Worldwide, Ursula K. Le Guin, Stanisław Lem,[1] J. G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr. (a pseudonym of Alice Bradley Sheldon), Thomas M. Disch and Brian Aldiss were also major writers associated with the style.
The New Wave was influenced by postmodernism, surrealism, the politics of the 1960s, such as the controversy concerning the Vietnam War, and by social trends such as the drug subculture, sexual liberation, and environmentalism.
[15] J. G. Ballard's themes included alienation, social isolation, class discrimination, and the end of civilization, in settings ranging from a single apartment block (High Rise) to entire worlds.
[16][17] Rob Latham noted that several of J. G. Ballard's works of the 1960s (e.g., the quartet begun by The Wind from Nowhere [1960]), engaged with the concept of eco-catastrophe, as did Disch's The Genocides and Ursula K. Le Guin's short novel The Word for World Is Forest.
The latter, with its description of the use of napalm on indigenous people, was also influenced by Le Guin's perceptions of the Vietnam War, and both emphasized anti-technocratic fatalism instead of imperial hegemony via technology, with the New Wave later interacting with feminism, ecological activism and postcolonial rhetoric.
[18]:286 Combined with controversial topics, it introduced innovations of form, style, and aesthetics, involving more literary ambitions and experimental use of language, with significantly less emphasis on physical science or technological themes in its content.
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.
James asserted the American New Wave did not reach the status of a "movement" but was rather a concordance of talent that introduced new ideas and better standards to the authoring of science fiction, including through the first three seasons of Star Trek.
New Wave writers did not operate as an organized group, but some of them felt the tropes of the pulp magazine and Golden Age periods had become over-used, and should be abandoned: J. G. Ballard stated in 1962 that "science fiction should turn its back on space, on interstellar travel, extra-terrestrial life forms, (and) galactic wars",[26] and Brian Aldiss said in Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction that "the props of SF are few: rocket ships, telepathy, robots, time travel...like coins, they become debased by over-circulation.
[30]: 18 Other writers and works seen as preluding or transitioning to the New Wave include Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, Walter M. Miller's 1959 A Canticle for Leibowitz, Cyril M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl's anti-hyper-consumerist The Space Merchants (1952), Kurt Vonnegut's mocking Player Piano (1952) and The Sirens of Titan (1959), Theodore Sturgeon's humanist More Than Human (1953) and the hermaphrodite society of Venus Plus X (1960), and Philip José Farmer's human-extraterrestrial sexual encounters in The Lovers (1952) and Strange Relations (1960).
"[39]: 162–163 Brooks Landon, professor of English at the University of Iowa, says of Dangerous Visions that it was innovative and influential before it had any readers simply because it was the first big original anthology of SF, offering prices to its writers that were competitive with the magazines.
"[41]: 141 The changes were more than the experimental and explicitly provocative as inspired by Burroughs; in coherence with the literary nouvelle vague, although not in close association to it, and addressing a less restricted pool of readers, the New Wave was reversing the standard hero's attitude toward action and science.
[42]:87 In 1962 Ballard wrote: I've often wondered why s-f shows so little of the experimental enthusiasm which has characterized painting, music and the cinema during the last four or five decades, particularly as these have become wholeheartedly speculative, more and more concerned with the creation of new states of mind, constructing fresh symbols and languages where the old cease to be valid...
The New Wave's later American exponents were strongly associated with the New Left and opposition to the Vietnam War, leading to some rancorous public disputes in which politics was tangled together with definitional questions about the nature of SF and the direction of the field.
[41]: 142 Roger Luckhurst disagreed with critics who perceived the New Wave mainly in terms of difference (he gives the example of Thomas Clareson), suggesting that such a model "doesn't quite seem to map onto the American scene, even though the wider conflicts of the 1960s liberalization in universities, the civil rights movement and the cultural contradictions inherent in consumer society were starker and certainly more violent than in Britain.
"[44]: 160 [47] In particular, he noted: The young turks within SF also had an ossified 'ancient regime' to topple: John Campbell's intolerant right-wing editorials for Astounding Science Fiction (which he renamed Analog in 1960) teetered on the self parody.
In 1970, when the campus revolt against American involvement in Vietnam reached its height and resulted in the National Guard shooting four students dead in Kent State University, Campbell editorialized that the 'punishment was due', and rioters should expect to be met with lethal force.
"[48]Similarly, Rob Latham observed: ...indeed, one of the central ways the New Wave was experienced, in the US and Britain, was as a "liberated" outburst of erotic expression, often counterpoised, by advocates of the "New Thing" (as Merril called it), with the priggish Puritanism of the Golden Age.
[49]: 13–14 In the August 1970 issue of the SFWA Forum, a publication for Science Fiction Writers of America members, Harlan Ellison stated that the New Wave furore, which had flourished during the late 1960s, appeared to have been "blissfully laid to rest".
Their total misunderstanding of what was happening (not unusual for fans, as history... shows us) managed to stir up a great deal of pointless animosity and if it had any real effect I suspect it was in the unfortunate area of causing certain writers to feel they were unable to keep up and consequently they slowed their writing output.
Veteran science fiction writer Jack Williamson (1908–2006) when asked in 1991: "Did the [New] Wave's emphasis on experimentalism and its conscious efforts to make SF more 'literary' have any kind of permanent effects on the field?"
His depiction of an alien ménage a trois, complete with homoerotic scenes between the two males, marks an interesting departure from his earlier fiction, in which sex of any sort is conspicuously absent.
He said that changes of technology as well as an economic recession constricted the market for science fiction, generating a "widespread" malaise among fans, while established writers were forced to reduce their output (or, like Isaac Asimov, shifted their emphasis to other subjects); finally, editors encouraged new methods that earlier ones tended to discourage.
Predicting that Zelazny's career would be more important and lasting than Disch's, he described the latter's book as "unflaggingly derivative of" the New Wave and filled with "dumb, resigned victims" who "run, hide, slither, grope and die", like Ballard's The Drowned World but unlike The Moon is a Harsh Mistress ("about people who do something about their troubles").
[64] Writing in The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, Disch observed that "Literary movements tend to be compounded, in various proportions, of the genius of two or three genuinely original talents, some few other capable or established writers who have been co-opted or gone along for the ride, the apprentice work of epigones and wannabes, and a great deal of hype.
[40] Among the stories Ellison printed in Dangerous Visions were Philip José Farmer's Riders of the Purple Wage, Norman Spinrad's "Carcinoma Angels", Samuel R. Delany's "Aye, and Gomorrah" and stories by Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, John Brunner, David R. Bunch, Philip K. Dick, Sonya Dorman, Carol Emshwiller, John Sladek, Theodore Sturgeon, and Roger Zelazny.
[43]: 158 Like other writers for New Worlds, Zoline used "science-fictional and scientific language and imagery to describe perfectly 'ordinary' scenes of life", and by doing so produced "altered perceptions of reality in the reader".
[22] New Wave works engaging with utopia, gender, and sexuality include Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975), and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976).
[12]:61–62 The influence of postmodernism in New Wave can be seen in Brian Aldiss's Report on Probability A, Philip K. Dick's Ubik, J. G. Ballard's collection The Atrocity Exhibition, and Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren and Triton.
[12] Brian Aldiss, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, Norman Spinrad, and Roger Zelazny are writers whose work, though not necessarily considered New Wave at the time of publication, later became associated with the term.