from a malfunctioning brewing machine. It gets stranger from there.

In Thomas Disch’s first novel, The Genocides, aliens convert the Earth to cropland and treat people as pests to be exterminated. It ends not with survivors building a new world but with the last humans dying. When outraged fans objected, he urbanely explained that having survivors would “destroy the purity of the thing.” In Disch’s masterpiece, Camp Concentration, a journalist discovers first that a totalitarian American government is injecting prisoners with a tailored disease that turns them into geniuses whose discoveries can be exploited before they die, and then that he himself has been infected. The gradual transformation of the hero from normal intelligence to near-superhuman status is a tour de force of modern fiction.

Ever the contrarian, defying the New Wave proclivity for pessimism, Disch gave his novel a happy ending.

So far, the New Wave was a British phenomenon. In 1968 Judith Merrill transferred it to America via a much-discussed anthology of New Wave fiction titled England Swings SF. In the introduction, she wrote that what was happening in England was the most important development in all of science fiction. There were only two possible reactions to this. Those writers who wanted to write SF pretty much the way it had always been resented being labeled Old Wave and hated this new thing. Everybody else was mad to be a part of it.

Where Moorcock was chiefly concerned with what science fiction was about, Merrill cared more about how it was told. The best examples of how mainstream techniques could be imported into science fiction were John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up, both of which made the grim consequences of overpopulation bearable to read about by telling the story in collage form. The novels were shown through the eyes of dozens of protagonists, with excerpts from books, newspaper articles, and the like scattered throughout. Thus the hero of these books was not a single individual but everybody. The collage technique was old news to the literary world but stunningly effective when applied to science fiction.

Almost simultaneously, writer Harlan Ellison assembled what is probably the single most famous original anthology in the history of the field, Dangerous Visions. Ellison’s New Wave was all about breaking taboos: religious, political, sexual, literary, what-have-you. Every story he bought was a taboo breaker. Some of these have aged badly. Theodore Sturgeon’s “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Want One to Marry Your Sister?” (long titles were a commonplace of the era) was a rousing defense of incest. This looked bold and daring at the time but today seems simplistic and wrong-headed. But several of the stories were classics. Some won major awards. One of these was by Samuel R. Delany.

Delany’s influence on science fiction can hardly be exaggerated, in part because while literarily innovative, he didn’t give up on the traditional pleasures of science fiction. Babel-17 is a good example of this. It was an exploration of the (since disproved) Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis that language shapes human perception, with a poet-linguist-and-starship-captain named Rydra Wong, zero-gee battles, space pirates, and enough fresh new ideas to float the entire career of a lesser talent. It was colorful, exciting – and as sophisticated as anything appearing in the mainstream.

In their early years, Delany was often confused with Roger Zelazny, another writer who combined spaceships and adventures on alien planets with erudition and a flashy prose style. (Zelazny turned to SF after failing as a poet.) Lord of Light is set in a world based on Indian mythology and culture. Everyone is effectively immortal – reincarnation is a simple matter of going to a temple where a machine will place your consciousness in a new young body. Technology, however, is controlled by the crew of the ship that originally brought humanity to the planet and they use it to pass themselves off as the Hindu gods. When the inevitable violent rebellion fails, who better to lead a peaceful revolution than the Buddha?

All the writers mentioned so far are male because at that time the field was overwhelmingly male. That was beginning to change. Two of the many women now entering science fiction, Joanna Russ and Ursula K. Le Guin, happened to be among the very best writers of their era. Both, unsurprisingly, were feminists. Joanna Russ’s debut novel, Picnic on Paradise, featured a heroine unlike any female protagonist previously seen in SF. In a galactic milieu filled with tall, beautiful, irresponsible people, Alyx is short, plain, tough, fierce, and competent. When war breaks out on a resort planet, she is assigned the task of rescuing a stranded group of tourists by guiding them through dangerous wilderness without using any modern tools, which would bring them to the attention of the warring factions. The greatest danger, however, comes not from the war but from the moral weakness of the tourists themselves.

