One of the Earliest Science Fiction Books Was Written in the 1600s

In her lifetime, Lady Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 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.

"Change some of the wording around, and The Blazing World resembles a modern science fiction story. While the Empress enters a “portal” in the book, today’s sci-fi tales might say she enters another dimension. The people of the Blazing World, as her universe was called, came in colors ranging from green to scarlet, and had what we might now call alien technology. Cavendish writes that “though they had no knowledge of the Load-stone, or Needle or pendulous Watches,” Blazing World inhabitants were able to measure the depth of the sea from afar, technology that wouldn’t be invented until nearly 250 years after the book came out."

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