This week's host is Ben Blattberg, a freelance writer currently living in Texas. You can find him blogging about movies and story structure and making jokes on Twitter at @inCatastrophe.

American speculative fiction has always had a diversity problem, but it has never been a whites-only genre. Long before Samuel R. Delany, N. K. Jemisin, or Janelle Monae, African Americans have been using speculative tropes to examine our world and imagine another.

So here, for your reading pleasure, are five works of pre-1940 speculative fiction by African Americans, ranging from eerie regionalist tales; to hidden empire polemics; to technocratic pulp adventures.

To be clear, this list of five (well, six) is neither exhaustive nor all that representative, but rather idiosyncratic - these are five examples that I’ve read. So I’ve left off Martin Delany’s Blake; or the Huts of America (1859/1861-2) –with its speculation about a mass slave rebellion in Cuba – for the simple fact that I’ve never read it.

In short: you should only use these five as a jumping off point - and there are even more to find.

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) - The Conjure Woman

With his 1887 story “The Goophered Grapevine,” Charles Chesnutt became the first African-American author published in the Atlantic Monthly. Which basically marked him “approved for white consumption” for the next few years.*

And at first glance, “Goophered Grapevine” and the other stories in The Conjure Woman (1899) look safe for white people: after the Civil War, elderly Uncle Julius tells the new (educated, white) Northern plantation owners eerie, folksy tales from before the war.

There’s the eerie tale of the a slave whose life gets tied - Fisher King-style - to a cursed grapevine; and the story of the slave turned into a tree to escape - except the tree gets sawed up for lumber; and, as if presented by Rod Serling for our approval, there’s the story of a cruel white master turned into a black slave; etc.

Notice that Chesnutt is clear about slavery being bad, but never hints at current racial issues. Even the form would be comfortable for the Atlantic, since these stories fit in with the 1880s-90s boom in regionalist literature (give it up for Sarah Orne Jewett!), complete with “authentic” native dialect.

But read a few of these stories, and you’ll notice that Uncle Julius always profits from telling these tales to the white people. It’s almost as if he understands that performing a certain type of “blackness” would get him approval.

* Chesnutt lost this status when he wrote The Marrow of Tradition (1901), a novel about the 1898 Wilmington race riot. Seriously: literary taste-maker and erstwhile Chesnutt-champion, William Dean Howells complained that Marrow was “bitter, bitter.” Which is kind of like saying, “Why does your book about lynching have to be such a bummer?”