.
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the New Wave and had a rudimentary understanding of the Chinese publishing industry's view of what could and could not be published there, I was happy to oblige.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.
*
Posts
