The Heads of Cerberus and Other Stories – Stevens, Francis – Paperback

$19.95

Exposed to a high-tech dust that can transport people from one dimension to another, three travelers must try to escape the totalitarian Philadelphia of 2118.

When three people in Philadelphia inhale dust developed by a scientist who has discovered parallel universes, they are transported into an interdimensional no-man’s-land that is populated by supernatural beings. From there, they go on to an alternate-future version of Philadelphia—a frightening dystopian nation-state in which citizens are numbered, not named. How will they escape? In The Heads of Cerberus and Other Stories, introduced by Lisa Yaszek, you will find this world-bending story as well as five others written by Francis Stevens, the pseudonym of Gertrude Barrows Bennett, a pioneering science fiction and fantasy adventure writer from Minneapolis who made her literary debut at the precocious age of 17.

Often celebrated as “the woman who invented dark fantasy,” Bennett possessed incredible range; her groundbreaking stories—produced largely between 1904 and 1919—suggest that she is better understood as the mother of modern genre fiction writ large. Bennett’s work has anticipated everything from the work of Philip K. Dick to Superman comics to The Hunger Games, making it as relevant now as it ever was.

Francis Stevens (Gertrude Barrows Bennett, 1884-1948) was the first American woman to publish widely in fantasy and science fiction. Her five short stories and seven longer works of fiction, all of which appeared in pulp magazines such as Argosy, All-Story Weekly, and Weird Tales, would influence everyone from H.P Lovecraft to C.L. Moore.

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“[Stevens] wrote in the early 20th century and anticipated much about where the genre would go.”
—Reactor Magazine

“An excellent way to rediscover an excellent writer.”
—Transfer Orbit

“Stevens’ writing is both reflective of the societal upheaval in her time and freshly insightful. And frighteningly, there are intense similarities to tensions today. Her clear-eyed, laser pointed writing strips away any pretense, leaving the simple truth to make the reader queasy. . . . Anyone who enjoys speculative or science fiction like The Twilight Zone, or steampunk like Jules Verne, or dystopian novels like The Hunger Games needs to be reading Francis Stevens.”
—Meaghan Walsh Gerard

“The stories in this collection are richly evocative of their time’s vision for our possible future, and their influence on the genre continues to broadly underpin the language by which contemporary works now explore today’s futures.”
—Suzanne Palmer, Hugo Award–winning author of “The Secret Life of Bots” and The Finder Chronicles

“I am always delighted when I find Francis Stevens ‘booked for a thriller.’”
—Reader’s letter to The Argosy (1919)

“Those who insist on the close reasoning and the satirical wit of modern science fiction will find surprising amounts of both here.”
—Damon Knight, In Search of Wonder

“What strikes us in [Stevens’s ‘Friend Island’] is the happy combination of an imagination that is projected into the distant future with a bubbling sense of humor that knows how to turn all the clichés of the hour into a rollicking good laugh. An unusual bit of work, which will be sure to delight all appraisers of the new and the delightful.”
—All-Story Weekly (1918)

“‘Behind the Curtain,’ by Francis Stevens, is a lot better than Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ if we do say it.”
—All-Story Weekly (1918)

Re: The Heads of Cerberus: “A highly imaginative work, one of the classics of early pulp fantastic fiction.”
—E. F. Bleiler

Re: The Heads of Cerberus: “Perhaps the first science fantasy to use the alternate time-track, or parallel worlds, idea.”
—Groff Conklin

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