SF and Romantic Biofictions: Aldiss, Gibson, Sterling, Powers

This paper considers modern sf fictions and biofictions featuring Romantic-period writers, including works by Brian Aldiss, Tim Powers, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, Amanda Prantera, and Tom Holland. It considers how the identification by Aldiss and others of Mary Shelley as the "founding mother" of sf has generated an interest in the lives of Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and other Romantic-period poets and writers, who have become the subject for time-travel novels and fictions set in an alternate 19th century. It discusses proto-sf themes in Romantic-period works, such as Percy Shelley's and Byron's interest in the theory of Catastrophism. It illustrates the various sf-type angles taken on the reworking of biography by this range of authors, including computer recreations of personality and neo-Gothic interpretations of historical events. It explores the unexpected similarities between biofiction and cyberpunk novels in the treatment of personality, showing how both sub-genres have a postmodern approach to a breaking down of individuality and selfhood. It concludes that Romanticism and postmodernism are the two ends of an arch celebrating human individualism, and that these biofictions link the Neuromancer-or "New Romancer"-and the Old Romancers by both celebrating and driving a postmodern stake through the heart of Romantic biography.