April 2022 BotM - "The Heads of Cerberus" by Francis Stevens

[Jim]

The Heads of Cerberus by Francis Stevens won the poll for the Pre 1920 or Proto SF era book of the month this time.

The book blurb reads:

Philadelphia, 1918: Three friends--brave, confident Viola Trenmore, clever but shy Robert Drayton, and Viola's strong and hot-tempered brother, Terry--discover a mysterious powder that transports them two hundred years into the future. The Philadelphia of 2118 is no longer a bustling metropolis but instead a completely isolated city recovering from an unknown disaster. Citizens are issued identification tags instead of having names, and society is split between a wealthy, powerful minority and a downtrodden lower class. The position of supreme authority is held by a woman, and once a year she oversees competitions to the death to determine who rules alongside her. When Viola, Terry, and Robert are forced to take part in these strange and deadly games, it will take their combined wits for them to escape this strange world and return home.

Equal parts adventure and dystopia, The Heads of Cerberus is an unjustly forgotten work of early science fiction written by a trailblazing master of the genre.

[Ed]

I already owned a copy, so I started reading today. I'm already 1/3 or more done.

I like the way it is written. The writing feels a bit like a hard-boiled crime story. I find myself reading it in a mid-Atlantic accent.

After a few down-to-earth chapters, comes a chapter which feels more like "weird fiction" or fantasy, then finally we get to the Sci-Fi part.

It had me running for my dictionary on words like these: sassenach, misdoubt, ....

[Chad]

I’ve downloaded this to my kindle and should be able to start it today after I shovel some coffee into my face.

[Jim]

I read this book last August. I was born in 1947 and grew up reading some of the earlier SF writers like H. G. Wells when I was a teenager and still enjoy reading a novel from that time period that I hadn't read before. While the novel is dated I didn’t mind because I expected it to be based on when it was written but I enjoyed the way it used the tropes of alternate worlds and a future dystopia. I liked how the trio of protagonists exhibited mostly good character traits but were rounded out with some weaknesses. I think that Stevens has written a great female character who is smart and capable and only 17 if I remember correctly. But I wasn't sure what the intent of the last couple of chapters. It seemed to be analyzing their behavior and learning about their own characters but it didn't seem to be very clear what the conclusions were.

[Chad]

So far so good. I’ve been reading up on the author and it seems that she had a very interesting life. The photo that Goodreads provides gives me a Lizzie Borden feel. Interesting.

[Ed]

I don't mind the pulpiness. It is pure fun. But "the Pit" is going a bit too far. It doesn't sound realistic.

More vocabulary: quondam, shindy, comether ...

[Leo]

I agree, it's simple fun. Author is more interesting than the book maybe.

[Ed]

It occurs to me that this is the third book we've read recently where the characters have numbers for names.

The others were We and A Memory Called Empire.

[Ed]

Finished a few days ago. I enjoyed it and might like to read one of her other books.

This reminded me a bit of a Dr. Who episode. (Not any specific episode.) A main guy and his two companions arrive in a strange dystopian society, get themselves in trouble, then find a quick fix that fixes the society and gets them safely away again.

Ok. They didn't exactly fix this society, but they put an end to the authoritarian government.

The way they traveled felt like fantasy. But in the end they give a semi-scientific explanation involving that fancy new science idea: electrons!

[Leo]

I became less interested reading the second half, skimmed some parts, but maybe therefore missed some information. Did they just end up in the future, or were there more things that were different? I remember somthing with the sun and the moon but fail to remember what exactly it was.

[Ed]

Leo wrote: "... Did they just end up in the future, or were there more things that were different? ..."

They traveled to a future, not necessarily the only possible future, via (view spoiler)[a land called Ulithia, which might be an afterlife or something like that. (hide spoiler)]

[Leo]

Ah, thanks. That was what I did not get, how Ulitha was related to Philadelphia.

[Natalie]

This book started out fast paced and I had hopes for an exciting read. However, after they travel by magic dust to 2118, the pace slows and the storyline occasionally gets confusing (and dry) as the characters explore a dystopian world. I felt the author had opportunity to really build the world she touches on but instead she focused on the political aspects of "Penn," only touching on landmarks of the city. Trenmore turns out to be a heroic character but Viola seems weak and the other characters angry or limited. While the premise is interesting, the book is only mildly so.

[Rosemarie]

I've just finished this and found it an okay read but it lacked depth and character development. But it did have lots of action towards the end.

[Natalie]

Rosemarie wrote: "I've just finished this and found it an okay read but it lacked depth and character development. But it did have lots of action towards the end."
I do wish there had been more character development!

[Oleksandr]

I've started the book yesterday and am already 1/3 done. First impressions:
1. I expected it to be more SF from the description
2. unusual use of words, like using ejaculating instead of shouting
3. if the heroes are in the future (they are just being arrested for lacking buttons) then the author missed the tech progress of her time to extrapolate it

[Ed]

1. I was also surprised by the "fantasy" section. Though in the end it is given a sort-of SF explanation.
2. Yes!
3. Yeah, there is basically no new technology or science. Just a new political system.

[Oleksandr]

Ed wrote: "1. I was also surprised by the "fantasy" section. Though in the end it is given a sort-of SF explanation.."

Yes, both #1 and #3 are addressed closer to the end. And I agree, it is sort-of scientific. after all even SF writers working decades later thought that the paranormal can be explained, and not only of Campbell's stable (whose conversion to dianetics affected SF)

[Oleksandr]

My review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Ed]

Because this was published right after the 1917 Russian revolution, I wonder whether the author was thinking about that when creating her future society.

Probably not, but I wonder about it.

[Oleksandr]

Ed wrote: "Because this was published right after the 1917 Russian revolution, I wonder whether the author was thinking about that when creating her future society."

With labor hours as a unit of account, I also guessed at least socialistic tendencies. Moreover, the servants of people turned out true parasites

[Natalie]

Interesting that she might have been influenced by the revolution. It does say in her bio that she started writing after WW1 so world events may have been on her mind. I thought it had similarities to 1984 but that was first published in 1949.

[Ed]

...the servants of people turned out true parasites

I'm not sure that Americans were expecting that to happen back in 1919, which is why I don't really think she was referencing communism. We would now think communism would lead to repression of the common man, but that isn't what most people were thinking in 1919.

[Oleksandr]

Ed wrote: "I'm not sure that Americans were expecting that to happen back in 1919, which is why I don't really think she was referencing communism."

I guess it depended on what kind of news she read - around this time there was a small scandal (in British press) that what Bolsheviks got from imports were a score of Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost for all highest-ranking party leaders (ok, it was possibly a bit later, as I started digging deeper in this theme, here is an interesting investigation https://www.svvs.org/LeninRolls.shtml )

[Ed]

There is a new edition of this book, with added stories: The Heads of Cerberus and Other Stories.

An interesting article about it describes the author as "The Woman Who Invented “Dark Fantasy.” "

https://lithub.com/the-woman-who-inve...