The New Romantics: Author Notes

March 4th, 2025

After over a year of it living its own beautiful life in an anthology collection, I am so excited to be able to share this short story with a whole new audience. Namely: you.

First, a little history: last year, my friend Jeri put together an amazing team of writers to create Other Worldly: Volume 1, a genre fiction anthology. We published and sold these in collaboration with Nerd Street, who run my favorite convention, Twin Cities Con. I wrote an original piece, The New Romantics, exclusively for the collection; as part of our contract, the story was only allowed to live in those pages for one year.

Well: that year is up.

I got such a lovely reaction from the people who discovered it and fell in love with its strangeness, a tale of love and war and violence and technology and, most of all, loneliness.

I don’t want to ruin any of its surprises, but I will talk about its title: who are the New Romantics?

Yes, I am aware that it’s a Taylor Swift song, but that’s not where the title came from; I am a strong believer that we are at the beginning of a new Romanticism movement, and my feelings are both inspired and validated by one of my favorite culture writers, Ted Gioia.

• • •

In his Substack, Ted writes:

“A new Romanticism? Could that really happen? That seems so unlikely.

Even I didn’t take this seriously (at first). I was just joking. But during the subsequent weeks and months, I kept thinking about my half-serious claim.

I realized that, the more I looked at what happened circa 1800, the more it reminded me of our current malaise.

• Rationalist and algorithmic models were dominating every sphere of life at that midpoint in the Industrial Revolution—and people started resisting the forces of progress.
• Companies grew more powerful, promising productivity and prosperity. But Blake called them “dark Satanic mills” and Luddites started burning down factories—a drastic and futile step, almost the equivalent of throwing away your smartphone.
• Even as science and technology produced amazing results, dysfunctional behaviors sprang up everywhere. The pathbreaking literary works from the late 1700s reveal the dark side of the pervasive techno-optimism—Goethe’s novel about Werther’s suicide, the Marquis de Sade’s nasty stories, and all those gloomy Gothic novels. What happened to the Enlightenment?
• As the new century dawned, the creative class (as we would call it today) increasingly attacked rationalist currents that had somehow morphed into violent, intrusive forces in their lives—an 180 degree shift in the culture. For Blake and others, the name Newton became a term of abuse.
• Artists, especially poets and musicians, took the lead in this revolt. They celebrated human feeling and emotional attachments—embracing them as more trustworthy, more flexible, more desirable than technology, profits, and cold calculation.

That’s the world, circa 1800 . . . Could that happen again?

• Imagine a growing sense that algorithmic and mechanistic thinking has become too oppressive.
• Imagine if people started resisting technology as a malicious form of control, and not a pathway to liberation, empowerment, and human flourishing—soul-nurturing riches that must come from someplace deeper.
• Imagine a revolt against STEM’s dominance and dictatorship over all other fields?
• Imagine people deciding that the good life starts with NOT learning how to code.”

• • •

These are the ideas and feelings that inspired my short story.

And The New Romantics is available for you to read right now, for free, at my website, dennisvogen dot com. (I would also adore it if you picked up a copy of Other Worldly! I’ll sign it next time I see you!)

I hope you read it; I hope you love it. I wrote it because I needed it then; it means just as much, if not more, now.

P.S. I’m currently writing my piece for Volume 2 and I know some of you are going to be floored. It’s a standalone story that is also a prequel to one of my books…