When we think about the multiverse, we often think it started with that episode of Star Trek with evil Spock (1967’s “Mirror, Mirror”).
But the writers of that episode — and everyone else who’s ever written a multiversal story — owe a debt of gratitude to Gertrude Barrows Bennett who, under her nom de plume Francis Stevens, pioneered the way of the parallel realities in some of the stories she wrote between 1917 and 1923.
Now six of those stories, including her 1919 novel The Heads Of Cerberus, are being collected in the new volume The Heads Of Cerberus And Other Stories (paperback, Kindle), which was edited by Dr. Lisa Yaszek, the Regents’ Professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech, who also wrote the rather appropriately titled introduction, “The Mother Of Modern Genre Fiction.”
In the following email interview, Dr. Yaszek talks about the significance of these stories, as well as how she decided which to include.
Dr. Lisa Yaszek
The Heads Of Cerberus And Other Stories collects Francis Stevens’ titular 1919 novel and five of her short stories, but let’s start with the novel itself. What is The Heads Of Cerberus about, and what kind of a story is it? Some have called it dystopian sci-fi.
Stevens’ novel follows a down on his luck lawyer, a self-made man of adventure, and a quick-witted, sharp shooting young woman on a truly fantastic adventure through time and space. Much of that adventure is indeed set in a dystopian future Philadelphia, where democracy and brotherly love are replaced by authoritarian rule and isolationist paranoia. As such, anticipates and perhaps even sets standards for dystopias to come, from 1984 to the Hunger Games franchise.
But The Heads Of Cerberus is more than just a straightforward dystopia. Stevens’ protagonists travel forward 200 years in time from a familiar present-day version of Philadelphia to an estranging, dystopian version of the same city. But to get there, they must pass through the cosmic space of Ulithia, a “phantom borderland” where strange creatures manipulate the fabric of time and space itself. It’s a delightfully eerie sequence that very much anticipates the cosmic horror imagery of Ashton Clark Smith and H.P. Lovecraft.
As if that’s not enough, we also get a romance subplot, which was common in speculative fiction published at this time because editors wanted to appeal to women who might otherwise not purchase such magazines.
And if that’s still not enough, I’d note that Stevens, who was writing at the height of the suffrage movement, even weaves in a bit of feminist speculation with the story of two compelling and, for the day, fairly complex female characters who realize they may have more in common with each other than with the men around them, whether or not they want that to be true.
The great thing is that Stevens does a wonderful job weaving all these plotlines together and so crafts a story that truly has something for almost everyone.
You kind of just touched on this, but what is the significance of this story? Groff Conklin, who’s edited numerous sci-fi anthologies, said it was, “perhaps the first science fantasy to use the alternate time-track, or parallel worlds idea.” Is he right, or is it significant for some other reason?
Conklin was correct in proposing that The Heads Of Cerberus was one of the first stories to dramatize new scientific ideas about parallel worlds; and as of right now, we think that Stevens was the first author to publish a parallel worlds story in the modern genre magazines.
Of course, she wasn’t the only author exploring this concept: the idea of parallel universes displaced from our own in a fourth dimension was popularized at the turn of the century by mathematician and science fiction writer C.H. Hinton in The Fourth Dimension (1904) and then dramatized author William Hope Hodgson in The House On The Borderland (1908) and The Ghost Pirates (1901). Just a few years after Stevens published The Heads Of Cerberus, H.G. Wells published his own parallel world novel, Men Like Gods (1923), and A. Merritt — who frequently acknowledged Stevens’ influence on his writing — published his own take on the theme in The Ships of Ishtar (1924).
But what I find most exciting is that Stevens distinguishes herself from all these other excellent authors by taking the idea of parallel worlds a step further and suggesting that such worlds might run at different speeds.
So, does that mean that Marvel Comics, DC Comics, and the producers of Star Trek all owe Francis a debt of gratitude?
Yes, I’d say that DC, Marvel, and Paramount owe Stevens and her peers a debt of gratitude — and in fact, they should count themselves lucky that Stevens, like many of her peers, saw her fiction as disposable writing and didn’t bother with copyright.
What was the reaction to The Heads Of Cerberus when it was originally serialized in the pulp magazine The Thrill Book?
We don’t know much about how readers reacted to the original publication of Stevens’ novel because the story ran in the last five issues of The Thrill Book, and that publication was one of the few pulps that did not feature a readers’ forum or letters to the editor page. We don’t even know how the editors introduced the first installment of Stevens’ serial because there are no known copies of that issue in existence anymore. This is one of the most challenging aspects of archival research on science fiction and fantasy: all those early pulp magazines were considered disposable entertainment and very few copies were preserved.
