Guide to the classics: Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World pioneered speculative fiction, 400 years ago

By Donna Mazza, Associate Professor, English and Creative Writing, Edith Cowan University

The Blazing World is a testament to how far the written novel has travelled in the past 400 years. A literary time capsule, it holds within it the origins of a genre we now call speculative fiction.

Written by Margaret Cavendish, a wealthy iconoclast who advocated for women’s educational opportunities, and published in 1666, The Blazing World is a strange work. Testament to this, its full title is The Description Of A New World Called The Blazing-World, written by The Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent…

Read complete article

~	Scientists have scrapped the worst-case climate scenario – because action is making a difference

~	Deep-rooted inequalities are driving the latest diphtheria outbreak. But we can fix them

~	Trump can’t sell the Abraham Accords on a Middle East that has lost trust in the US

~	One Nation targets Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie over role in Ben Roberts-Smith affair

~	France Acknowledges Need for Slavery Reparations

~	Cubans, Many in the US for Decades, Deported to Mexico

~	Lebanon Joins Mine Ban Treaty

~	Heatwaves are destroying the sex lives of bees – new research

~	They ‘showed me a lot of love’: why young men seeking belonging join gangs

~	An AI solution to an 80-year-old problem has shocked mathematicians