Best New Wave Science Fiction Books

The May 1964 issue of the venerable British science fiction magazine New Worlds had a new editor: Michael Moorcock. Moorcock, still in his early 20s, had already made a name for himself as editor of Tarzan Adventures and the Sexton Blake Library, hardly a CV that suggested radical change, but that is what happened. Backed by Brian Aldiss and J.G. Ballard, already the star writers of New Worlds, Moorcock encouraged experimental writing, the use of modernist literary techniques and the exploration of what became known as "inner space". It is in the nature of experiments that many of them failed, but enough succeeded to cause a sensation. New writers like M. John Harrison and Christopher Priest were attracted to this exciting new form of sf, while more established writers were encouraged to try something new. It helped that this was the mid-60s, the era of Swinging London and The Beatles, and this radical no-holds-barred literature suited the zeitgeist.

Judith Merril took the British New Wave to America with her anthology, England Swings SF, but a slightly different new wave was already under way there. It was an age of the counterculture, of youth versus old, of protests against the Vietnam War. In 1967 the magazine Galaxy carried two full-page advertisements on facing pages, one was signed by sf writers supporting the war (without exception, authors associated with the classic sf of the 40s and 50s), the other signed by writers opposing the war. Except for one or two names (Isaac Asimov), this list was composed of writers who would become associated with the American New Wave. The exemplary text was Harlan Ellison's massive, groundbreaking anthology Dangerous Visions, which set a tone of iconoclasm, of breaking taboos, of bringing sex and politics into science fiction.

Within ten years, the new wave had run its course on both sides of the Atlantic. But that period was one of the most exciting in the history of science fiction, with a host of new writers emerging, and with a steady parade of stories, novels and anthologies (whether the experimental fictions from Britain or the iconoclastic ones from America) that changed the character of science fiction, and laid the groundwork for the cyberpunk, feminist and postmodern science fictions to come.