Miscellaneous Chatter > Literature
New Wave SF
What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Soterion ---I don't claim to be an authority on SF, but I usually distinguish between what I perceive as a strong(er) anthropocentrism in Golden Age SF and a reinforcement of the power, or importance, of the human. There are certainly exceptions to this rule, but generally I find this to be the case, along with a heightened espousal of typical value systems. Also, Golden Age SF narratives tend to tackle much larger, sprawling operatic, cosmic subject matter; characters are major political figures, ultra-intelligent scientists, or other figures of prime importance. New Wave SF moves away from this to grittier, "commoner" tales; so Philip K. Dick writes about bounty hunters and drug dealers, M. John Harrison writes about "entradistas" and serial killers, and William Gibson writes about hackers and exploited cool-hunters.
These are merely a few distinctions, but I think the tone of New Wave tends to be more radically critical, often entirely anti-humanist (or far less anthropocentric), and challenging toward traditional values.
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What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Madness ---Thanks Soterion.
Do you think that NWSF doesn't offer the same narrative of galactic import and resolution despite the choice character vehicles? I mean, obviously, there are plenty of examples of stories that focus on events that aren't important in the grand scheme of things but is that the distinction you wanted to make between the two?
Don't you think that NWSF (as per your loose distinctions) also reinforces that it wasn't always "rulers or the super-gifted" that made the decisions of history? That is, that history often turns on the small and irrational, the common and average?
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What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Soterion ---Those are good points. I'd offer the following in response:
I think that NWSF often carries the implicit suggestion that "history" doesn't even exist. That is, that any history that purports to turn on human involvement, regardless of its quantity, is an ideological representation and ultimately an illusion. Any actual temporal development in/through/of reality is a radically nonhuman process. Much of what I would classify as New Wave challenges the conception of history itself, often through complex narrative temporalities.
For Golden Age SF, history remains of profound importance, as well as human involvement in that history. GASF can feature time travel, but it's time travel according to rather linear criteria (if that makes sense). NWSF, in contrast, involves a (sometimes) conscious turn away from linearity and narrative regularity. History, for NWSF, becomes "future history"; or, more specifically, a history that is consciously assessed as filtered, normalized, or idealized through ideological representation. It is a history that is aware of itself as history, and thus becomes self-reflexive and self-critical.
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What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Madness ---NWSF is automatically vested in anachronistic discourse whereas GASF is not?
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What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Soterion ---Well, Gothic literature is invested in anachronism, so that's not something that's even limited to science fiction. I think that GASF handles anachronism simplistically, or linearly. Take William Penn's "The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway," where a time traveler goes back in time to meet his favorite artist, only to discover that the man is a completely apathetic drunk (or something along those lines). Fearing that the artist will never create his masterpieces and greatest works, the time traveler (who knows every detail of them) takes to doing it himself, thus fulfilling that they will be made and instantiating himself as the actual creator of the works.
This short story deals implicitly with many intriguing and complex themes such as authorial identity and time itself, but it handles the paradox rather linearly (or circularly, which still follows a progressive track). The time traveler has regressed far enough in time that he doesn't interfere with his own birth, but encases himself in a feedback loop where he will always travel back in time and create these great works of art. This same narrative idea is at play in Back to the Future, albeit to a far less intellectual degree; but both are rife with paradoxes that aren't forcefully broached.
Flash forward to a film like Looper, in which the protagonist must become aware of his own participation in such a paradoxical time loop that continually repeats, or circulates. Looper is, in fact, the more "New Wave" version of this story in that it is about a temporal loop becoming aware of itself, so to speak, and dealing with its paradoxes in the only way a human subject could ever comprehend (I'll say no more in case some people still want to see the film). Coincidentally, Shane Carruth worked on the time travel sequences in Looper, and Carruth's film Primer is the best narrative engagement with time travel that I've ever seen.
In short, where GASF anachronism resolves itself, so to speak, NWSF allows anachronism to implode or unravel. Time travel is, of course, only one image we typically encounter in science fiction. But in GASF, the overwhelming ideological power of traditional science often trumps the logical paradoxes; in NWSF, ideology-critique and postmodernism (two movements that I find essential for the New Wave to have taken place) allow for more speculative criticism of science itself.
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