It did have a major lasting impact on the field, though - opening up science fiction to all sorts of new ideas and styles, many of which are still common today - and it left in its wake several works that are still very highly regarded.

As most movements do, it also faced a backlash from a new generation of writers who brought back scientific accuracy, action and adventure (this in particular was aided and abetted by publishers after Star Wars became a mega-hit, as they felt works in the same style would sell better), or both often matching the literary chops of the by-now venerable New Wave writers, who started to be seen as pretentious intellectual lightweights at best, Bourgeois Bohemians at worst. Both lost relevance by the end of The '70s. The cohorts of writers and readers most associated with this movement were either Beat generation or baby boomers engrossed in the counterculture of The '60s. Much like the Youth Movement, the New Wave gradually faded away as its members got older and/or found that really experimental writing had a very limited market.

Burroughs was mentioned by many as a major influence. The writers of the New Wave began looking beyond SF for inspiration, and Beat writer William S. Dangerous Visions, in particular, which called for 'stories that could not be published elsewhere or had never been written in the face of almost certain censorship by SF editors', helped make what had been a primarily British movement into an international one. Two anthologies - England Swings SF, edited by Judith Merril, and Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison - helped crystalize the movement. While the origins of the New Wave are somewhat murky, most agree that Michael Moorcock spearheaded the movement with his New Worlds magazine, which, when he took over in 1964, began focusing exclusively on experimental and literary SF works.

The New Wave was strongly associated with the Youth Movement of the sixties and was regarded with much the same distrust and fear by older and more conservative types. The Sixties were a turbulent time (to put it mildly), and the SF community in those days was a small and relatively insular one, so the New Wave became massively controversial within that community. New Wave Science Fiction was a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s a rejection of the simplistic action-adventure stories of the 'Golden Age' in favor of more literary and experimental forms of SF and Fantasy, with more emphasis on writing and creativity and less on 'hard' science, and, well, plot. Judith Merril, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, 1967

S-F by Judith Merril