60s - 70s "New Wave" SF.

[Mark13]

I recently found "Again, Dangerous Visions" at a thrift shop and found several of the stories to be truly great (The Word For World Is Forest is probably the best) while most of them seemed like the authors were either writing under the influence of LSD or pretending to. What are some of the better (ie. challenging, yet coherent) New Wave SF stories?

 

[Ward]

If you can find the first DV it's much more consistently good throughout. I'd argue 'Word for World' isn't even close to being New Wave, which is probably why it worked

I can't recall much of what was good in 'Again' off the top of my head, but I will say the last story was a bigger pile of poo than you'll find in a rhino cage, and twice as smelly. Its the sort of thing that really discredited the New Wave in my opinion. It's laughable to read all the hype swirling around it, and how Harlan praises it till he's blue in the face. Big hints at how the 'movement' was eating its own flesh at that point.

Another good collection of New Wave stuff that is actually good is 'Alone Against Tomorrow,' an antho of Ellison's short work that is very strong and has a lot of landmark stories (I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream is very good and justly famous, Repent! Harlequin is considered a classic...it's so-so in my opinion). It is sort of hard to peg down what is and isn't 'new wave' as the movement itself veered wildly into experimentalism, for my taste though the earlier stuff is much better than the latter, when the hype machine kicked into overdrive and the need to tell a story went out the window.

If you haven't read the novels of Philip K. Dick yet than you'll definitely want to check those out for some of the best stories written in this period; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Martian Time Slip, and The Man in the High Castle are good places to start.

 

[ArthurFrayn]

Most of the New Wave reading I've done has been long fiction, but off the top of my head with regard to short that I've read and remember:


Sundance-Robert Silverberg
Nightwings-Robert Silverberg
To the Dark Star-Robert Silverberg
Croatoan-Harlan Ellison
Shatterday-Harlan Ellison
A Boy and His Dog Harlan Ellison
Jefty is Five-Samuel R Delany
The Star Pit-Samuel R Delany
Aye and Gomorrah-Samuel R. Delany(which is in the first DV)
The Bees of Knowledge- Barringon J Bayley
The Cabinet Of Oliver Naylor-Barrington J Bayley
An Overload-Barrington J Bayley


As for longer fiction I'd always recommend the 70s work of Robert Silverberg:

Dying Inside
Thorns
Downward to the Earth
A Time of Changes
Tower of Glass
Up the Line
The Masks of Time
To Live Again
The World Inside
Son of Man (but you'll probably do your LSD thing about this one )


a couple of novels arguably representative of New Wave

Agents of Chaos-by Norman Spinrad
The Final Programme-Michael Moorcock
Lord of Light-Roger Zelazny
The Einstein Intersection--Samuel R. Delany
The Man in the High Castle -Phillip K Dick
Crash/High Rise -JG Ballard

 

[Archren]

A collection you would probably enjoy is Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, a collection of the short fiction of James Tiptree, Jr., who was a major figure of the American New Wave.