(And actually, so did I, until I realized I was thinking of Joanna Russ. Who I hope actually does count as New Wave?)

Slip of the tongue. You really pick nits.

Granting that terms like "New Wave" tend to be fungible over time, there is still no coherent history of modern SF in which the "New Wave" includes the period of Tiptree's glory. Miller's--Salon's--slovenliness about SF's actual, knowable, well-documented modern history is inexcusable. We may be a lowlife genre worthy only of the servants' entrance, but by God we deserve better than this.

"Science fiction at the time was in a war between the "Old Wave" that believed in scientific accuracy and a "New Wave" that made literary values paramount. Tiptree's work fell into both camps -- scientifically accurate but passionately concerned with gender and power."

Based on PNH's comment, I'm assuming he won't like that much better, if at all...

"...she told several of her correspondents that she would kill herself when Ting died. She had no close friends and was an atheist."

Because, of course, theists never commit suicide. Or anyway atheists are so much more likely to. What's the point for them, after all?

My recollection (and I was there at the time) is that "New Wave SF" slipped free of any specific meaning within about eight minutes of becoming widely known in the field. It was variously applied to anybody new on the scene, anything that wouldn't have appeared in Astounding, or sometimes in Planet Stories (in both cases, whether or not this might have been true), and anything that contained an unrecognizable literary reference (often though not always Joyce). A common usage was, not unlike Americans' use of "French New Wave," for whatever the critic didn't like.

See also: Cyberpunk.

Two words, Laura Miller:

S-E-P-T-E-M-B-E-R E-L-E-V-E-N.

You dork!!

Most of you have never met me. Some of you may not have considered yourself fans when I was still a regular convention member. All that may count against being "close friends", but is anything beyond commmunication a necessary condition?

There are people on the net I've been friends with for over ten years, and we still haven't exchanged physical addresses.

If this isnt true, correct me but it might be fair to call her a fellow traveller?

An author who inserts an error near the beginning of a piece does you a service: you have a zero'th-order idea of how much scepticism to bring to bear on the rest of it, which still might be worth reading anyway.

I feel that Ms Miller's wrong, but not fundamentally wrong. I use "not fundamentally wrong" in its usual sense of, "I might have made roughly the same mistake." I started reading post-40s SF authors roughly around 1976, and (for example) I encountered Larry Niven's "Known Space" stories about the same time I started reading Sheldon's work. If I'd been aware at the time of a split in the SF world, I would have put the authors of "The Soft Weapon" and of ""Filomena & Greg & Rikki-Tikki & Barlow & the Alien" (to name the first short story I read from each author) in different camps.

When I did learn of the split, I felt it probably had more to do with Vietnam and level of blind technophilia than anything else---not accurate, necessarily, but an easy mistake to make if such. (I can't find a transcription of the dueling "Analog" ads on the web; anyone have a pointer?)

I love Wikipedia.

Here endeth the digression.

(Sleep-deprived man staggars from party.)

My recollection (and I was there at the time) is that "New Wave SF" slipped free of any specific meaning within about eight minutes of becoming widely known in the field. It was variously applied to anybody new on the scene, anything that wouldn't have appeared in Astounding, or sometimes in Planet Stories (in both cases, whether or not this might have been true), and anything that contained an unrecognizable literary reference (often though not always Joyce). A common usage was, not unlike Americans' use of "French New Wave," for whatever the critic didn't like.

Beyond that, yes, I know that other people have used the term "New Wave" to mean any SF writer who didn't wear their hair in a buzz cut after 1964. Those people are also idiots.

Because you expect it to be so much better, right?

Sadly, I passed my cancel-the-subscription point with Salon a few months ago.

Well, technically, they're not saying she was part of the "New Wave", they're saying she wrote during the new way. They're also saying the "New Wave" occurred in the 60's, which, well, when did the SF new wave occur? And was it a heyday after all?

So, it's more like they're saying the Allman Brothers made songs during the British invasion, not that they were necessarily part of it. Of course, it's ambiguous wording that suggests something not intended, so it should be rewritten, but oh well.

