Science in the New Wave

The 1960s and the New Wave.

Aldiss and Ballard published their stories in the British magazine New Worlds (1946-70), long edited by writer Michael Moorcock. Moorcock’s own fiction is closer to fantasy than to science fiction, but the authors he published attempted other approaches to break out of what they considered the too-rigid conventions of their genre. The tone of science fiction the era of the New Wave to the present is satirical, pessimistic, and anti-utopian-in contrast to attitudes at science fiction’s beginnings, which paralleled the beliefs of their day in scientific progress and prosperity for all.

The 1970s and Beyond
Many of the “golden age” authors still produce, as do almost all the writers from the 1950s and the 1960s. They were joined in the 1970s by writers of the quality of Ursula K. Le Guin, who The Dispossessed (1974), uses anthropological and sociological theories as springboards for her plots. Harlan Ellison, Norman Spinrad, Samuel R. Delany, and Robert Siverberg achieved their reputations in the 1970s. The British writer lan Watson takes on both the humanistic sciences and physics and cosmology in his work.

A notable development of the past two decades has been the growing reputation of women science fiction writers. They range from Le Guin through authors who used male pseudonyms, the most notable is James Tiptree, Jr, to Joanna Russ and Doris Lessing, in her apobalyptic novels and her many volume Sirius cycle.

The computer has given science fiction new universes to explore. From early notions that the machines would take over and rule, or produce more of their own kind and oust humanity, contemporary science-fiction writers such as William Gibson produce novels (Neuromacer, 1984) in the “cyberpunk” mode, stylistically resembling some of the early science fictions writing.

Science Fiction in Eastern Europe
The Polish writer and scientist. Stanislaw LEM is perhaps the most important contemporary European science fiction writer; his works range from mystical planetary explorations (Solaris, 1961; Eng. Trans, 1970) to comic tales about the space pilot Pirx.

Rusian space scientist Konstantin Tsiokovsky wrote, among other novels, Beyond the Planet Earth (1920; Eng. Trans, 1960), a prophetic work in the sage of space travel. After the revolution, Y. Zamiatin’s We (written 1920; Eng trans. 1924) was a profoundly dystopian work, never published in Russia. Among the many other Russian science fiction authors, the work of Alexander Belyaev and the Strugatsky have been translated into English the Strugatsky brothers have been translated into English.