Most science fiction stories seem to go stale after a couple decades. This week, I listened to The Heads of Cerberus by Frances Stevens, initially published 106 years ago. The story had passed its expiration date decades ago, but I still found it mildly enjoyable as a historical curiosity.
If you’re not fascinated by the evolution of science fiction, I’ll understand you leaving this essay now. The Heads of Cerberus is not a forgotten classic. It gets points for being an early example of time travel and dystopian fiction written by a woman, but it’s not a good example. At best, it’s a sample from 1919, the kind that MIT Press is reprinting in its Radium Age science fiction series.
Gertrude Barrows Bennett (1884-1948) published several fantasy and science fiction stories between 1917 and 1923 as Francis Stevens. This makes her a pioneering author in the pre-Amazing Stories era, especially as a woman writer, but she is practically forgotten today. I just learned about Francis Stevens by reading a two-part review of “Sunfire” on Science Fiction and Fantasy Remembrance (Part 1, Part 2) by Brian Collins. That review inspired me to research her, and what I learned inspired me to read The Heads of Cerberus.
The Heads of Cerberus was first serialized in five 1919 issues of The Thrill Book. It was first printed in hardback in 1952. It’s been reprinted at least a dozen times since.
I listened to a free copy on LibriVox. There are several public-domain ebook editions available, here is one at Gutenberg Australia. Lisa Yaszek who edited The Future is Female! series for the Library of America recently published a collection of Francis Stevens’ stories at MIT Press Radium Age series called The Heads of Cerberus and Other Stories. Gertrude Barrows Bennett is getting rediscovered. However, she’s been rediscovered before, it just never sticks.
The Heads of Cerberus is about three people from 1918 Philadelphia traveling to Philadelphia in 2118. Bob Drayton is a disbarred lawyer. Terry Trenmore is his Irish friend who is a powerfully built giant. And Viola Trenmore, Terry’s beautiful little sister, and just seventeen. In 2118 they find a dystopian society run by a handful of weird characters. The story is painfully simple, although I enjoyed it somewhat. The fun in reading these old science fiction tales is not the storytelling, but seeing how people imagined science fictional ideas before the concept of science fiction was invented.
The 19th century had several tales of people traveling to the future that could have inspired Bennett, each with a unique method of time travel. In “Rip Van Wrinkle,” Washington Irving has his title character sleep for twenty years after drinking potent liquor. Edward Bellamy had Julian West sleep for 113 years via hypnosis in Looking Backward. Frances Stevens has her characters jump ahead two hundred years by sniffing grey dust from a vial of mysterious ancient origins. The vial’s stopper is shaped like Cerberus.
As I said, The Heads of Cerberus isn’t very sophisticated. Its tone reminded me of the Oz books by L. Frank Baum, which were for children. Those books were often about ordinary people meeting extraordinary beings in strange places. Bennett’s imagined future is minimalistic, and somewhat goofy, reminding me of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. However, Stevens lacks the creative imagination of Baum and Carroll.
Edward Bellamy created a complex economic system for his future society that inspired many readers in the 19th century to form over five hundred Nationalist Clubs based on socialist ideas in Looking Backward. Francis Stevens imagines an economy based on the number of hours worked. Her society was ruled by an elite called The Superlatives. Ordinary people didn’t have names but numbers, and the Superlatives had names based on cardinal virtues like the Loveliest, The Bravest, the Fastest, the Strongest, etc.
The main problem with Stevens’ science fiction is her future society isn’t a philosophical idea she believed in or promoted, but merely conjured up quickly to fit a plot. Bennett was a young widow, with a child and mother to support after her dad died. She was a stenographer but made extra money by writing for the pulps. She quit writing after her mother died. The Thrill Book that serialized The Head of Cerberus was a low-paying market, but Stevens sold three novels to Argosy, a much-admired pulp after it. They were Claimed, The Citadel of Fear, and Possessed: A Tale of the Demon Serapion. Even though they are dark fantasies, a genre I’m uninterested in, I should try one to see if her writing improved. Her first serial, The Labyrinth, was to All-Story in 1918, another legendary pulp.
James Wallace Harris, 2/21/25