However, their timeline may be completely screwed up. Apparently, I missed the Hay Days, so I don't know about that part. Which means their statement could still be wrong, depending on the exact date and time of the actual Hey Days in question.

While we're on the topic, I'd like to order a Hay Day now, if I could. Where do I file the paperwork?

(I think of the New Wave as being based to a large degree on the writers who submitted work to New Worlds; that may be a bit parochial.)

Nicholls (correctly, in my view) gives the start of New Wave as Michael Moorcock's taking over the editorship of New Worlds (his first issue was May/June 1964) and seems to say that by the early 1970s it had pretty much become the mainstream of science fiction.

And that, of course, is well before Tiptree really became prominent. She was first published in 1968, but her first book wasn't until 1973 -- long after the wave had washed over the shore.

Ironic isn't it? An on-line newspaper which carries a feminist blog feels the need to use such cliches as the tragic/fragile beauty to make the life of a female writer more enticing. I wonder if the people in charge of the Broadsheet will make a note of the discrepancy, or is that only suppose to be a critique of the mainstream media.

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The first thing to clear up is that the "She had no close friends and was an atheist" line is not from Miller; that's from the other article quoted here, the Washington Post review by Martin Morse Wooster.

The second thing is that while maybe she shouldn't write about the New Wave without knowing something about it, here she was just quoting the book. I think. This is of course the first day since I got it that I haven't lugged the biography into the office, but I'm pretty sure the New Wave thing is in the book, and that Julie Phillips was quoting me. It was a line I had used earlier in Meet Me at Infinity, which was that the advocates of the New Wave and the advocates of the Old Wave had both been claiming Tiptree as one of their own. This was what I was seeing in 1971.

I hit that point when they had their vaccines-cause-autism expose a while back.

Will the real New Wave please stand up.
please stand up.
please stand up.

Did anyone figure out the "New Wave" years, btw?

And if there's an old and new wave, maybe we could get some hard dates for that too.

The "New Wave" literary movement was closely associated with "New Worlds," a British prozine edited by John Carnell and later by Michael Moorcock. I differ with one opinion on the page link I gave you above. I'd call Judy Merrill the chief U.S. proselytizer/adopter of the British New Wave movement rather than Harlan Ellison. The Magazine of F&*SF published Merrill's essay about it in 1966. Her "England Swings" short story collection extolling the New Wave was published by Doubleday in 1968. I used to hear her talking up "England Swings" at convention panels in 1968-1969. What I remember of Harlan's promotion of "Dangerous Visions" is that he regarded the British New Wave as just one subset of the revolution that he wished to advance. (Judy Merrill and Harlan were feuding with each other then, too, which complicates the issue in terms of taxonomy.)

Norman Spinrad, another U.S. New Wave campfollower, gained notoriety in 1969 when his novel "Bug Jack Barron" was denounced in Parliament after being serialized in New Worlds.

I used to hang out with Norman in the time period from 1969 to 1971. I recall him being much more gung-ho about the New Wave as a literary movement in the earlier portion of that timeframe.

New Worlds ceased publication as monthly magazine in 1971 and continued publication for another five years as a series of paperback collections. It sez here that Moorcock's editorial in the first paperback version proclaimed a "return to our pre-1967 format." He might have been referring only to the physical appearance of "New Worlds."

I think there's a credible historical argument to be made that the New Wave movement in science fiction peaked before 1970 and was old news by 1972 -- not withstanding the fact that the stories published under its banners continued to influence new writers after that time.

I'll definitely agree that when I think of the New Wave I think of two people: Michael Moorcock and Judith Merril. What they promoted was what the New Wave was for me.

The bullet list of dystopian signifiers in New Wave stories is something that rings true to my recollection of the way the most prolific (or maybe just the loudest) analysts in the s-f community talked about the New Wave at that time.

The page says nothing about Cele Goldsmith, Joanna Russ, and Tiptree (or Charles Platt, John Sladek, Keith Roberts, and Barrington Bayley, for that matter). It totally sidesteps the feminist revolution in science fiction in the '70s, which was arguably the most significant antecedent of the New Wave literary movement. But it doesn't make the Wikipedia mistake of merging the historical events of the 1960s and later periods into a confusing hodgepodge.

