Compelling Science Fiction - The Duchess Who Invented Science Fiction

In May of 1667, the Royal Society of London had an unusual visitor.

The men of the Royal Society were no strangers to the unusual. After all, the Society—a group of natural philosophers, physicists, and mathematicians—was synonymous with cutting-edge scientific thought in seventeenth-century England. These guys weren't afraid to get weird. On that fateful day in May, the Society planned to weigh the air itself, turn a piece of mutton into goop with the help of a little sulfuric acid, and examine a giant lodestone. All in a day's work.

But even these men of science weren't prepared for the Duchess of Newcastle.

The Royal Society, founded in 1660 and chartered in 1662, was still considered thrillingly new in 1667, and their mission fascinated experts and amateurs alike. The Society wasn't open to just anyone, though. Laymen of a certain social standing with an interest in science might become Fellows of the Society—but even the most scientifically minded women could not so much as visit. That May, however, the Society made an exception. After a long debate, they extended an invitation to the one and only Margaret Cavendish: poet, playwright, spectacle.

The duchess arrived fashionably late. Her dress required six women to carry the train, and the arrival of seven ladies to a Society meeting unleashed immediate chaos. "But, oh, the hurry and the din / To see this Dame to enter in," teased John Evelyn in a ballad, making Cavendish sound more exciting than any experiment: "I was half afeared … She looked so like a Cavalier / But that she had no beard!" Meanwhile, Samuel Pepys (not remembered for being super chill and nonjudgmental about women) pulled no punches: "I do not like her at all," he griped, "nor did I hear her say anything that was worth hearing, but that she was full of admiration, all admiration."

For Cavendish, the author of some half-dozen books on natural philosophy, a chance to glimpse the inner workings of the Society was a dream come true. Much of London was equally interested in glimpsing Cavendish. People lined the streets hoping to see this odd duchess from Nottinghamshire who traveled in a procession of three black coaches and dressed her servants in velvet philosophers' caps. At one point during her visit, Pepys watched a hundred children chase her down the road like a seventeenth-century Taylor Swift, if Taylor Swift wrote plays about lesbian nuns instead of songs about Travis Kelce. In another account, she arrived at the theatre in a chariot pulled by eight white bulls, her bare nipples scarlet-trimmed. "I was surprised to find so much extravagancy and vanity in any one person not confined within four walls," John Evelyn's wife Mary quipped after meeting her. "I hope, as she is an original, she may never have a copy."

Cavendish didn't care about the critics. "I matter not the censures of this age, but am rather proud of them," she wrote, "for it shows that my actions are more than ordinary." In fact, the duchess was so far ahead of her time that it's no surprise her own century didn't know what to make of her. Three hundred years before the birth of modern science fiction, she was a speculative futurist and early systems thinker with no formal education who wrote a dozen books about everything from atomic theory to parallel universes. Most people have never read a word she wrote. But this more-than-ordinary duchess proved that speculative fiction isn't just about escaping reality: it's a way to resist the limitations of the present, a tool that can help us dream new futures into being.

MARGARET THE FIRST

Cavendish, born Margaret Lucas in 1623, was the last of eight children. Her wealthy father died only two years after her birth; her mother, Elizabeth, governed the family admirably after her husband's death. Yet while Elizabeth was a loving and sometimes indulgent mother, she did not believe in educating her daughters. Cavendish received a rudimentary education even compared to other young women of the gentry in the period. She could sing, and she claimed to know "indifferently well" how to keep sheep, but she could not speak any other languages and she had little knowledge of the classics. From her earliest childhood she chafed against the confines of her limited education. When not dressing up in costumes of her creation—a habit she carried into adulthood—she busied herself writing one of sixteen books she later called her "baby-books."

In an autobiography written at the grizzled old age of thirty-two, Cavendish described her childhood as idyllic. This happy period came to an abrupt end with the arrival of the English Civil War. The Lucases were devout Royalists, and in 1643, the family fled Parliamentarian violence for the king's court in Oxford, where Cavendish served a maid of honor to Queen Henrietta Maria. After a crushing defeat for the Royalists in 1644, she followed the queen into Parisian exile, where she met and wed William Cavendish, Marquis and later Duke of Newcastle, thirty years her senior. When King Charles I was executed in 1649, Newcastle's banishment—and seizure of his estates—accompanied the (temporary) abolition of the monarchy. The couple spent the next fifteen years abroad. In Paris, they dined with men like Descartes and Hobbes; in Antwerp, where they lived for most of this period, they leased the house of Peter Paul Rubens. By the time they returned to England with the Restoration in 1660, Cavendish had published five books of poetry and natural philosophy. She published seven more before her death in 1673.

