KING’S CROSS STATION
By:
June 10, 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.
This circled cosmos whereof man is god
Has suns and stars of green and gold and
red,
And cloudlands of great smoke, that range
o’er range
Far floating, hide its iron heavens o’erhead.
God! shall we ever honour what we are,
And see one moment ere the age expire,
The vision of man shouting and erect,
Whirled by the shrieking steeds of flood
and fire?
Or must Fate act the same grey farce again,
And wait, till one, amid Time’s wrecks and
scars,
Speaks to a ruin here, ‘What poet-race
Shot such cyclopean arches at the stars?’
— Published in 1900. It was included in Chesterton’s collection The Wild Knight and Other Poems (1900). The author celebrates the 1852 London station’s striking industrial yet cathedral-like architecture, particularly its vast, curved glass-and-iron roof (“iron heavens”) and its trains (“shrieking steeds of flood and fire”), signal lights mimicking suns and stars, and clouds of smoke… yet wonders whether humankind (the members of which treat train travel as a dreary chore, rather than marveling at it) will soon devolve from this high point.
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.