The Blazing World

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, sometimes known as Mad Madge, was an amazing figure, a friend of major thinkers like Descartes and Hobbes, she was an early exponent of atomism, and persistently tried to join the Royal Society though women were not allowed to be members at the time. Above all, she was one of the first women in England to publish books under her own name, and to make a living at it. The Blazing World is full of incident. Our heroine is kidnapped by pirates, shipwrecked at the North Pole, finds another world attached to ours at the pole, crosses to that other world where she encounters a host of strange animals, then she goes into the interior of the world which is ablaze with jewels and has herself made Empress. On top of all of that, she then starts to communicate with the Duchess of Newcastle in our own world, so that the author thus becomes a character in her own novel. We might wonder whether The Blazing World might have been acclaimed as a precursor for postmodernism if it hadn't been written by a woman. Why it's on the list: This is the earliest substantial work of fiction written by a woman that is recognisable as science fiction, and it is still fascinating to read today.