Margaret Cavendish’s ‘The Blazing World’ pioneered speculative fiction 400 years ago

The Blazing World is a testament to how far the written novel has travelled in the past 400 years. A literary time capsule, it holds within it the origins of a genre we now call speculative fiction.

Written by Margaret Cavendish, a wealthy iconoclast who advocated for women’s educational opportunities, and published in 1666, The Blazing World is a strange work. Testament to this, its full title is The Description Of A New World Called The Blazing-World, written by The Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princess the Duchess of Newcastle.

The novel follows the journey of a woman who lives by the sea and is abducted by a travelling merchant from a strange land. His boat swiftly heads to the Arctic, where it threads between the ice and all the men on board freeze to death.

The North Pole of Earth is connected to the Pole of The Blazing World. Here, the hapless lady crosses into an alternate landscape where she is rescued by gentle bear-like creatures. These creatures deliver her as a gift to their emperor, who believes her a goddess (perhaps because she manages to learn their language so quickly) and marries her.

From here, the empress swiftly rises to a position of power. She travels through the land, interrogating representatives...

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