PLANET NEPTUNE TO MOTHER SUN
By:
March 9, 2026
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.
Mother of worlds, you shine afar
With the feeble light of an evening star;
Your smile is faint as I glimpse your face
Across the millions of miles of space.
Can you recall that destined day
When I left your arms and sped away
To spin my life in the lonely wide? —
Alone till a child moved by my side.
Smaller you grew and dimmer yet
As eons dawned and millennia set,
Till you lived for midgets, Mars and Earth,
Older than I, but younger in birth.
Ages of ages have passed since then,
And time must die ere we meet again,
Yet I send my longing across the night
To dust of my dust and light of my light.
— found in Copeland’s 1922 collection Whimsical Rimes.
Note from the SFE:
In “Planet Neptune to Mother Sun,” for example, the planet Neptune (see Outer Planets), referencing the outdated notion that the planets had been expelled from the Sun, recalls its ancient departure and mournfully addresses its now-distant parent, currently more attentive to the closer planets Mars and Earth.
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.