Teaching the New Wave

Abstract

The history of science fiction, like that of popular literature generally, is made up, in large part, of a series of factional movements, emerging on the margins, contesting for terrain and subsiding as they run out of steam or are incorporated into the central trajectory of the genre. When the appearance of one of these movements coincides with a period of crisis in the field’s development, the result can be a seismic conflict over basic definitions and core assumptions. In a discussion of the controversy surrounding the cyberpunk movement during the 1980s, Carol McGuirk refers to this process of ‘noisy polarization’ as a struggle for consensus: ‘Each group seems sure that it represents the “real” science fiction. … In SF studies, terms shift in meaning whenever the centre of power shifts, and a whole group of concepts may become debased when one generation’s avant-garde giant … is dismissed by a subsequent generation as a mere pygmy-with-a-giant-typewriter.’1 As I have argued elsewhere, a ‘recurring cycle of messianic avant-gardism and old-school intransigence is the very motor of SF as a historical genre’,2and this reality was nowhere more visible than during the mid- to late 1960s, in the furious ideological combat that swirled around the New Wave movement.KeywordsScience FictionBook MarketTaste CultureWave FictionShort FictionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.