One sci-fi epic that made a big impression on me was Aniara, by the Swedish poet Harry Martinson. Man, was that depressing, though! Kind of the mirror image of the futurist epic Altazor by Vicente Huidobro, the great Chilean modernist poet, which expressed a much more positive vision of exploring the cosmos. (I don't think either of those works required much research to write, but they are certainly important if you want to understand how 20th-century poets viewed science and technology.)