The growth of science fiction has mimicked the evolution of civilization: basically slow, steady growth punctuated by abrupt changes having major impacts, such as the invention of the printing press affected the growth of civilization in Europe. These abrupt changes in science fiction were called “waves” by sf historians in the 1960s, and they occurred about once every 10-20 years in the past century:

> 1912: the scientific romances which followed the publication of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars
> 1927: the development of hard science fiction which resulted from the founding of Amazing Stories, by Hugo Gernsback
> 1938: the Golden Age of Astounding Stories under the editorship of John W. Campbell, Jr.
> 1951: the broadening of science fiction in the pages of Galaxy (edited by H.L. Gold) and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (McComas and Boucher)
> 1965: the New Wave which developed in the pages of Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds
> 1984: the popularity of cyberpunk, which was influenced by the fiction of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling

Henry Welch mentioned to me that the gap between waves corresponded to the number of years necessary for young readers of one wave to grow up and become writers themselves, whereupon the best and brightest of those new writers inevitably pushed science fiction in a brand new direction.

Cyberpunk was twenty years ago though, and science fiction has continued to experience a lot of slow, steady growth in the years since. Consider these changes which were minor developments in 1980 but are major aspects of the genre now:

> the blending of fantasy foundations with science fiction rigor (a la Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun)
> the blending of horror with science fiction (likely influenced by the popularity of Stephen King)
> the amazing growth of alternate history (perhaps most popularized by Harry Turtledove)
> the new space opera which developed in the United Kingdom (by such writers as Alastair Reynolds and Iain M. Banks)
> the new weird, a melding of disparate sub-genres such as sf, fantasy, slipstream, space opera, etc. into one seamless whole

Are any of these movements–if that is indeed what they are–abrupt enough or influential enough to be considered the latest wave in science fiction? Or has the field become too broad, and too sprawling, for any single wave to affect it as the other waves did in the 20th century? Perhaps a wave can only be influential over a certain-sized writing population, a size which science fiction has obviously surpassed in recent decades, so that what we are actually seeing is a half-dozen different waves occurring simultaneously?

If that’s true, how the heck will science fictional theorists deal with such a multiverse of simultaneous change? Maybe it will require a critical Michael Moorcock to make sense of it all?