Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World serves as a response to the Royal Society, which refused to admit her despite her interest in natural philosophy and her aristocratic standing. Published alongside her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy and Grounds for Natural Philosophy, the work has been described as one of the first female utopian fictions, a progenitor of science fiction, a romance, and an adventure story.

The heroine of the story is kidnapped by boat, which then drifts to the North pole where all the men on board die, but she finds herself slipping into a parallel world in which the men take the form of animal-men hybrids (such as bird-men). She is immediately made Empress and begins to go about setting the citizens to discover meaning of natural phenomenon. She attempts to construct worlds based on previous philosophical models (such as Platonism) but fails.

At the same time that Cavendish establishes a justification of monarchy, she decenters humans from the universe and attributes agency to animal-men hybrids. At times, matter itself has a kind of agency, aligning her ideas with those of Jane Bennett and against those of Lucretius. Though as someone engaged in experimentation, Cavendish was very much engaged in the discussions of atomism as an explanation for the structure of matter. And yet, for Cavendish’s heroine, the worlds in her mind are just as real, if not more real, than the material world she inhabits, suggesting a flat ontology of things.

At the very least, Cavendish suggests a link in the chain of vital materialism, which is frequently, though perhaps unfairly, gendered female.

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