A fascinating look at an early sf author:
Meet Lady Margaret Cavendish.
NO ONE COULD GET INTO philosophical argument with Lady Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and walk away unchanged. Born in 1623, Cavendish was an outspoken aristocrat who traveled in circles of scientific thinkers, and broke ground on proto-feminism, natural philosophy (the 17th century term for science), and social politics.
In her lifetime, she published 20 books. But amid her poetry and essays, she also published one of the earliest examples of science fiction. In 1666. She named it The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World.
In the story, a woman is kidnapped by a lovesick merchant sailor, and forced to join him at sea. After a windstorm sends the ship north and kills the men, the woman walks through a portal at the North Pole into a new world: one with stars so bright, midnight could be mistaken for midday. A parallel universe where creatures are sentient, and worm-men, ape-men, fish-men, bird-men and lice-men populate the planet. They speak one language, they worship one god, and they have no wars. She becomes their Empress, and with her otherworldly subjects, she explores natural wonders and questions their observations using science.
Wow! I don’t think I’ve heard of this, before! (It certainly sounds hard to forget! – though… maybe, ‘never say never’…).
Anyway, it is delightful to see that it is scanned in the Internet Archive – though listed under the title of its companion volume, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (!):
https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_e_dmAAAAcAAJ/page/n5
And to see that there is even a free audiobook of it (lasting a bit over four hours) at LibriVox.org – with a link to an online transcription.
I have not paused to make its direct acquaintance before giving thanks to you and Natalie Zarelli for bringing to our – and, so, my – attention, so I don’t yet know if it has any possible connection with, say, John Uri Lloyd’s Etidorpha, or Tolkien’s Polar mythology… But I wonder if any of the Inklings knew it?