The uneducated second wife of a general in exile: not the most impressive starting point for literary greatness, even before we take into account early modern stigma against women's authorship. Yet Cavendish, who frequently expressed the desire to be remembered, believed in the worth of her words. "Though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second," she wrote, "yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First." In print, she generally presented herself with the confidence of a biotech founder soon to be imprisoned for fraud. She named herself both empress and authoress, and (navigating the real limits of her education) renounced grammar as oppressive on the grounds that "wit … must have no set rules." In other words, the duchess was a seventeenth-century lady possessed by the spirit of a "hot girls hit curbs" bumper sticker.

Above all else, though, Cavendish was a woman of science… or, at least, a woman keenly interested in scientific experimentation. She treated her public persona as a kind of experiment, too. So, sure, she (supposedly) painted her nipples scarlet and (maybe) traversed London in a bull-drawn chariot. But she also described herself in her autobiography as debilitatingly shy, addicted "to contemplation rather than conversation," and wrote that she wanted nothing more than to be left alone to write in peace. She hated games, didn't like to dance, and tried to avoid revels and feasts, because too much feasting inevitably made her stomach hurt. (Been there, girl.) In public, she wore absurdity like another outlandish outfit—but she was never happier than when at home with her books. Cavendish was, affectionately, a weird woman. She was also a sharp thinker experimenting with the uses of weirdness, and she refused to abandon her efforts in the face of derision from the Mary Evelyns of the world. Or, in her own words: "I had rather die in the adventure of noble achievements, than live in obscure and sluggish security."

For Cavendish, the uses of unapologetic weirdness weren't limited to bare-breasted nights out at the theatre. In a time when women weren't supposed to write and were absolutely not supposed to publish, she published twenty-one editions of a dozen original works all with her name right there on the title page. A quick perusal of her bibliography shows the extent to which her interest in science shaped everything she wrote. Among her volumes of poetry, letters, and plays are works like Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655) and Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy (1666), which clearly lay out her unconventional vitalistic system of nature. But even her first volume of poetry in 1653 began with a prefatory address aimed at natural philosophers and featured poems with titles like "The weight of Atomes" and "Winds are made in the Aire, not in the Earth." Like so many modern thinkers, Cavendish saw connections between imagination and scientific reasoning; she understood speculative thinking to be both tool and art.

Many (okay, most) of her scientific ideas don't hold up today. Fair enough: she wrote in a time when people thought touching the king cured tuberculosis, and she lived before a century in which people believed women could give birth to rabbits. But even when she wasn't right, Cavendish was curious. She believed in the value of asking questions whether or not they had answers. Her vitalistic materialism, unlike the mechanistic materialism of Descartes or Hobbes, foreshadowed systems thinking and chaos theory; her distrust of microscopes, as silly as that seems today, stemmed from her fear that unmediated access to technology could damage users' creativity and critical thinking skills, which might sound familiar. What truly distinguished her philosophy, though, was her articulation of a mutually constitutive relationship between science and art. Her most monumental achievement wasn't nonfiction, then: it was a sprawling utopian romance known as The Blazing World, arguably the first science fiction novel ever written.

THE EMPRESS OF THE WORLD

The Description of a New World Called The Blazing World (1666) is a spectacular book in every sense of the word. Cavendish's ambitions were, as usual, utterly conservative and restrained: in a preface addressed to the reader, she described the book as a way to build a world of her own so she might conquer it. A fictional world would have to do, she explained, since she had "neither power, time nor occasion to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did." One wonders what sort of violent imperial feats the duchess might have managed with a few extra hours in each day.

The Blazing World is as singular as it is ambitious. When it comes to early modern literature, the meanings of "first," "science fiction," and "novel" are all up for debate. Still, compared to other pre-Frankenstein contenders for the title of first science fiction novel (like Thomas More's 1516 Utopia or Johann Valentin Andreae's 1616 The Chemical Wedding), The Blazing World is heavy on the science—and heavy on the fiction, too. For Cavendish, the two were inseparable. She published The Blazing World alongside her Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy. "If you wonder, that I join a work of fancy to my serious philosophical contemplations; think not that it is out of a disparagement to philosophy," Cavendish wrote. One more time, Margaret, for the people in the back: "[Reason] requires sometimes the help of fancy, to recreate the mind." Long before Ursula K. Le Guin famously claimed that social change begins with art, Cavendish insisted that speculative fiction could and does improve the way people think about the world.

