The Heads of Cerberus

February 18, 2019
This rediscovered 1919 classic by Stevens (the pseudonym of Gertrude Barrows Bennett, 1884–1948, who arguably invented dark fantasy) is an intriguing and political time-travel adventure. Clever teen Viola Trenmore is hanging out in 1918 Philadelphia in the company of her brother, Terence Trenmore, a wealthy, burly Irishman; his friend Robert Drayton, a lawyer; and Arnold Bertram, a hapless burglar. After Drayton breaks open a crystal vial, the dust inside it propels the foursome to a strange limbo called Ulithia, where they meet dancing shadow people. Then they’re sent 200 years into the future. The capricious regime of 2118 uses murderous public competitions to keep the population subjugated, and the oppressed are forced to wear large yellow buttons; though the text predates Nazi Germany by decades, modern readers will find those connotations inescapable. Viola is as logical as she is petite, and easily holds her own alongside the men as they explore weird Ulithia and interact with corrupt government officials. This work, set in the birthplace of America, proclaims that democracy is tenuous, and its themes will be deeply resonant for those concerned by present-day politics. Agent: Jennifer Carlson, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner.

March 15, 2019
An early-20th-century time-travel dystopia whose vision of 2118 resonates eerily with our own century.In the first decades of the 20th century, Gertrude Barrows Bennett wrote pulp genre fiction under the pseudonym Francis Stevens. This novel, first published in serial form in 1919, has been reprinted from time to time as readers and scholars revisit past visions of the future, fantasy and science fiction by women, and forgotten influences on more famous genre writers. In 1918, a lawyer down on his luck, his wealthy and burly Irish buddy, and the buddy's fetching younger sister spill a vial of strange gray dust that catapults them forward through time, first to a mystic realm between worlds and then through a moonlike door into a possible future. In Stevens' 2118, isolationism has been taken to a totalitarian extreme. The city-state of Philadelphia no longer has any communication with the rest of the world, and its citizens have numbers instead of names, all except for the Servants of Penn (government officials) and the Superlatives (rulers), who go by their titles--things like Virtue, Mercy, Strongest, and Loveliest. These officials attain their positions through nepotism and graft, and their characters are generally the exact opposite of their titles: Pity is pitiless, Virtue is corrupt, and so forth. That part will feel familiar to readers from the strange, alternate-reality version of 2019 that we appear to be inhabiting--although, as with most visions of the future, the story probably says more about the moment when it was written than the period in which it's set. The novel has the workmanlike prose, forward-sweeping plot, and stereotyped characters of well-crafted popular fiction of the period.As dated as it is prescient, this novel will appeal both to historians and to readers who enjoy a fast-paced, imaginative yarn.

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