The Blazing World

The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World, otherwise known as The Blazing World is a 1666 work of prose fiction written by Margaret Cavendash, Duchess of Newcastle. Its considered a proto-science fiction novel, with utopian themes and political ideas that resonant with Thomas Hobbes, whom Cavendash would have read, and for the most part agrees with. This is the only utopian fiction novel written by a woman from the 17th century, making it a rare event and a feminist work, she's one of the first feminist writers in a sense. The book was published as a companion piece to her scientific work, Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, which I ordered a while back from the library.
 
The Blazing World is a fanciful, romantical, satirical, utopian vision where a young woman enters another world via the North Pole, where she becomes an Empress of a world with talking creatures, complete with fish-men, bear-men, mer-men, and the like. She even converses with spirits, and the real life Duchess herself, that is, the author becomes a character in the story itself.

What really got me into this novel, reading it for hours every day other than the fact that its considered ancient science fiction, was the fact that the writing is different, it has a voice. Cavendash creates a poetic space with her imaginative creative style. Its one of the first ever feminist takes on utopian fiction. Its feminist in the sense that its about a woman who takes over control of a whole world in a utopian society, a kind of feminist ideological. But it doesn't end there. This is a work of many genres, be them poetry, utopia, proto-science fiction, romance, epic, morality, kabbala, philosophy, its a hybridization, which makes it even more highly unusual.
 
In the book, the Empress creates a monarchy government. Cavendash argues that monarchy is the best form of government because it eliminates separations of powers. She writes, "it was natural for one body to have one head, so it was also natural for a politic body to have but one governor … besides, said they, a monarchy is a divine form of government, and agrees most with our religion.
 
Cavendash gets her philosophy from Thomas Hobbes, who says in his work Leviathan (which I'm almost done reading) that monarchy is the best form of rule, and without it men would be at each others throats by the sword, and lastly, that life is nasty, brutish, and short. We see Hobbes echoed through The Blazing World, and its not surprisingly to me given that they're both from civil war era England and Cavendash was even familiar with the smartest men of the day. She even dined with Descartes.

But how does the book read, and is it good? The book reads kind of slow. It was some three-hundred pages but sometimes a whole day of reading (which is only like three hours for me) felt like it didn't get me very far. Its so overly detailed and all over the place that sometimes its hard to keep track of whats going on. Arguably you could say that Cavendash's refusal to write in a simplistic 'feminine' way is her being a rebel, a true feminist doing whatever she wants, saying whatever she wants, and writing whatever she wants in her own self-published books, just because she can.
 
I also think the writing is very good. The book lives up or down depending on your outlook, although it doesn't exactly keep you on the edge of your seat. I have the advantage of reading this book four-hundred years later and not only enjoying it, but interpreting it in my own way. The book gets tedious, it meanders through many, many pages, and it seemingly becomes more and more fantastical and philosophical, its exciting through and through and I would probably read it again given some time. The story is a little bonkers but if you keep going with it you can find its riches.
 
Read this if you're into creative writing, feminist writing, or archaic science fiction of the utopian variety. Also recommended: Sir Tomas More Utopia and Francis Bacon New Atlantis.