Brian Aldiss
The bridge between British SF's catastrophe tradition and the New Wave he helped detonate.
New Wave SF
The 1960s-70s literary insurgency, led from Britain by New Worlds magazine: inner space, experimental prose and a healthy disrespect for rocketry.
The authors (10)
J. G. Ballard
The most important literary stylist British SF has produced, the New Wave's central planet, and a prophet whose obsessions — media spectacle, manufactured desire, communities seceding from reality — simply became the news.
Alfred Bester
The proto-New-Wave and proto-cyberpunk in one package: Gibson, Moorcock and Delany all name him as the spark.
Samuel R. Delany
The New Wave's prodigy and the genre's first great Black voice, who expanded what SF prose could do and whose criticism taught the field to understand itself.
Philip K. Dick
The genre's great metaphysician.
Harlan Ellison
The most decorated short-fiction writer in genre history and the editor who dragged American SF into the New Wave.
Michael Moorcock
Twice a revolutionary: as editor he made the New Wave happen, and as writer he rewired heroic fantasy with Elric, whose shadow falls on every brooding anti-hero with a cursed weapon since.
Robert Silverberg
The field's great professional, whose 1970s novels proved commercial SF writers could retool into literary ones.
James Tiptree Jr.
The genre's great case study in gendered reading and one of its supreme short-story writers, full stop.
Roger Zelazny
The New Wave's mythographer, who fused literary technique with pulp velocity and made it look effortless.
Essential books, oldest first (15)
The Stars My Destination
Perennially voted among the greatest SF novels ever; Gibson, Moorcock and Delany all cite it as ground zero.
The Big Time
Hugo winner (1958).
Titus Alone
A flawed, haunting coda whose proto-New-Wave collision of fantasy and dystopia influenced Moorcock (who championed it) and M.
The Drowned World
A founding text of both the New Wave and, retrospectively, climate fiction; its psychological inversion of the disaster story remade the form.
'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman
Hugo and Nebula winner, and one of the most reprinted SF stories ever written — the genre's definitive fable of civil disobedience.
This Immortal
Tied with Dune for the 1966 Hugo — the upset that announced the New Wave generation.
Babel-17
Nebula winner (1966).
Dangerous Visions (editor)
The single most influential original anthology in SF history: the American New Wave's founding document and the proof that the genre's future lay beyond magazine censorship.
Nova
The bridge between classic space opera and cyberpunk — Gibson's 'cyberspace jack' is Delany's plug socket renamed — and a fixture of best-SF lists since publication.
Ubik
Widely considered Dick's masterpiece; Time magazine listed it among the hundred best English-language novels.
Behold the Man
Nebula winner and the New Wave's most notorious provocation: time-travel paradox as theology, handled with a seriousness that outlasted the scandal.
Crash
The most extreme and most influential of Ballard's urban-disaster novels; Cronenberg's 1996 film adaptation won a special jury prize at Cannes and a moral panic in the British press.
High-Rise
The definitive vertical-dystopia novel, endlessly cited in architecture and sociology as well as fiction; filmed by Ben Wheatley in 2015 with Tom Hiddleston.
Dhalgren
The genre's most famous avant-garde novel and an enduring proof that SF readers will follow real difficulty if the sentences earn it.
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
The canonical single-volume case that Tiptree belongs among the greatest short-story writers in or out of genre; required reading, frequently literally, on university syllabuses.