4 ideas
A merchant abducts a young lady and sails her north. A storm drives the ship to the North Pole, where every man aboard freezes to death, and she crosses alone into another world joined to ours at the Pole. Its emperor marries her, and she organises its animal-hybrid peoples (bear-men, bird-men, fish-men, ape-men, lice-men and others) into academies and cross-examines them on natural philosophy, religion and government.
Telescopes and microscopes show altered appearances, not the true natures of things. The empress notes that the bear-men's telescopes only multiply their disputes about the heavens, orders the instruments broken, and later relents.
The empress wants a world to govern, and her scribe, the Duchess of Newcastle's soul, has a similar ambition. Spirits advise them to create worlds in their own minds instead of seizing real ones, since anyone can rule an immaterial world completely without war or injustice. Imagination thus becomes a legitimate way to exercise sovereign ambition, especially for those shut out of actual power.
The Blazing World is peaceful because it has one emperor, one religion and one language. After the empress's new academies and her own separate congregations start quarrels and division, she is advised to dissolve the societies and restore the old single-sovereign order. The mechanism is that every autonomous body with its own doctrine becomes a seed of disputation that can grow into civil disorder.