Best 1919 Adventures (10)
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January 13, 2019
One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 1919 adventure novels. Happy 100th anniversary!
Francis Stevens’s Radium Age sci-fi adventure The Heads of Cerberus (serialized 1919; as a book, 1952).
When three Philadelphians — Bob Drayton, a lawyer who’s fallen on hard times; his old friend Terry Trenmore, a brawny Irish adventurer; and Viola, Terry’s beautiful young sister — accidentally inhale dust from an ancient vial, they are transported to Ulithia, a fantastical almost-Earth realm. There, they encounter living suits of armor, faceless dancers, a ghostly White Weaver, and a castle whose crumbled walls repair themselves by night. The vial (whose cap is shaped like the mythological Cerberus, hence the story’s title) supposedly contains dust from the gates of Purgatory that had been collected by Dante; however, we eventually discover that the dust was invented by a scientist who has discovered the secret of parallel universes. Our protagonists are next transported to Philadelphia, in the year 2118: the city has become a dystopian state, a sham meritocracy ruled by those who triumph at unfairly rigged games; everyone else is a Number, i.e., a nameless prole. William Penn is worshipped as an angry god, and the Liberty Bell has become a deadly object of veneration. Is this future Philadelphia real, or are our protagonists somehow creating it? What is reality? The Heads of Cerberus has been described as one of the first alternative worlds stories, or “perhaps the first work of fantasy to envisage the parallel-time-track concept.” For sure, it’s a fun epistemological thriller.
Fun fact: Gertrude Barrows Bennett (1883–1948), who published under the pseudonym Francis Stevens, has been described as “the woman who invented dark fantasy.” The Heads of Cerberus, which was serialized in the pulp magazine Thrill Book, displays a solid understanding of Einstein’s theory of relativity; and Bennett’s concept of parallel universes is not too dissimilar from late 20th-century theories.
JOSH GLENN’S *BEST ADVENTURES* LISTS: BEST 250 ADVENTURES OF THE 20TH CENTURY | 100 BEST OUGHTS ADVENTURES | 100 BEST RADIUM AGE (PROTO-)SCI-FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST TEENS ADVENTURES | 100 BEST TWENTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST THIRTIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST GOLDEN AGE SCI-FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST FORTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST FIFTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST SIXTIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST NEW WAVE SCI FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST SEVENTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST EIGHTIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST DIAMOND AGE SCI-FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST NINETIES ADVENTURES (in progress) | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | NOTES ON 21st-CENTURY ADVENTURES.