Of One Blood by Pauline Hopkins

(The MIT Press, 2022)

Reviewed by Paul Graham Raven

In reviewing this addition to MIT Press’s boldly designed Radium Age Science Fiction imprint, which is dedicated to bringing back into print seminal works of proto-sf that were originally released in the first few decades of the C20th, I find myself doing something a bit unusual: I’m going to recommend that you read Of One Blood by Pauline Hopkins even though, as a novel, it is not very good.

I generally avoid definitive statements regarding quality, and part of me would like to do so here. I am not an aficionado of the period—Of One Blood was originally published in 1902—so I cannot assess it against some accepted standard of quality, even were we able to agree on the metrics for such a measurement. Nonetheless, I can say objectively that the prose veers between overwrought and hackneyed, the pacing is erratic, and the plotting largely obvious with flashes of where-the-hell-did-that-come-from. (Apparently the story was originally written for serial publication, which goes some way to explaining its rather lurching progress: even with a solid outline to go by, a tale told in episodes can come out lumpy, particularly if there are wordcount restraints.)

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Review from BSFA Review 20 - Download your copy here.