Other New Waves

It's late on a Sunday night, and I spent the day at the Jersey shore with The Wife, the boys, and my mother-in-law. (And then spent the last two hours writing a review for ComicMix and my "Reviewing the Mail" post for tomorrow morning.) So my brain has just shut down, and coherent thought is not on the table. However, I do have these old bits of string from other places, so I'll lay this one out for you now.

A fellow named Ted Nolan asked the assembled minds of rec.arts.sf.written if any other written fiction genres had a "New Wave," and this was my brainstorm:

Mysteries had their big split much earlier: hardboiled and cozies started spitting at each other when Black Mask started in 1920, and in earnest as the "Black Mask school" got larger and more prominent.

Thus Black Mask is New Worlds, Ngaio Marsh is Hal Clement, and Raymond Chandler is J.G. Ballard.

It was a split about content more than about "literary" style, though many on the hardboiled side did consciously try to write well, and to write about real life, as opposed to tea-time with vicars.

--
Andrew Wheeler
finding the parallels striking