“IF GOD HAS NOT NOTICED…”
By:
September 30, 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.
If God has not noticed us?
He is so occupied
with the crowded cycle of nature.
The sea’s breath,
by drenching the hills
and descending along the meadow booklets
(whose backwaters
are playgrounds of busy insect populations),
returns seaward
to rise again.
Water-beetles
skating on the stagnant skin
of a backwater,
we get rumours of Oceanus,
of storm-driven worlds and island universes.
And we would annex them!
We would dignify the fiery currents of the Cosmos
by spawning in them!
But the minnow, death, he snaps us;
and presently some inconsiderable spate
will scour the cranny clean of us.
Long after man, the stars
will continually evaporate in radiant energy
to recondense as nebulae,
and again stars;
till here and there some new planet
will harbour again
insect populations.
— Untitled poem from Olaf Stapledon’s 1932 proto-sf novel Last Men in London, written by its protagonist, Paul. “The following curious poem, which Paul devised shortly before the end of the war, expresses his sense of the futility and pettiness of all human activity.”
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.