THE AUTOMOBILE
By:
October 15, 2025
A series dedicated to poems, published c. 1900–1935, the Radium Age sf-adjacent themes of which include: dystopia and utopia, far-out mathematics and the fourth dimension, Afro-futurism, catastrophe, future war, new technologies, scientific breakthrough, dehumanization, cosmic awe, disenchantment and unseen forces, unknowable aliens and singularity. Research and selection by Joshua Glenn; thematic index here.
A FIRST RIDE — 1904
Fluid the world flowed under us: the hills
Billow on billow of umbrageous green
Heaved us, aghast, to fresh horizons, seen
One rapturous instant, blind with flash of
rills
And silver-rising storms and dewy stills
Of dripping boulders, till the dim ravine
Drowned us again in leafage, whose serene
Coverts grew loud with our tumultuous
wills.
Then all of Nature’s old amazement
seemed
Sudden to ask us: “Is this also Man?
This plunging, volant land-amphibian
What Plato mused and Paracelsus
dreamed?
Reply!” And piercing us with ancient scan,
The shrill, primeval hawk gazed down —
and screamed.
— Appears in the author’s 1912 collection Uriel, and other poems. Not sure if it was first published earlier.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF POETRY: Stephen Spender’s THE PYLONS | George Sterling’s THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS | Archibald MacLeish’s EINSTEIN | Thomas Thornely’s THE ATOM | C.S. Lewis’s DYMER | Stephen Vincent Benét’s METROPOLITAN NIGHTMARE | Robert Frost’s FIRE AND ICE | Aldous Huxley’s FIFTH PHILOSOPHER’S SONG | Sara Teasdale’s “THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” | Edith Södergran’s ON FOOT I HAD TO… | Robert Graves’s WELSH INCIDENT | Nancy Cunard’s ZEPPELINS | D.H. Lawrence’s WELLSIAN FUTURES | & many more.