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 of all the various “peoples” who rule over their domains. These human-animal chimera include bear-men, worm-men, fish-men, geese-men, ape-men and lice-men.

The empress is the antithesis of a picaresque hero. Rather, she is an entitled figure with a thirst for new knowledge, unreflective about adopting an imperialistic leadership role in countries where she has only recently arrived.

At the time, Cavendish’s book was written, European literature was dominated by playwrights, including Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, and poets, among them the three Johns: Donne, Milton and Dryden. Prose fiction, having flourished in older works such as The Decameron and Don Quixote, had fallen into the doldrums.

The Blazing World is sometimes called the first “science fiction” novel, but it has less reliance on science and more on fantasy or speculation. Science is........

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