# The Heads of Cerberus *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 01 Jun 1998* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### adam louis stephanides *01 Jun 1998, 16:02* I've also been reading a book entitled _The Heads of Cerberus_, by "Francis Stevens" (a pseudonym for Gertrude Bennett). It was originally published in 1919, I would guess in magazine form, but the copy I read is a small-press reprint from 1952. It's about three people from the present who are transported by some strange dust into 22nd-century Philadelphia. It's very much the sort of pulp Wolfe parodied in "The Last Thrilling Wonder Story," and it's pretty bad, so much so that after I got halfway through I just skimmed the rest. But, though there are no thematic or structural similarities I can detect between _Heads_ and FHC, there are a few odd points of similarity which make it possible that Wolfe read _Heads_ and incorporated some allusions to it. These are: 1) A society frozen in stasis and ruled by a tyrannical government 2) People designated only by numbers (in _Heads_, everybody but the elite in future Philadelphia 3) A library which the protagonist(s) are forbidden to enter. I can post or email a description of the book if anyone's interested. --Adam ---