Having said that, we do know from the editorial introductions and reader responses to her other stories — including many of those featured in this volume — that Stevens was compared favorably to past and present masters of genre fiction, including Edgar Allen Poe and H.G. Wells. We also know that readers particularly appreciated both the “refreshing” originality of her fantasy imagery and the “exquisite” nature of her often slyly humorous approach to genre storytelling. So, my guess is that readers enjoyed The Heads Of Cerberus as much as any of Stevens’s other stories.
And are there modern or relatively modern science fiction authors who you think were influenced by The Heads Of Cerberus? Or maybe seem like they might have been? Because Everett F. Bleiler, who was also an editor as well as a scholar, said that the novel’s ending, “…is a fine anticipation of the world of Philip K. Dick.”
There are definite similarities between Stevens’s The Heads Of Cerberus and Philip K. Dick’s fiction: both authors like to leave readers uncertain about what transpired over the course of a story, especially in terms of what is real and what is not; we can see this particularly in Dick stories like Ubik and “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” [best known as the basis for the movie Total Recall].
Honestly, I think Stevens’ tendency to leave readers wondering “what world am I in?” anticipates a lot of midcentury science fiction and postmodern literature, including Jorge Luis Borges’s The Aleph And Other Stories, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying Of Lot 49 — especially when Pynchon’s heroine realizes at the end of the novel that she still doesn’t know what’s really going on and there are “four symmetrical” possibilities to explain her experience — just like in Stevens’ novel.
The question of “what world am I?” in are also at the center of more recent slipstream stories that blend science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction to get readers thinking differently about what counts as reality. As such, it’s a pretty short line from Stevens’ novel (and from “Unseen — Unfeared!,” which ends in a similarly indeterminate manner) to China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, Anna Kavan’s Ice, Gerald Vizenor’s “Custer On The Slipstream,” and the collected short stories in Kelly Link’s Magic For Beginners and Get In Trouble.
Francis Stevens
Now, along with the titular novel, The Heads Of Cerberus and Other Stories also, obviously, includes some of Stevens’ short stories. How did you decide which to include? Like, did you pick ones that were in the same vein as Cerberus, or were totally different to show a different side of her writing?
Francis Steven’s has long been called “the woman who invented dark fantasy,” and as both the Ulithia scenes from The Heads Of Cerberus and the entire short story “Unseen — Unfeared!” demonstrate, her ability to craft spooky interdimensional landscapes replete with repulsive insectoid aliens and ominous elder beings anticipated the kinds of cosmic horror imagery popularized just a short time later by H.P. Lovecraft.
But she is also so much more. Stevens had a very short career, publishing one early short story in 1904 and the rest of her fiction between 1917 and 1923, when she had to find a way to support her young family while working from home during the Spanish influenza epidemic. What I find most remarkable is that she never settled into a just one type of storytelling, but instead wrote one or two well-researched and well-crafted stories in a single subgenre before moving on to the next. I was surprised and delighted to discover her literary versatility and wanted to share that with readers.
You also wrote an introduction titled “The Mother Of Modern Genre Fiction.” Given that you’re the Regents’ Professor of Science Fiction Studies in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, does that mean your intro is scholarly?
I hope it’s scholarly, but in all the good ways.
I’m interested in science fiction as a window into literary and cultural history, I’m trained in archival research techniques, and I’ve been on a few SF award committees. But I’m also a lifelong science fiction fan myself, (my first memory is watching Star Trek reruns with my dad), and I still get unreasonably excited when a science fiction artist befriends me on social media.
So, I wanted to combine my scholarly expertise with my fannish passion and write an informed but lively and accessible essay that would get readers as excited about Stevens as I am.
In particular, I hope readers will come to appreciate how she extrapolated from the most exciting scientific and social developments of her day, including everything from Marie Curie’s Nobel-prize winning discovery of radium and polonium to the Egyptology craze to the Tammany Hall scandals to craft stories that thrilled contemporary audiences and gave future generations of science fiction fans some of our most cherished genre tropes, including the eccentric but likeable mad scientist, the sexy humanoid elf, and the lab grown superhero. In short, I find that most science fiction, fantasy, and horror enthusiasts are natural historians and theorists of genre fiction, so I wanted to write an introduction that honors that far-ranging intelligence.
Francis Stevens’ real name was Gertrude Barrows Bennett. Did she write as Francis because that can be a man’s name, and at the time she was writing — 1917 through 1923 — women were not accepted as writers of science fiction?
Bennett did not pick her penname, but she was not particularly averse to it either.
