New Wave (science fiction)

The New Wave is a movement in science fiction produced in the 1960s and 1970s and characterized by a high degree of experimentation, both in form and in content, a "literary" or artistic sensibility, and a focus on "soft" as opposed to hard science. New Wave writers often saw themselves as part of the modernist tradition and sometimes mocked the traditions of pulp science fiction, which some of them regarded as stodgy, adolescent and poorly written.

The New Wave science fiction of the 1960s emphasized stylistic experimentation and literary merit over scientific accuracy or prediction. It was conceived as a deliberate break from the traditions of pulp SF, which many of the writers involved considered irrelevant and unambitious. The most prominent source of New Wave science fiction was the magazine New Worlds under the editorship of Michael Moorcock, who assumed the position in 1964. Moorcock sought to use the magazine to "define a new avant-garde role" for science fiction by the use of "new literary techniques and modes of expression." It was also a period marked by the emergence of a greater variety of voices in science fiction, most notably the rise in the number of female writers, including Joanna Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin and James Tiptree, Jr.

The term "New Wave" is borrowed from the French film movement the nouvelle vague.

Gary K. Wolfe, professor of humanities and English at Roosevelt University, identifies the introduction of the term New Wave to SF as occurring in 1966 in an essay for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction written by Judith Merril, who was indirectly yet it seems unambiguously referring to that term in order to comment on the experimental fiction that had begun to appear in the English magazine New Worlds, after Michael Moorcock assumed editorship in 1964. However, Judith Merril denies she ever used that term.

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