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