Francis Stevens (real name Gertrude Barrows Bennett) published her first story in 1904. She was just 17 years old. Like the teenage Mary Shelley and Frankenstein before her, she changed how speculative fiction would be written afterwards, but for some reason Stevens is not a household name. Hopefully, that is about to change.
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.
“The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar” (1904) was published just five years after Marie Curie discovered radium, an otherworldly, glowing substance. It was just two years after the Wright Brothers managed powered flight and Marconi sent the first radio transmission across the Atlantic. Scientific advancement was not only taking wild leaps — it was in the direction of the unseen and untethered.
In the short story, narrated by Dunbar in the first person, he awakes in an unfamiliar room with unfamiliar people. Dunbar can tell has been injured, though he seems to be healing fairly quickly. When he moves about to explore his surroundings, he finds himself in some kind of factory or industrial facility (suitably steampunk). When a worker is trapped above a vat of something horrible, Dunbar leaps to the rescue with a superhuman strength he didn’t have before the mysterious accident. The story presages both aspects alien abduction accounts to come and the superhero origin story.
“Friend Island” was published at the close of World War I and the height of a deadly influenza epidemic. The first-person narrator is a shipwreck castaway who manages to find the shores of a mild island. It abounds with fruit and fresh water, and she finds herself content to await rescue. But once a bit of loneliness sets in, the weather grows dreary and threatening. And something else like unease begins to set in. “Friend Island” uses “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as its inspiration and brings it into a proto-futuristic world.
It was upon the waterfront that I first met her, in one of the shabby little tea shops frequented by able sailoresses of the poorer type. The uptown, glittering resorts of the Lady Aviators’ Union were not for such as she.
Stern of feature, bronzed by wind and sun, her age could only be guessed, but I surmised at once that in her I beheld a survivor of the age of turbines and oil engines — a true sea-woman of that elder time when woman’s superiority to man had not been so long recognized. When, to emphasize their victory, women in all ranks were sterner than today’s need demands. …
‘When I was a lass,’ quoth the sea-woman, after a time, ‘there was none of this high-flying, gilt-edged, leather-stocking luxury about the sea. We sailed by the power of our oil and gasoline. If they failed us, like as not ’twas’ the rubber ring and the rolling wave for ours.’ ~Pg. 277-8
“Behind the Curtain”, also published in 1918, is a direct descendant of a Poe story — a mysterious sarcophagus, a dead wife, an empty house, and a trusting friend. Stevens even invokes a different tone, a different cadence for this story as if it really were written 80 years earlier.
“Unseen–Unfeared” is a modern magician’s tale that blurs the line between sorcery and science. After all, to many the Radium Age was just that. “The Elf-Trap” imagines what happens when a noted natural scientist is lured into a fairy world. Written in 1919, it is no doubt influenced by the trouble of the Cottingley Fairies and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Those are the short stories included in the book, but the title The Heads of Cerberus is the main novel. A group of three friends finds a small antiquity — a jar with three dog heads — and they touch the grey dust within. They are at once transported to another realm and attempt to find their way back home. Through a portal, they recognize their Philadelphia home but it is only minutes before they are arrested for not wearing their ‘numbers’ badge. They quickly realize this is a parallel future Philadelphia.
From 1919, the novel extrapolates the consequences of the Bolshevik Revolution with striking accuracy. The travellers find themselves in a Soviet-like state where no one (except the very special people at the top) are allowed to be individual, where dissenters are punished or killed, and where libraries and information are forbidden. They have to manipulate their way to freedom in a world where the rules are arbitrary and unknown. The adventure is entertaining, but some of the encounters begin to feel repetitive. Stevens’ short form stories are much more affecting and show the sheer range of her abilities as a writer.
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.
My thanks to David at MIT Press for the review copy.
Publisher: The MIT Press (September 17, 2024)
Language: English
Paperback: 400 pages
ISBN-10: 0262549069