Fly-men

The Fly-men are a people of the Blazing-World whose unusual capacity for observation and travel makes them essential intermediaries in the Empress’s inquiries. Appointed natural philosophers, they investigate the air and range around the globe; when the Empress fears that Immaterial Spirits have vanished into the darkness beneath the Earth, the Fly-men trace them to the Antipodes and return with news that restores her peace of mind. Their role gives the book’s speculative natural philosophy a practical form: knowledge depends not on omniscient vision, but on particular bodies, instruments of perception, and cooperation among different peoples.

Identity and Place in the Blazing-World

The Fly-men belong to the Blazing-World’s many distinct kinds of inhabitants, whose bodies and aptitudes differ from those of humans in the Duchess’s Native World. The Empress assigns each people a field that she considers suited to its nature: the Fly-men, together with the Worm-men and Fish-men, are natural philosophers. She encourages their pursuit of useful arts and sciences through schools and learned societies, making their work part of an organized system of inquiry rather than an isolated curiosity.

That classification makes the Fly-men both members of a distinctive community and specialists within the Empress’s administration of knowledge. The narrative identifies their numerous eyes as a particular advantage for observing the air. Their calling therefore rests on embodied perception: the Empress appeals to what their many eyes can detect when she asks whether Immaterial Spirits inhabit the atmosphere. Their expertise is significant, but not unlimited; the Fly-men report what they have observed and what they can learn through investigation, rather than claiming universal knowledge.

Observation and the Immaterial Spirits

The Fly-men’s most consequential investigation begins when the Empress, wanting to learn about the world from which she came, concludes that she needs the assistance of Immaterial Spirits. She summons learned representatives of the different peoples and asks the Worm-men whether such beings have been perceived within the Earth. They answer that they have encountered no immaterial inhabitants there, since what dwells underground is embodied and material. The Empress turns to the Fly-men about the air, reasoning that their numerous eyes should make them especially able to perceive what others might miss.

The Fly-men report that Immaterial Spirits lodge in the vehicles of the air. They describe the Spirits not as beings wholly without bodily conditions, but as clothed in material forms, for the most part bodies made of air, which can take on other substances when necessary. This account opens the way to communication: the Fly-men believe the Spirits can be approached, and, at the Empress’s command, ask some of them whether they will visit her. The Spirits appear, and the Empress receives the information she sought about her former world and its inhabitants. The Fly-men thus connect observation of the natural world to a direct encounter with its purportedly immaterial residents.

That connection does not turn the Fly-men into authorities on everything the Spirits say. In the later discussion of how spirits move, the Spirits explain that they have no motion apart from their corporeal vehicles: they move by means of bodies, not bodies by means of them. The Empress presses the distinction, and the Spirits agree that self-moving vehicles give motion to the spirit. The exchange fits the Fly-men’s larger narrative function: they make contact possible, while the nature and limits of knowledge remain matters for questioning and debate.

Search beneath the Earth and Flight to the Antipodes

The Fly-men’s most urgent service follows an abrupt break in their contact with the Empress. During her discussion with the Spirits, she announces that she wants to make a Cabbala. The Spirits immediately disappear, leaving her so startled that she falls into a trance. When she recovers, she becomes convinced that the Spirits may have been punished for errors in their answers and sent into the lowest, darkest vehicles. Her distress is not simply at losing her informants; she fears that her own wish to make the Cabbala has caused harmless beings to suffer.

The Empress sends both the Fly-men and the Worm-men to search for the missing Spirits. The Worm-men descend through the Earth, asking the creatures they encounter about the strangers, and learn at its center that the Spirits had stayed there for a time before traveling to the Antipodes. The Fly-men take a complementary route: they ascend into the air, then report that they have rounded the Earth and met the Spirits at the Antipodes. Their account corroborates the Worm-men’s discovery and carries the search beyond the underground world to the opposite side of the globe.

The Spirits are in good condition. Their vehicles, they explain, are made of substances that carry their own light, like cats’ eyes, glow-worms’ tails, and rotten wood. They fear no darkness and are willing to serve the Empress in making her Cabbala. The Fly-men relay both the Spirits’ reassurance and their offer; the Empress is exceedingly glad and rewards the Fly-men and Worm-men bountifully. Their expedition reverses the Empress’s fearful interpretation of the disappearance: what had seemed a descent into a black abyss proves to be a journey to a distant place where the Spirits remain safe and available.

A Practical but Limited Knowledge

The Fly-men’s repeated appearances distinguish their knowledge from supernatural omniscience. They can detect what the Worm-men cannot see underground, travel around the Earth, and establish that the Spirits have reached the Antipodes. Yet the book presents these achievements as investigation and report: the Fly-men consult other inhabitants, follow traces across different regions, and bring evidence back to the Empress. Their discoveries depend on collaboration with the Worm-men, whose descent to the center of the Earth supplies the first account of the Spirits’ route.

Their role also helps define the limits of the Spirits themselves. In conversation with the Empress, the Spirits admit that they do not possess general or perfect knowledge, that memory is necessary to account for past events, and that their movement depends on embodied vehicles. The Fly-men do not settle those philosophical questions, but their observations help make them discussable. In the Blazing-World, the air is not an empty interval between earth and spirit: it is a domain inhabited by vehicles, traversed by investigators, and made legible through the Fly-men’s particular capacities.

As a character group, the Fly-men are described chiefly through their professional function rather than through individual histories or personalities. Their narrative importance lies in the contrast between a striking bodily specialization and a disciplined, collective service to the Empress. With many eyes they see what others cannot; by ranging from the air to the far side of the Earth, they turn that sight into usable knowledge, and by reporting back they help restore the Empress’s confidence when inquiry becomes fear.