/lit/ - Literature

>>22082873
The New Wave was a science fiction (SF) style of the 1960s and 1970s, characterized by a great degree of experimentation with the form and content of stories, greater imitation of the styles of trendy non-science fiction literature, and an emphasis on the psychological and social sciences as opposed to the physical sciences. New Wave authors often considered themselves as part of the modernist tradition of fiction, and the New Wave was conceived as a deliberate change from the traditions of the science fiction characteristic of pulp magazines.
Many young writers entering the field came to feel, either instantly, like Thomas M Disch, or after some years' slogging away at conventional commercial sf, like Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg, that genre sf had become a straitjacket; though widely supposed to emphasize change and newness, sf had somehow become conservative (not in the political sense but rather if your novel wasn't inspired by Lensman, John Carter or Foundation it would be very hard to get it published)
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 the Mainstream novel (see Modernism). Thus Philip José Farmer's "Riders of the Purple Wage" (in Dangerous Visions, anth 1967, ed Harlan Ellison) echoed the manner of the "Aeolus/Cave of the Winds" segment of Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce, while John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar (1968) homaged the narrative and Infodump techniques used by John Dos Passos in the USA trilogy (1930-1936 3vols)
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 of Postmodernist 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.
Sorry for the long post.

They don't make cover art like they used to.