New Wave Science Fiction - Name

Name

The term "New Wave" is borrowed from the French film movement known as the nouvelle vague.

Gary K. Wolfe, professor of humanities and English at Roosevelt University, identifies the introduction of the term New Wave to SF as occurring in 1966 in an essay for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction written by Judith Merril, who was indirectly yet it seems unambiguously referring to that term in order to comment on the experimental fiction that had begun to appear in the English magazine New Worlds, after Michael Moorcock assumed editorship in 1964. However, Judith Merril denies she ever used that term.

Merril later popularized this fiction in the United States through her edited anthology England Swings SF: Stories of Speculative Fiction (Doubleday 1968), although an earlier anthology (Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions ) has also come to be referred to as a key work of New Wave science fiction.