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Module 14: The New Culture and the New Wave
Overview of The New Culture and the New Wave

Although science fiction often attempts to anticipate the future, in the late 1960s science fiction reflected changes and new trends in human society at least as much as it foresaw them. The emerging pop counter-culture of the 1960s, which challenged traditional social norms and values, had a strong impact on science fiction, provoking a “New Wave” of revolutionary, even rebellious writers, avant-garde literary styles, and controversial narrative themes. Science fiction became increasingly concerned with “inner space,” rather than outer space, and sexuality, gender, religion, spirituality, drugs, ethics, society, and psychology—all big concerns of the 60s culture—increasingly became the focus of New Wave science fiction.

The Western ideal of unending materialistic-technological progress, attacked by the 60s culture, was severely critiqued by J. G. Ballard, a key figure of the “New Wave, in his mesmeric tales of the catastrophic (such as The Crystal World and The Drowned World), and by John Brunner in his “Quartet of Dreadful Warnings,” notably in his Hugo winning Stand on Zanzibar. In his time-traveling retelling of the Crucifixion, Behold the Man, Michael Moorcock dove into the blasphemous. Harlan Ellison edited the ground-breaking Dangerous Visions and rewrote the story of the Garden of Eden in The Deathbird; he won the Hugo for his totally unnerving “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.” Philip Jose Farmer resurrected the dead—every last member of our species into Your Scattered Bodies Go—and led the deep and at times perverse dive into science fiction sex in The Lovers, Flesh, and Strange Relations. The lyrical Roger Zelazny explored the mythic and the mystical in tales such as Lord of Light, and Robert Silverberg, one of the most popular and prolific writers of the era, went totally psychedelic and erotic in Son of Man, his novel of the far-future evolution of humanity. Joe Haldeman wrote the Vietnam-inspired, great anti-war, pot-infused Hugo-Nebula winning novel The Forever War, and in the movies, Kubrick assaulted the senses, boggled the mind, and gleefully dove into hell—all done with great cinematic pizazz and aesthetics—in Dr. Strangelove, 2001, and A Clockwork Orange. But perhaps the most significant development in the New Wave was the dramatic and powerful rise of women authors and feminist themes, beginning with Ursula Le Guin and her award-winning The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, and soon followed by Joanna Russ (The Female Man), the wondrous mystery man/woman James Tiptree, Jr. (“Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death”), and numerous other women writers and tales. In the New Wave, the mind-space of science fiction evolved.