1950-1964 --  Age of Acceptance
1964-72 -- The age of Rebellion

Basic Characterists of New Wave Sf

• Explores controversial ideas (taboos such as: cannibalism, sex (sex with aliens, with robots, incest, explicit), race, homosexuality)
• Questions conventional values
• government (particularly Viet Nam  post 1968)
• big business  (media, ads, captialism in general, consumerism)
• conformity (grey flannel suit)
• religion (blasphemy; exploration of alternative religions, especially Eastern)
• drugs (psychedelica-- how it feels)
• science (much of New Wave is very anti-science, questioning progress thru technology)
• Literariness
• Modeled not on Heinlein but Faulkner, Joyce:  science fiction--> speculative fiction
• Character development becomes central-- new emphasis on "inner space"
• Plots much more complex, recursive, flashbacks, unreliable narrators, fragmented sections
• Conscious literary experimentation with language, myth (much more erudite diction, broader range of associations)
• sf/f becomes major part of the market
• SF writing grows up and joins the mainstream
• SF= Speculative Fiction rather than science fiction
• Outer space --> Inner Space
  

• 1964, Michael Moorcock takes over New Worlds  magazine in Britain
• totally disenchanted with science
• poke fun at SF conventions
• no sense of future progress
• political/ social import
• a new level of literary self-consciousness
• By 1960 only 5 major Sf mags left in US
• Nmae comes from Judith Merril -- British SF editor
• Predecessors of the New Wave
• Philip Jose Farmer
• Alfred Bester
• Philip K. DIck
  
• New generation of editors, trained in college (English majors)
• SF and mainstream beginning to merge:
• 1962 -- Clockwork Orange
• 1966 -- Giles Goat Boy
• 1969-- Vonnegut Slaughter-House Five and Lessing Four Gated City
• 1973 -- Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
  
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• British writers
• J.G. Ballard
• Moorcock
• Brian Aldiss
• Judith Merrill
  
• Harlan Ellison Dangerous Visions