btuftin reviewed The description of a new world, called the blazing world and other writings by Margaret Cavendish (Pickering women's classics)
Review of 'The description of a new world, called the blazing world and other writings' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
If you want to read something unusual and old, this might be for you. But the odds are somewhat slim. This is a very peculiar book. The story aspect is very, very slim, and a lot of it is philosophical musings presented in the form of dialog with little effort made to make it anything other than an obvious way of presenting the author's thoughts "indirectly" and some of the musings may seem quite daft unless you remember that it was written before phlogiston theory and spontaneous generation was disproved.
It eventually becomes very meta when the author herself joins as a central character and is given advice on the benefits of creating entire worlds in your mind, and it contains an embarrassing amount of flattery of the British royals and the author's husband, but I still enjoyed the experience of engaging with proto-fantasy, proto-scifi written by a British noble …
If you want to read something unusual and old, this might be for you. But the odds are somewhat slim. This is a very peculiar book. The story aspect is very, very slim, and a lot of it is philosophical musings presented in the form of dialog with little effort made to make it anything other than an obvious way of presenting the author's thoughts "indirectly" and some of the musings may seem quite daft unless you remember that it was written before phlogiston theory and spontaneous generation was disproved.
It eventually becomes very meta when the author herself joins as a central character and is given advice on the benefits of creating entire worlds in your mind, and it contains an embarrassing amount of flattery of the British royals and the author's husband, but I still enjoyed the experience of engaging with proto-fantasy, proto-scifi written by a British noble from the age of Charles II.
