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The first item in Robert Pepperell's "The Posthuman Manifesto" reads, "It is now clear that humans are no longer the most important things in the universe. This is something the humanists have yet to accept."² As the governing intellectual element of the early modern period, human- ism played an essential role in the intellectual history and literary out- put of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, but according to Juliana Schiesari, "anthropomorphic humanism" of the period would lead to "ethnocentrism, nationalism, racism, and sexism."³ The first of these great early modern English humanists, Thomas More, left the world his Utopia, a text first printed in 1516 that has not ceased to elicit scholarly attention. Following More, empiricist Francis Bacon created his Utopian society Bensalem in the 1624 text, The New Atlantis. Neither More's nor Bacon's text have garnered widespread critical consensus on any of the issues they raise. In response to More and Bacon, Margaret Cavendish created her Utopian vision of a fictitious society without leaving any definitive "meaning" or commentary on whether or not the "utopia" she depicted constitutes a perfect, idealized society. Similar to More's and Bacon's Utopian texts, Cavendish's The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World has received critical attention seeking to label the text as Utopian, dystopian, science fiction, or some kind of hybrid.⁴ This essay will demonstrate that Cavendish's The Blazing World constitutes a dystopia in which the subjectivities attained by the Empress and the half-man, half-beast inhabitants of the Blazing World

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