Summarizing The Blazing World is a difficult task. The short version: after a merchant who is maybe not great at handling rejection gets turned down by a nameless lady, he kidnaps her from her father's house and carries her away by boat. This act offends the gods, who respond by blowing his boat to the North Pole, where everyone but the lady promptly freezes to death. The lady escapes death through exceedingly normal means: traveling through a magic portal into a universe populated by talking animal-man hybrids who mistake her for a goddess and name her their new empress. Like any good empress, she gets straight to work reshaping the world:

Reading this description of a woman who is not only an empress but also the face of scientific progress, you might begin to think, huh, this sounds a lot like self-insert fanfiction, sounds a lot like the empress is maybe just Margaret Cavendish in a diamond-crusted hat? And you would be wrong… not because she didn't want to hang out with bear-philosophers and ape-chemists in her own private Royal Society, which she absolutely did, but because Margaret herself shows up fifty pages later. After meeting the immaterial spirits of this strange world and bombarding them with questions, the empress resolves to "make a Cabbala." She asks one of the spirits to bring her the disembodied soul of a great thinker to serve as her scribe. Aristotle, she suggests, or maybe Pythagoras or Galileo. Instead, the spirit introduces the empress to the Duchess of Newcastle:

But The Blazing World isn't just a series of self-deprecating handwriting jokes. Upon arriving in this brave new world, the newly crowned empress gathers the animal-men before her and quizzes them on every conceivable scientific subject. Why does the sun change position? How is the wind made? Why is the sea salty? Can an oyster bleed? Why do maggots taste like cheese? (Truly terrible question, Margaret, thanks.) Is color an illusion? What causes the plague? The animal-men, some of whom suspiciously resemble well-known Fellows of the Royal Society, answer—even as the Empress continually challenges them, determined to refine her knowledge of this parallel universe and her own world. By the end, The Blazing World is more than utopian vision or social satire. It's an impassioned defense of speculative thought as scientific endeavor:

Cavendish lived in a tumultuous time. Her early adulthood was defined by civil war, and twelve years after the execution of the only king she'd ever known, a new king took the throne and did his best to rewrite history. She went from living in exile to visiting the Royal Society; she could publish her work, but not without condemnation from those who believed a woman had no right to do so. She used fiction, then, to ask those questions she couldn't ask without fiction. After all, only in speculative fiction could she describe an air-powered engine upon a golden ship and, in the same paragraph, imagine technologies for gauging the depth of the sea three hundred years before the development of multibeam sonar. Only in speculative fiction could two seventeenth-century women debate science and religion while an entire universe of men sat in rapt attention.

MAD MADGE

Like a long line of unconventional women before her, Margaret Cavendish was clearly recognized as a genius in her day, then celebrated after her death exactly as she'd known she would be. No, wait, that's not right: she was brutally mocked for centuries and remembered not as Margaret the First, empress of her own imagination, but as Mad Madge, the embarrassing and awkward duchess who didn't know when to put down her pen. Dorothy Osborne wrote in 1653 that there were "many soberer people in Bedlam." Almost three centuries later, Virginia Woolf reviewed the evidence and concluded in The Common Reader that Cavendish was "crack-brained and bird-witted," with "the freakishness of an elf," a description so spectacularly harsh that very few scholars of Cavendish have ever successfully resisted the temptation to quote these lines.

Still, Woolf acknowledged, Cavendish's work is "leavened by a vein of authentic fire." Her authentic fire—her unyielding insistence on being nothing less than herself, her steadfast belief in the value of weirdness—is exactly what makes the Duchess of Newcastle relevant today. Like Cavendish, we live in an age of social upheaval shaped by rapid developments in science and technology. Historical works like The Blazing World serve to remind us that speculative fiction has always been a powerful tool for navigating a changing world. Cavendish wasn't trying to predict the future or avoid the present. Instead she used speculation to rethink her present. Fiction is a sandbox. Speculative modes blow up the sandbox. How would you make the world better if nothing stood in your way? Forget the future you think is possible. What future do you want?

Sometimes progress looks like technological innovation or social good. Sometimes it looks like a short story that manages to shift the way we think in only a few thousand words. And sometimes it looks like a duchess with painted nipples and a silly hat. "Since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made a world of my own: for which no body, I hope, will blame me, since it is in every one's power to do the like," Cavendish begins The Blazing World. She was right about the relationship between reason and fancy, and she was right about this, too: each of us has the power to make a new world. The art of creation begins with an act of speculation.