Usula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness begins with the sentence, “The king was pregnant.” and presents a world in which people are sexless save for a few days each month, when their bodies randomly turn either male or female. This allowed Le Guin to examine the question of how much of our gender roles are biological and how much socially determined. It was an instant classic. In almost fifty years, it has never gone out of print.

Because of his essential strangeness, Philip K. Dick is always included among the New Wave writers, though there is little doubt he would have written exactly as he did if the movement had never existed. Over the course of dozens of novels, Dick obsessively examined the nature of reality as something other than what it appears to be. This, combined with some incautious statements in interviews, led to the impression that he was half-mad. Yet people who worked with him assure me that he was unfailingly rational. Unlike most writers, no single work stands out among his oeuvre. With Dick, you can start reading anywhere.

The last of the New Wave greats is Robert Silverberg, a man seemingly capable of writing well about anything. He received his greatest critical acclaim for Dying Inside. Its premise is simple. Selig has the extremely rare gift of reading minds. Yet, despite that, or possibly because of it, he has made almost nothing of his life. In middle age, he’s making a meager living writing term papers for college students. Then he discovers that his telepathic power is fading away. Alone and miserable, he has no choice but to come to terms with it. Telepathy has long been a power fantasy in science fiction. But Silverberg used it to create a meditation on the fact that everyone, no matter how powerful or insignificant – and Selig is both – must someday acknowledge their own mortality.

For a decade, exciting and innovative new works, like nothing ever seen before, appeared one after another, surprise upon surprise, on an almost monthly basis. It was an thrilling time to be a reader. Anything, it seemed, was possible.

Only it wasn’t.

Editors had long known that many New Wave authors did not sell well. But so long as the SF line as a whole made money, they were able to publish them anyway. Then came computers. It was now possible to track sales of every individual title. Overnight, it became obvious that conventional science fiction – the Old Wave – vastly outsold the New Wave. Word went down to cut the deadwood.

Some authors, such as R. A. Lafferty, the most original writer of his time, had to retreat to the small presses. Others quit writing. Yet others unenthusiastically switched back to the old stuff. At least one changed his name and wrote detective novels. British science fiction disappeared from American bookstores.

It felt like the end of the world.

In the aftermath, the conventional wisdom was that New Wave fiction was self-indulgent, plotless, and depressing. It’s true that there were excesses. Robert Silverberg’s time travel novel Up the Line featured almost non-stop sex. Brian Aldiss’s The Dark Light-Years was about trying to understand an alien species that communicated by defecating. A lot of short fiction by writers now long forgotten made no coherent sense at all. But it would be wrong to judge the New Wave by its worst examples.

If we judge the movement by its best, the New Wave was a tremendous success. Well before he died, J. G. Ballard was recognized by the literary establishment as one of Britain’s foremost writers. Stand on Zanzibar was a best-seller. Roger Zelazny’s work remained immensely popular. So did that of Delany and Le Guin, who are now darlings of Academia; the number of papers written about their work is legion. Silverberg was coaxed out of retirement by the largest advance ever offered a science fiction writer and wrote the immensely successful Lord Valentine’s Castle.

More importantly, the candle flame of literary ambition may have flickered but it never died. New writers were coming along, like James Tiptree, Jr. whose stories of biological determinism and alien colonialism were first collected in Ten Thousand Light Years from Home and Gene Wolfe, whose The Fifth Head of Cerberus can equally well be considered the last major work of the New Wave or the first of what came after. None of the new writers thought that SF and serious literature were two separate things. Nobody could tell them that science fiction couldn’t be about serious subjects or told in a literary way.

The New Wave had proved that wasn’t true.

When I responded to that fan letter asking if there would ever be a new New Wave, I said no. It simply wasn’t needed. And time has proved me right. What I didn’t know, however, was that Cyberpunk was about to happen and that for close to a decade, it would be all that anybody in science fiction talked about, argued over, or denounced.

But that’s another story, for another day.

Above: Marianne bought this carry-on bag for me in Canada. It's made from Italian leather and the Chinese flag was one of several they offered. I chose China because I'd never been there and hoped someday to visit. And I have! Several times. Our global interdependence can, on occasion, be a good thing. 

*

http://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2026/03/the-new-wave-explained-in-fewer-words.html