I've just yesterday discovered that there was this thing called ‘New Wave science fiction’, which corresponded closely to Lem's position on SF―though his is a m

I've just yesterday discovered that there was this thing called ‘New Wave science fiction’, which corresponded closely to Lem's position on SF―though his is a mix of this New Wave's social topics and more technicky hard-SF. The Wikipedia article is curiously full of original motivation and sentiments of the ‘New Wave’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Wave_science_fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Wave_science_fiction > With negligible exceptions (Wells, Stapledon and who?), nearly every science-fiction writer up to a very few years ago made one very hidden—and indefensible—assumption. They assumed that science changed; that the world changed; that everything you could imagine changed, except one thing. They assumed that the human race did not change at all. — Frederik Pohl, 1965 Wells and Stapledon happen to be exactly the two whom Lem cited as his primary idols, and he lamented that later authors didn't live up to that impressive start of the genre. (Personally I keep getting irked by the term ‘science fiction’ for writings that predominantly have nothing to do with science and everything to do with space cowboys and dramatic robotics―such that people had to invent the qualifier of ‘hard SF’. Russian, and possibly other Slavic languages, call it simply ‘fantastica’, which IMO describes the genre much more accurately.)