The Heads of Cerberus

The Heads of Cerberus, serialised in 1919, is one of the earliest parallel-world novels in English. When three Philadelphians inhale a strange grey dust found in an ancient vial, they are transported to an alternate 2118 where their city has become a walled totalitarian state ruled by aristocratic families through gladiatorial combat. Francis Stevens — the pen name of Gertrude Barrows Bennett — anticipated the dystopian fiction of Huxley and Orwell by more than a decade, and the parallel-universe concept that would become a staple of science fiction. A pioneering work by a writer who deserves far wider recognition.