The Blazing World
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The Blazing World is a work of prose fiction by the seventeenth-century aristocratic writer Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, published in 1666. As its full title suggests, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World is a fanciful depiction of a utopian kingdom that can be reached via the North Pole. The work, which many credit as one of the earliest pieces of science fiction, accompanied Cavendish's Observations upon Experimental Philosophy and functioned as an imaginative component to what was otherwise a reasoned endeavour in seventeenth-century science. The work is an aberration of sorts considering that its themes might be considered postmodern by some, despite its being published during the early modern period.
The Blazing World has some ideas which resembles that of J. R. R. Tolkien's concept of sub-creation, pre-dating him by nearly 300 years. In Alan Moore's graphic novels The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the Blazing World was, in the late 1680s, the destination of Prospero's Men, until that group disbanded in 1690.