The opening decade of the 20th century were indeed a significant moment in the history of pulp magazines, as publishers shifted away from multigene publications like All-Story Weekly and Blue Book that were generally purchased by women for their families to specialist genre magazines aimed at niche audiences based on gender, race, age, class, and cultural interests — and at that time, science fiction was indeed marketed toward boys and young men. Editors had no problem with women writing science fiction, but they did generally assign such authors masculine or gender-neutral pennames on the assumption that young male readers wanted stories by young male authors (for what it’s worth, men who wrote in the feminine genres were assigned female pennames).
Indeed, Bennett even suggested her own gender-neutral pseudonym, “Jean Veil,” when she sent her short story “The Labyrinth” to All-Story. However, her editor ended up running that story under the name “Francis Stevens,” and she was perfectly willing to keep using it when that story was well received by readers. Given that her main ambition was to be an artist and, later, a journalist, probably didn’t mind publishing what many considered to be disposable fiction under a pseudonym.
So, what do you think Gertrude would think of there being a woman who’s the Regents’ Professor of Science Fiction Studies in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, and that she’d written an intro to this book?
I think she would see that as entirely appropriate and correct. Stevens lived and wrote through the peak of the suffrage movement, and she herself was very much the embodiment of early feminism’s educated, artistic, and adventurous “New Woman.”
Moreover, since Stevens specifically wrote fiction as a means of supporting herself, her daughter, and her mother, I like to think that she would appreciate another woman studying and teaching that fiction earning a living for her own family.
If anything, I think Stevens might be impatient that we’re still fighting for gender equity. After all, one of the short stories featured in this volume, “Friend Island,” extrapolates from the 1917 Supreme Court ruling that allowed women to enlist in the navy to imagine a matriarchal maritime near-future that evolves peacefully from our own present, as people of all sexes and genders recognize women’s natural superiority, both at sea and on the land. We’ve come a long way, but perhaps not quite that far yet.
Also, I have to ask, if Francis Stevens is the mother of modern genre fiction, who is the father?
I love this question.
First, let me say I think there are many parents of science fiction — shout out to Johannes Kepler and Margaret Cavendish in the 1600s and Voltaire and Mary Shelley in the late 1700s and early 1800s. But most of those earlier authors used science fiction to dramatize their more abstract scientific and philosophical arguments to their peers. By way of contrast, Stevens wrote science fiction to entertain a new class of young readers and to support her family. So, I see her specifically as a pioneer in commercial genre fiction as it came of age in turn of the century magazine culture.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t name other parents of modern genre fiction. Stevens’ editors often compared her to Edgar Allen Poe and H.G. Wells (usually to brag about how much better her stories were), while fans compared her favorably to Edgar Rice Burroughs and A. Merritt. So, I think those would be some good fathers we could point toward.
And of course, Stevens was not the only woman writing speculative fiction. The great American author and editors Pauline Hopkins and the great American feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman both wrote utopian science fiction for the magazines they edited, and by the end of the 1920s women including Pansy E. Black, Clare Winger Harris, and Leslie F. Stone were all publishing science fiction in the new specialist genre magazines under their own names or, in Black’s case, under decidedly feminine pseudonyms. They say it takes a village to raise a child, and I think it’s safe to say that it takes a whole passel of science fiction authors to create a genre.
So, is there anything else you think people should know about this new edition of The Heads Of Cerberus?
Yes, I want to thank the two Georgia Tech science fiction minors who assisted me with this project: Diya Patel and Max Mateers. They did a wonderful job researching race and gender relations in the cities where Stevens spent her writing career.
They also produced “Sisters Of The Radium Age,” a detailed timeline that situates Stevens’s fiction in relation to that produced by the many other women creating speculative art at this time. I hope readers will check it out at https://www.hilobrow.com/sisters/.
Finally, if someone enjoys The Heads Of Cerberus And Other Stories, which of the previous Radium Age books would you suggest they check out next?
Given the range of Steven’s genre writing, it’s hard to recommend just one book. But I’ll try to limit myself to one book per theme.
Readers who are fascinated by dystopias such as the one at the center of The Heads Of Cerberus might enjoy Rose McCauley’s What Not, which also imagines a near future authoritarian dystopia, although in this case organized around selective breeding rather than religion and interpersonal competition.
Those who enjoy Stevens’ strong female characters in Cerberus, “Friend Island,” and “The Elf Trap” will find much of interest in J.D. Beresford’s A World Of Women, which follows the adventures of a group of women who flee a post-apocalyptic London to start a communally run agrarian colony in the English countryside.
Finally, those who thrill to the cosmic horror of Cerebus Ulithia and the ghastly creatures of “Unseen — Unfeared!” will probably get a good shiver out of the bug-like monsters and interdimensional “watching things” of William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land.