Bueller? Bueller?

Just rot13 a quick explanation of the ending, and I'd be most appreciative.

Ohg ubj pna lbh gryy gung ur jnfa'g whfg ybfvat uvf zvaq? V pbhyqa'g gryy vs gur jubyr nvepensg syvtug ng gur raq jnf n unyyhpvangvba be abg, fvapr ur frrzrq gb or oynpxvat bhg naq onpx va naq trarenyyl tbvat n ovg penml.

rot 13 converter for your convenience.

For Brian Aldiss, she lists his critical work and his 1980s series, but not his more appropriate Barefoot in the Head.

J.G. Ballard's short fiction like "The Assasssination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" was a cornerstone of the New Wave; his early novels like The Drowned World were not.

I never considered Ursula Le Guin a New Wave writer, but I guess others do; at any rate, The Lathe of Heaven is not one of her Hainish novels.

Nothing she lists for Philip Jose Farmer would be considered NW; a very few of his pieces would, but not enough to get him featured on this list.

Why list Delany and not mention Dhalgren?

(Other writers I don't think have been mentioned yet include Thomas M. Disch, David R. Bunch, James Sallis and Pamela Zoline.)

And the writers on her "influenced by the New Wave" list? If Ira Levin and Stephen King are going to be there, why not just mention every writer in the world?

Gur raqvat vf qryvorengryl nzovthbhf, ohg v nyjnlf nffhzrq gung vs ur jrer unyyhpvangvat gung ur jbhyq unir raivfvbarq gur erny ragrecevfr.

For type specimen, I nominate Zoline's "The Heat Death of the Universe." It has most of the hallmarks: formal experimentation, present-day setting, feminism, science content as explicit metaphor, cussin', publication in New Worlds.

It's also less than completely optimistic, although that aspect of New Wave is often exaggerated. A lot of it was very playful.

"I really dislike that whole 'she's so interesting because she's pretty and messed up, and besides, we can talk about her sex life' trope, especially when used to reduce a feminist writer to Salon-size."

Delany is core to that NYC lineage as was George Alec Effinger, who also hung out with the poets around St.Mark's Church, and Tom Disch (The New York School of Science Fiction, perhaps).

Tiptree was writing meta-science fiction, as behoved a New Yorker writer. She was inventing the writer as well as the work, so she is more like Borges than like most s.f. writers.

People who come out of more literary traditions who start writing s.f. often write very conventionally at first, or at least apparently conventionally, as a sort of asking permission and as a ironic exploration of the standard tropes.

Attempting to divide people into waves or schools strikes me as weird, though, something people who aren't writers are given to doing.

I'm going to give a deliciously geeky answer to "who's in the New Wave?"

At Iguanacon, the 1978 Worldcon, William Sims Bainbridge administered a complex questionnaire to 595 congoers, asking them a few questions about the types of SF they preferred, and asking them to rate 140 SF authors. The analysis appeared as Dimensions of Science Fiction in 1986.

In the multidimensional factor analysis, a New Wave cluster popped out very distinctly.

Bainbridge writes "Table 7 lists all twenty-six writers who achieved loadings above .35 for this factor." In order:

Ellison
Silverberg
Knight
Russ
Dick
Willhelm
Sturgeon
Mazberg
Aldiss
Lafferty
Budrys
Tiptree
Vonnegut
Spinrad
Delany
Huxley
Merril
Orwell
Brunner
LeGuin
Pohl
Davidson
Bloch
Bester
Bradbury
Haldeman

Don't argue with me whether Aldous Huxley belongs in the New Wave, argue with 595 Iguanacon attendees. (Well, I was one of them, so I guess you can argue with me, but I am only responsible for a sliver of this result. Personally, I'd exclude Orwell, Huxley, Sturgeon, Bester, Budrys, Bradbury, Pohl, and a few others for historical reasons-- but they are New Waveish, and presumably that's what's being measured here.)

