OVER THE WINTER OF 1902 TO 1903, The Colored American Magazine (which Pauline Hopkins edited) published chapters of a work that seemed to blend two popular late-Victorian literary forms: “society” novels of the doings of the upper classes, and lost world adventures such as H. Rider Haggard’s She. Though it really belongs to a third genre of “problem” books because of how it focuses on contemporary racial issues, Of One Blood begins in the style of the society novel/drawing room drama. A Boston medical student falls in love with the (white-appearing) soloist of a touring (“colored”) choir, proposes marriage, and is accepted—but the machinations of a rich rival drive him from his wife’s arms to take part in an Ethiopian archaeological expedition.

Here the lost world narrative takes over. Hopkins’s hero, Reuel Briggs, himself hiding his own African heritage, discovers a hidden kingdom of which he turns out to be the prodigal king. Unlike the imaginary countries of most of this genre’s exemplars, however, its inhabitants are Black. Not only Black, but proud of that Blackness.

Hopkins has an official of this proto-Wakanda lecture American-born Reuel that from Black civilization came “all the arts and cunning inventions that make your modern glory.” That’s heady thesis, especially for the time in which the book was published—less than forty years after the end of the U.S. Civil War. It’s still a marvelous assertion today, and offers her readers a thrill just as audacious, just as mentally invigorating, just as cosmologically expansive in its implications as ever.

Hopkins is in some ways the foremother of Octavia E. Butler, and Tananarive Due, and many of today’s leading science fiction, fantasy, and horror authors—primarily because she’s another African-descended woman using a popular genre to write speculatively about hard philosophical questions, surprising truths, and the wonders of the occult.

That word, “occult,” appears often throughout Of One Blood, and its synonym “hidden” is part of the book’s subtitle: The Hidden Self. While these days we tend to identify the term occult with nonscientific traditions, that’s all it means. Hidden. And while these days we tend to identify spiritualism, clairvoyance, and hypnotism—or “mesmerism,” as it was called then—with the nonscientific, they were thought quite scientific at the time of this novel’s publication. Like Mary Shelley creating Frankenstein nearly a century before Of One Blood’s publication, like Margaret Cavendish creating The Blazing World nearly a century-and-a-half before that, Hopkins drew on and hewed to the scientific teachings of her day. That makes what she wrote science fiction—convenient mysterious birthmarks, biblical quotations, clairvoyance, ghostly apparitions, and all.