)
had started out as fans, or writers, of classic magazine hard SF, began to experiment
with two new techniques:
- non-traditional style and narrative modification
- social relevance, including issues of politics, sex, drugs (and even rock and roll)
The stories that began to be written became known as the "New Wave" in SF. Like many cultural movements of the 60's, the New Wave probably arose first in England, and was adopted enthusiastically in America slightly later. The landmark anthologies of the New Wave are Harlan Ellison's omnibus volumes Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972) (Dangerous Visions has recently been reissued in a beautiful 35th anniversary edition, and Again, Dangerous Visions, while out of print, is not impossible to find).
In many ways the stories of the New Wave continued in the SF tradition, since they were first of all works of extrapolation, of imaginative experimentation with scientific ideas. But they were also, in other ways, quite different from anything that had come before. The scientific ideas they explored came more often from psychology or philosophy than physics. They also adopted enthusiastically the drug culture's interest in alternate realities, and the more general counter-culture interest in rejection of established societal norms. Even more importantly, in including more explicit issues of race, of political criticism and satire, and of gender, the New Wave opened SF to a much wider range of voices, and themes, and readers, than it had ever had available to it before.
It's also important to realize that although the New Wave did introduce differences into SF, those differences also fit right in with SF's tradition of openness, cultural critique, and experimentation, as we've explored in earlier modules. The New Wave, although it was new as a wave, was still part of the same ocean.
No specific discussion board topic for this mini-lecture, but be sure to post 
your choice and ideas for the final paper (see the Assignments section for more information).