The Blazing World (1666)
Revolutionary hardly begins to describe Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (full title: The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World); first and foremost, it was written during a time when female authors were almost unheard of. Second, it accompanied Cavendish’s nonfiction science book Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, which was even less heard of, but it helped that Margaret was also the Duchess of Newcastle. In the book, a woman travels to the North Pole but gets mysteriously transported into another realm full of anthropomorphic animal people, gets made Empress, discusses science and philosophy with all the scholars there, meets the Duchess of Newcastle (long story), and then leads her new army when Great Britain invades, conquering them in turn. Besides musing on the nature of matter, where thunder and lightning come from, and more, her forces include submarines pulled by fish-men. Fun!
