Novelist and scholar Damien Broderick, winner of awards for both, offers an exhilarating report on the state of science fiction at the start of this millennium. Broderick came of age during the psychedelic upheaval known as the New Wave. Forty years on, we're in the era of the New Weird, the New Space Opera. Looking back and forward, Broderick reveals a new perspective on renewal, change, and the strange. Call the earliest epoch of modern science fiction the First Wave: from Verne and Wells to the rise of the war machines. Science fiction's fabled "golden age," 1939-50, was the Second Wave. With the rise of fresh, rich themes and powerful literary writing, came the Third Wave-the "new wave" and its crusty opponents. Exhausted, science fiction was renewed again with the Fourth Wave, foaming up in the 1980s with cyberpunk, surging into the 1990s. Let Damien Broderick be your tour guide.