THE FIRST BULB IS TURNED ON
By:
December 25, 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.
From what nebula
Has a star rolled
Down among these slimy reeds?
The crowd of peasants sways —
Pressed by electric fingers
Of light that crumple
These men of stone.
Smiles stream forth
Through their straw beards.
They swallow the new light, gulping,
And scoop up handfuls
From the spring of light
Bared by the hand of man.
The flood-gate with a desperate sob
Hides under leaping foam.
To vertebral trees,
To skeletal posts,
We fasten nerves of light.
The wooden bones of the village,
Its log ribs,
Are worked by copper muscles.
Hundreds of electric fangs
Sink into izba hearts,
Into the hearts of peasants.
On windows blind with centuries,
Black with luchina soot,
Constellations burst.
New eyes are hatched to seize the world.
— 1923. From The Electric Poem.
An izba is a peasant cottage. A luchina is a strip of wood once used by peasants as a candle.
From Russian Poetry: An Anthology, chosen and translated by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky (1927).
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.