The Description of a New World Called The Blazing World and Other Writings

by Margaret Cavendish

"New Blazing World" (1666), is one of the earliest pieces of science fiction, telling the story of a voyage to a Utopian World. The Duchess of Newcastle (1623-73) was fascinated by contemporary science, and wove it into her writings. She was a colourful figure as well as a popular author.

Genres: Fantasy, Fiction

250 pages, Hardcover

Published June 24, 1992

About the author

Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was the youngest child of a wealthy Essex family. At the age of 20 she became Maid of Honour to Queen Henrietta Maria and traveled with her into Persian exile in 1644. There she married William Cavendish, Marquis (later Duke) of Newcastle.

Between 1653 and 1668 she published many books on a wide variety of subjects, including many stories that are now regarded as some of the earliest examples of science fiction.

Reviews

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

from Assaulted and Pursued Chastity

where after some days riding, [they] came out of the forest into great plains and champains, which were covered with a sea green and willow-coloured grass, and some meadows were covered with perfect shadows of all manner of sorts of greens. But as they drew nearer the city, there were great quarries of crystal, as we have of stone. But when they came up to the city, all about without the walls were orchards, and root-gardens, where there grew roots as sweet, as if they were preserved, and some all juicy; most of their fruits grew in shells like nuts, but most delicious to the taste; but their shells were like a net or caul, that all the fruit was seen through, and some kinds of fruits as big as one's head, but some were no bigger than ours, others very small; there never fell rain, but dews to refresh them, which dews fell upon the earth, every night they fell like flakes of snow; and when they were upon the earth, they melted; and those flakes to the taste were like double-refined sugar.

trees, the barks thereof shadowed with hair colour, and as smooth as glass, the leaves of a perfect grass-green, for that is very rare to have in that country, Nature hath there so intermixed several colours made by light on several grounds or bodies of things; and on those trees birds do so delight therein, that they are always full of birds, every tree having a several choir by itself, which birds do sing such perfect notes, and keep so just a time, that they do make a most ravishing melody, besides, the variety of their tunes are such, that one would think Nature did set them new every day.

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[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Both as a woman active in a wide variety of spheres of life in seventeenth-century England, and as a pioneering writer in an equally wide range of genres and forms, Margaret Cavendish's significance is unquestionable. The Blazing World, the best-known of Cavendish's three works here, is sometimes described as an early science-fiction novel, but the editor of this collection is more cautious and, I think, more accurate: it is "a text which ... combines elements of romance and utopia, and has sometimes been described as science fiction". As if Cavendish took up her pen and just wrote out everything that was in her head (a lot), no filter: it's innovative and discursive, often repetitive, sometimes spectacular, occasionally a bit dull. The other two works of fiction here ("The Contract" and "Assaulted and Pursued Chastity") have more of the last of these qualities than the penultimate one: more for specialists than for general readers. The Blazing World is worth reading for itself, and as particularly as an embodiment of Cavendish herself, but I think it shows English prose fiction taking a turn down a side-alley towards the end of a journey from romance, rather than a significant step on the road to the novel.

[Zan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This probably should've been a book I just dropped - don't let my inability to enjoy this take away from Cavendish's pretty incredible achievements, these are wildly imaginative proto-pulp-fiction tales with some kinda awesome feminist twists... but actually reading them is pretty painful. It's like one infinitely long run on sentence with adhd, changing its subject at any whim, refusing to use proper nouns, etc. Your eyes just slide off any meaning. What's there is delightfully strange, but it's not worth the struggle really. Leave it for academic curiosity.

[Nardia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Only read "Assaulted and Pursued Chastity" p. 45-118