SOURCE: “SF and Romantic Biofictions: Aldiss, Gibson, Sterling, Powers,” in Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 24, No. 1, March, 1997, pp. 47-56.

In the following essay, Jones finds similarities between cyberpunk and the period of English Romanticism.

When St Paul's and Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins, in the midst of an unpeopled marsh; when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism, the respective merits of the Bells, the Fudges, and their historians.

Miching Mallecho (i.e., Percy Bysshe Shelley), dedicating Peter Bell the Third to Thomas Brown (i.e., Thomas Moore) in December 1819¹ uses a favorite motif among the Romantic poets: an imaginary situation in which their early-19th-century world...