New Wave (literature)

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As New Wave , a literary movement in the (mainly British) is science fiction of the 1960s called, which aimed at a renewal of the genre.

Literary claim

The aim of the New Wave was to break with the established conventions of the Gernsback and Campbell SFs. The New Wave was strongest in Great Britain from 1963 to the early 1970s. The central organ of this current, whose name was explicitly based on the French Nouvelle Vague des Kinos, was the British SF magazine New Worlds . The two most important protagonists were Michael Moorcock , who mainly acted as editor and propagator, and JG Ballard , the literary leading figure of the movement. William S. Burroughs served as a great role model for both of them. Many representatives, however, also came from the USA. The American anthology Dangerous Visions published by Harlan Ellison in 1967 was important . Alfred Bester , Ray Bradbury , Algis Budrys , Fritz Leiber , Catherine Lucile Moore and Theodore Sturgeon can be regarded as precursors .

The New Wave showed a more experimental attitude towards the form and content of science fiction, combined with an ambitious , highly literary attitude that confidently differentiated itself from penny literature . The exponents of the current criticized the existing science fiction as conservative literature, which both in terms of content and form remained at a standstill. A renewal of the SF literature was called for, which should formally draw level with the "serious" literature.

The New Wave was never a homogeneous movement, however, and the claim to renew science fiction was only really realized in a few examples. Many of the programmatic texts of the New Wave are contradicting themselves. Moorcock said goodbye to the strong focus on content and pleaded for an upgrade of the style. While Gernsback and Campbell had always defined the content of science fiction and almost completely ignored formal questions, Moorcock referred explicitly to the aestheticist positions of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

More experimental forms

In fact, the texts of the New Wave are characterized by a joy in experimentation that was previously unknown to science fiction, numerous stylistic means that were previously alien to science fiction found their way into the mode: assembly technology , stream of consciousness , irony , multi-perspective and associative narration, unreliable narrator , a strongly rhythmic language and typographical gimmicks. In most cases, of course, these were not genuine innovations in science fiction, but stylistic means of avant-garde literature from the turn of the century and the early 20th century. With the New Wave, science fiction primarily caught up on general literary developments.

Content innovations

At least some of the New Wave authors aimed not just for a formal, but also for a renewal of content. The New Wave clearly distanced itself from the optimistic, principally technology-affirming science fiction of the Golden Age. The hope that nature could be seen through and controlled was clearly rejected; the basic mood of the New Wave is mostly pessimistic and introspective . The authors were less interested in great technical innovations, instead they addressed areas such as sex and drugs that were previously taboo ; Instead of conquering the universe, it was time to explore the inner space of the soul.

Other stories revolved around the functional mechanisms of the mass media or entire social systems , or dealt with dystopian topics such as entropy and the direction of time, or scenarios of crises and the end of the world . A political subtext can be made out in Brian Aldiss , Thomas Michael Disch , who was influenced in part by Marxist and socialist traditions and directed against the hegemony of American culture and the technological belief of Campbell's science fiction. In the US , the New Wave was seen in close connection with the political left and the protest movement against the Vietnam War .

Representative of the New Wave

Important writers of the New Wave were:

literature

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