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.