This peculiar story was written in the mid-seventeenth century by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. It features an unnamed female protagonist who is abducted and then escapes and is transported from her own "Philosophical World" to the "Blazing World" of the title, where she is hospitably received and becomes Empress.

The Blazing World is populated something like the planet Mongo, with bear-men, fox-men, fish-men, bird-men, spider-men, lice-men, and others besides. The Empress consults all of these according to their specialties, regarding natural history, physics, logic, and other "philosophical" topics, and this section of the book gets rather slow--especially with the small type of the Dover Thrift Edition I read. One highlight of this section, on the other hand, is Cavendish's detailed set of character identifications for Ben Jonson's The Alchemist as a drame à clef regarding John Dee and Edward Kelly (35). This passage is connected with the Empress' further ambition "to make a Cabbala" (46).

Turning from her various animal-men subjects to the world of incorporeal spirits, the Empress is next introduced to ... the Duchess of Newcastle--that is, her author, with whom she develops a "platonic love." The Duchess pleads for intervention with Fortune on behalf of her maligned husband the Duke, and this motive accounts for much of the remainder of the first and longer of the story's two parts.

The second part is livelier on the whole, and involves the Empress receiving news that her home country in the Philosophical World is under threat. So she confers with the Duchess, and they develop and execute an operation by which they effect the military and political supremacy of the "King of EFSI," the Empress' former sovereign.

An epilogue in Cavendish's own voice touts her accomplishment in world-creation, and boasts herself superior in that respect to the mere conquerors of great empires such as Alexander and Caesar. She also sets herself above Homer, in giving her characters grounds to resolve their conflicts without fatal violence. She generously extends to her readers the option of becoming her subjects in the Philosophical World, but allows that if they prefer to create their own worlds, they can and should do so.

While the style of The Blazing World is dated, its freedom from later literary conventions often lends it a great deal of charm. Persevering through some of the denser bits is genuinely worthwhile, as the whole text is not that long. It was originally published as a "work of fancy" bound together with her "serious" Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (ix). Her philosophical biases are decidedly modern, and while The Blazing World has been instanced as a forerunner of science fiction, it does hold up as an unusual source of instruction in the magick of cosmopoeia.

This story, whose full title is “The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World”, is a curiosity. It was published in 1666 and written by the Duchess of Newcastle and can be considered a forerunner of science fiction because it’s set on a strange new world. However, this is a tough slog. The story is told in seemingly never-ending sentences and has consisted entirely of a woman who somehow escapes our world to land on a new one populated by all sorts of strange creatures, and they bandy about the latest scientific ideas. I’m dropping this unfinished because there isn’t much narrative drive to the story. ( )

A weird bit of philosophy and proto-sci-fi. Ignores the rules of any conventional story, features parallel worlds, astral-projection, submarines made of gold and many sorts of animal men including Lice-men. Best approached as a piece of philosophy rather than sci-fi but quite interesting. ( )

The rating here is a very conflicted four, because this is a very well written book of-its-time, but it has not aged well. In particular the ‘different races do different things well’ is heavy handed, and the section on ‘Jewish Cabbala’ was just, urgh.

This is utopian fiction, but rather than being about a utopia for all, it seems to be about utopia for one. By which the person gets abducted, and then becomes the uncontested leader of a new world. Where there are jewels beyond compare, and people to do their bidding.

Overall, fascinating in a ‘reading historical texts’ way, but I don’t recommend it as pleasure reading. ( )

I was very surprised to learn that many people believe Cavendish's work can be summarized, and that you don't need to read it, because the ideas are all that matters. The ideas aren't all that interesting, despite various editors and commentators' attempts to make her a feminist icon or whatever (n.b.: if you're really into the history of philosophy and science in the 17th century, you might well find it interesting to work out where Cavendish sits in the various debates of the period; suffice to say, the ideas she has are not all that often very good).

What is interesting is her style: it's a bit like reading Gulliver-era Swift. Everything is perfectly clear, without being monotonous or boring; Cavendish was, I would say, a great anti-Ciceronian. 21st century readers will find her far, far more readable than most prose writers of her era (compare Milton and Cavendish, for instance). Perhaps people have mentioned this before; I'm at the start of my reading/reading about Cavendish, and all I have to go on so far is the introduction to the Penguin edition, which is full of 'information' about how the author delighted in "the subversive potential of generic and intellectual hybridization," and uses the phrase "hermaphrodites of nature" as if it were an example of this... when, in the text, it's used as a criticism of dualism. God the early 90s were bad for literary criticism. ( )