Hello, and welcome! This project intends to explore the New Wave of science fiction. This movement, spanning mostly in the 1960s and 1970s, demonstrates how effectively the genre was utilized to display real world issues, often exploring the lasting effects of systemic oppression. By creating new and detached worlds, authors are granted freedom to make daring and biting commentary through the use of extended metaphor. However, these works also expose a very human shortcoming: the inability to create a wholly un-earthlike world. Every fictional culture, planet- even flora and fauna- are influenced and based in our earthly reality. This extends to gender roles throughout the world, concepts revolving "natural" sexuality, and the place of those who fall between or outside of the Western gender binary. The aim of this project is to analyze the ways gender and sexuality were explored during this New Wave, and to reflect on how these explorations exist today.
In this pursuit, we created a fifteen week syllabus, containing eleven novels, two movies, and various short stories. Please feel free to follow along, and to send any comments or questions to new.wave.study@gmail.com.
Week 1 – 1/25 – 1/31 – Introduction
I, Robot – Isaac Asimov (Selections From)
Week 2 – 2/1 – 2/7 – Exploration
The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. Le Guin
Week 3 – 2/8 – 2/14
Definitely Maybe (One Billion Years…) - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Week 4 – 2/15 – 2/21
2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY – Stanley Kubrick
Week 5 – 2/22 – 2/28 – Cultivation
Solaris – Stanislaw Lem
SOLARIS – Andrei Tarkovsky
Week 6 – 3/1 – 3/7
Hard to Be a God - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Week 7 – 3/8 – 3/14 – Destruction
Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
Week 8 – 3/15 – 3/21
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Philip K. Dick
Week 9 – 3/22 – 3/28
Driftglass – Samuel Delany
Week 10 – 3/29 – 4/4 - Survival
Ice – Anna Kavan
The Heat Death of the Universe
Week 11 – 4/5 – 4/11
The Female Man – Joanna Russ
When it Changed – Joanna Russ
Week 12 – 4/12 – 4/18
The Female Man – Joanna Russ
Week 13 – 4/19 – 4/25 - Rejection
The Dispossessed – Ursula K. Le Guin
Week 14 – 4/26 – 5/2
The Dispossessed
Samuel R. Delany Critique
Week 15 – 5/3 – 5/9
James Tiptree Jr. Short Stories