THE HEADS OF CERBERUS

Name: THE HEADS OF CERBERUS
Author: Francis Stevens
ISBN: 978-1-984854-20-9

by Francis Stevens ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 21, 2019

As dated as it is prescient, this novel will appeal both to historians and to readers who enjoy a fast-paced, imaginative...

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An early-20th-century time-travel dystopia whose vision of 2118 resonates eerily with our own century.

In the first decades of the 20th century, Gertrude Barrows Bennett wrote pulp genre fiction under the pseudonym Francis Stevens. This novel, first published in serial form in 1919, has been reprinted from time to time as readers and scholars revisit past visions of the future, fantasy and science fiction by women, and forgotten influences on more famous genre writers. In 1918, a lawyer down on his luck, his wealthy and burly Irish buddy, and the buddy’s fetching younger sister spill a vial of strange gray dust that catapults them forward through time, first to a mystic realm between worlds and then through a moonlike door into a possible future. In Stevens’ 2118, isolationism has been taken to a totalitarian extreme. The city-state of Philadelphia no longer has any communication with the rest of the world, and its citizens have numbers instead of names, all except for the Servants of Penn (government officials) and the Superlatives (rulers), who go by their titles—things like Virtue, Mercy, Strongest, and Loveliest. These officials attain their positions through nepotism and graft, and their characters are generally the exact opposite of their titles: Pity is pitiless, Virtue is corrupt, and so forth. That part will feel familiar to readers from the strange, alternate-reality version of 2019 that we appear to be inhabiting—although, as with most visions of the future, the story probably says more about the moment when it was written than the period in which it’s set. The novel has the workmanlike prose, forward-sweeping plot, and stereotyped characters of well-crafted popular fiction of the period.

As dated as it is prescient, this novel will appeal both to historians and to readers who enjoy a fast-paced, imaginative yarn.

Pub Date: May 21, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-984854-20-9

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Modern Library

Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

Categories:

DYSTOPIAN FICTION | SCIENCE FICTION | TIME TRAVEL

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MORNING STAR

From the Red Rising Trilogy series , Vol. 3

by Pierce Brown ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 9, 2016

An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.

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Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.

This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”

An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.

Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015

Categories:

SCIENCE FICTION | DYSTOPIAN FICTION

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IRON GOLD
by Pierce Brown

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GOLDEN SON
by Pierce Brown

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RED RISING
by Pierce Brown

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GOLDEN SON

From the Red Rising Trilogy series , Vol. 2

by Pierce Brown ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 6, 2015

Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...

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Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.

The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.

Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.