Over here it says: "New Wave -- a loose movement in science fiction writing from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, characterized by an experimental approach to narrative structures and language and an emphasis on nuanced social, moral, or psychological conflict rather than on technological concerns."

The "American" New Wave movement in science fiction might be said to have Jim Blish and Phil Farmer as genre pre-cursors (Blish for stylistic experimentation, Farmer for daring to introduce sexual speculation), and possibly John Barth (Giles Goat Boy) as a mainstream influence. After Delany ignites it, the "American" New Wave eventually begins to include Joanna Russ, David R. Bunch, and Tom Disch -- with Harlan Ellison, Ursula Le Guin, and Robert Silverberg being heavily influenced. (Ellison's novella, "The Region Between" includes typographical experiments that look like they're derived from the ones that John Barth popularized.) Damon Knight (Orbit), Cele Goldsmith (Amazing Stories), and Ellison (Dangerous Visions) provide early markets for the "American" New Wave.

A bunch of good stories by other s-f writers appear in these "new wave"-friendly markets, which contributes to the association of everything with a more sophisticated narrative style or a wider range of story subjects as part of the "New Wave."

(As Rebecca Ore points out, this is fanboy historiographical musing. The authors who were producing all those stories may see things differently.)

Robert Bloch?!?!?

Yeah, Bloch would also be on my list of "way before the New Wave" writers. But the statistics say that, in the minds of readers, his writing clumps with that of the NW gang.

Not just Bloch, Jeffrey... Why was Bradbury on the list, Bill?

I already gave the reason. Because his "factor loading" on this axis-- which is obviously dominated by a group of New Wave authors-- is 0.371.

Bainbridge also writes: "There has been strenuous objection in the past to including respected earlier writers like Bradbury among the lesser lights of the new wave. [...] In a quantitative ethnography such as this, I defer to my respondents, whose answers inform us about the dominant conceptualizations of the science fiction subculture. In my respondents' estimation, Bradbury's style is as about as close to new wave as is LeGuin's. Neither is as close to the center of the ideological factor as Ellison. Bradbury is closer to the new wave than he is to any other main faction.[...] the movement of the late 1960s becomes the crest of the wave, which exaggerated elements already present in the works of these earlier authors."

Dimensions of Science Fiction really is a unique and fascinating book.

(I introduce these ideas into this thread with some trepidation, not wishing to hijack it or blunt PNH's original point: The New Wave beachhead was firmly established, and its major players identified, considerably before Tiptree's most notable stories appeared in the early and middle 1970s.)

or Fritz Leiber. Green Millenium seems to me a pretty decent New Wave novel.

I kinda think the Old Wave/New Wave distinction is not drawn from any technophilia or special scientific accuracy in the former (or lack in the latter) but in the particular foregrounding of certain aspects of the science and technology that characterizes Old Wave story telling.

Once enough of those stories had been told, a lot of the technology and science was able to exist in the background, and a certain generation of writers took advantage of this, and became the New Wave.

I think you can see this in, for instance, the difference between Henry Kuttner's Mutant stories, and Delany's The Einstein Intersection; or possibly by contrasting A Martian Odyssey with The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth.

Just thinking out loud . . .

There is something deep-down, fundamentally conservative in Joe's storytelling style, even if his subject matter is far to the left--and he himself was a hippie back in the day.

But I consider the New Wave to be writing very much from the tradition set by Joyce and the Beat writers, with lots of wordplay, experimentation and psychedelic prose.

Haldeman, on the other hand, is a Hemingwayian--short, declarative sentences, transparent prose.

On the other hand: Yeah, I see it. Joe's a hippie, he's anti-war, he writes about characters who use recreational drugs and have recreational sex. He uses the F-word and S-word. Of course he was going to be considered New Wave by many people in the early 70s when he came onto the scene.

The nice thing is that even the reviews that seem to miss the point completely (Janet Maslin in the New York Times?) recommend the book. Everyone seems to like it. Patrick, above, says, "perhaps the best biography ever written of a modern science fiction writer." Schneider in Newsday went further: "possibly the best biography I have ever read."

Cool.