Skip to main content

The Heads of Cerberus (SF) - Francis Stevens ****

This book in the MIT Press 'Radium Age' series somewhat stretches the 'and other stories' label as the title work is a complete novel, followed by a number of stories from Francis Stevens, real name Gertrude Barrows Bennett, written in the first 20 years of the twentieth century. Stevens' writing style is very much of the period at the popular end of the market - think Conan Doyle, for example.

This is a bit of a wolf in sheep's clothing for the series, which is supposed to explore proto-science fiction from the period before the pulp SF magazines, but after pioneers such as Wells and Verne. Although Stevens uses some of the props of science, most of the content would be more accurately described as fantasy (but I'm allowing it to slip in here).

The title novel propels three main characters (two male, one female) into a strange world that acts as a gateway to an alternate future version of Pennsylvania. It's entertainingly done, doubtless with some inspiration from The Time Machine in the socially divided society the travellers experience. However, the mechanism of travel is pure fantasy - no more scientific than the hit on the head used to travel into the past in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. There might be a brief mention of atoms and frequencies - but used in a meaningless fashion that can't in any way be connected to the magic dust that facilitates their journey. For its age, though, it's very readable still.

Similarly, the first of the short stories, The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar, written when Bennett was 17, is an early version of a superhero story - but just as is the case with the comic book superheroes that would follow, a brief mention of a scientific concept is not enough to give any science fiction basis for superpowers. The source of the power here is a new and unknown element that apparently was somehow discovered but can't be again, introduced to the main character in a laboratory accident. But this is no more science than a magical spider bite or the power-giving influence of a yellow sun. This one has less punch than the novel - it doesn't really go anywhere with the super strength, as well as suffering from a touch of period xenophobia.

The rest of the stories are either fantasy or horror, sometimes with a touch of scientific dressing, but based on magic and definitely not SF, even though one has an impressively forward-looking setting of a world where women are in charge. In the end, this arguably isn't too much of a problem given these are still interesting bits of writing of the period from a pioneering female author. But whether the content is a good fit to the series is debatable.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms.  On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines  when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...
Post a Comment
Read more