The Blazing World is a satirical, Utopian tale written in 1666, credited as the first fictional portrayal of women and the new science of the 17th century (Bowerbank, Mendleson 26).
The story begins when a beautiful, unnamed maiden is kidnapped by a love-stricken merchant and his men. She is seized from the shore of her homeland and carried out to sea. While they are sailing, a tempest forces the boat to move towards the North Pole, and as the tempest rages on, she is saved "by Providence" and separated from her captors. The merchant's boat floats off into the Atlantic Ocean and the men freeze to death as the maiden, in a lifeboat, drifts into another world that is attached to Earth via the North Pole.
She passes through the pole to discover an icy, strange world in which different suns gloriously shine; the new, strange, and wonderful qualities of the blazing light emanate from these stars to create an alternative space and time. The maiden has entered a new kingdom, called Blazing World.
While in this new world, the maiden is enthroned as Empress of an extremely diverse society. The society of Blazing World is comprised of all different sorts of unrecognizable men: bird-men, fish-men, bear-men, mermen, lice-men, creatures of green, black, tawny, and even purple complexions. The Empress proceeds to assign each of the different types of men different occupations and obligations. The bird-men then become astronomers, the bear-men experimental philosophers, the spider-men as mathematicians, ape-men as chemists, and worm-, fish-, and fly-men as natural philosophers.
She uses her power to ensure that her newly endowed land is free of war, religious diversion, and unfair sexual discrimination. The Empress calls a conference, at which all of the men of the Blazing World deliberate on thought-provoking questions such as:
Why is the sun hot?
What causes wind?
How is snow made?
What makes the sea salty?
What are the elemental materials of life?
Should we dissect monsters in the interest of science?
What makes coal black?
and questions of Biblical accounts, where the Empress wonders whether Adam gave names to all the fishes he could not have seen in Paradise. These questions remain unanswerable, and lead to much discussion and deliberation among the intelligent beings of the Blazing World. After the conference and all the reports are in, the Empress concludes: "Nature's works are so various and wonderful, that no particular creature is able to trace her ways."
Later, the Empress summons the soul of the Duchess of Newcastle (who happens to be Margaret Cavendish herself) as her scribe, and she receives a message from Immaterial Spirits who tell her that her home country is under siege by it's enemies. She decides to act as a peacemaker and organizes an invasion complete with submarines towed by the fish-men, and stones dropped by the bird-men to ultimately defeat the enemies of her homeland.