The imperialist presence in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World itself is not a simple one. Her drive, through the character of the Empress, to conquer and exert power in her imaginary realm — this “New World” all of her own — seems a response to real-world limitations she encountered as a woman in the seventeenth century, albeit ones specific to the privileged world of a Duchess. If imperialist ideology inhabits the genre of science fiction in the imagining of interstellar frontiers of masculine swagger, we see here it takes a more unexpected form — a speculative domain for a woman to express her otherwise bridled will, where she is not forbidden from the most learned scientific societies but instead creates them. Indeed, she encouraged others, particularly elite European women, to create their own fictional realms to fit their desires, be that the expression of thwarted political power or securing respect for one’s intellectual scientific prowess. In this, the character of the Empress mirrors that of the author, whose preface asserts her to be “as Ambitious as ever any of my Sex was, is, or can be”, and whose creation of worlds means that “though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second; yet, I will endeavor to be, Margaret the First: and, though I have neither Power, Time nor Occasion, to be a great Conqueror, like Alexander, or Cesar; yet, rather than not be Mistress of a World, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made One of my own.”