Imagine it. A dystopian government maintains power over the downtrodden population of a post-apocalyptic United States through a system of deadly games. Exposure to a strange new element gives an average young man superstrength.
Invisible predators from an alternate dimension feed on human evil. A hardy young adventurer forges telepathic connections with a living world to oppose the forces that would brutally exploit them both. And then there are realities that turn out to be nothing more than mere illusions, the projections of angry and excited minds—or , a nagging voice inside us insists, .
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These are the dreams that contemporary culture is made of, fueling everything from Hollywood blockbusters to groundbreaking video games and prize-winning literary experiments. And, incredibly, they are all story forms popularized by pioneering genre author Gertrude Mabel Barrows Bennett, who wrote (primarily under the pen name Francis Stevens) in the first decades of the twentieth century. Although she is often celebrated as “the woman who invented dark fantasy,” the range of Bennett’s groundbreaking stories—produced largely in a six-year period—suggests that she is better understood as the mother of modern genre fiction writ large.
Using tales about the clash of alternate worlds and values to reassess scientific ideas and social relations emerging at the turn of the twentieth century (many of which are still very relevant), she innovated in speculative subgenres including.