What Is “Western Civilization”?
A Blazing Empire: The Civilized Fantasy of Margaret Cavendish
In her early work of science fiction, Utopia is an academic conference
The seventeenth-century writer Margaret Lucas Cavendish was — and is — a phenomenon. She had no formal schooling, but educated herself through both intensive reading and intellectual discourses with her brother, an established scholar. She was a polymath: poet, philosopher, natural scientist, playwright, fiction writer. Indeed, Cavendish’s best-known work of speculative fiction, The Blazing World, is widely regarded as an early work of science fiction. In this book, Cavendish imagined a heretofore unknown society with its own strange inhabitants, customs, and laws, and — significantly — she imagined such a society in a place that was not earth, the globe, the known or unknown terrestrial sphere.
Unlike the world-building of Plato, or Thomas More, or Jonathan Swift, who set their vanished or vaunted societies somewhere on the earthly globe, Cavendish’s world building truly did entail the construction of a new place. She set The Blazing World on a new pseudo-planet, connected at the north pole with the planet earth and with an infinite number of other worlds and planets, via a sort of spatiotemporal wormhole.
