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A version of this story appears in the July 21, 2017 issue of Entertainment Weekly. Pick it up on stands Friday, or buy it here now. Don't forget to subscribe for more exclusive interviews and photos, only in EW.

Many celebrities have book clubs, but none share the clout of Emma Watson's "Our Shared Shelf," which has picked up nearly 200,000 members since it launched on Goodreads in 2016. As Watson wrote when she made The Handmaid's Tale her May/June selection, "It is a book that has never stopped fascinating readers because it articulates so vividly what it feels like for a woman to lose power over her own body." Thanks to the recent Hulu series, Atwood's 1985 dystopian novel has again soared to the top of the best-seller lists. Watson called up Atwood to discuss.

Watson: You were living in West Berlin when you wrote The Handmaid's Tale in 1984; it was before the wall came down. Was being in a divided city a big influence on the novel or had you been thinking about it before you arrived in Berlin? I'd love to know how the novel came about.

Atwood: I had been thinking about it before I'd arrived, and at that time - when I was in West Berlin-I also visited Czechoslovakia and East Germany and Poland. They weren't revelations, because being as old as I am I knew about life behind the Iron Curtain, but it was very interesting to be right inside, to sense the atmosphere. East Germany was the most repressed, Czechoslovakia the second, and Poland was relatively wide open, which explains why Poland was where the Cold War wall first cracked. So it was very interesting to be there, but it wasn't the primary inspiration.

Watson: What was the inspiration, if you don't mind me asking?

Atwood: There were three inspirations. First, what right wing people were already saying in 1980. They were saying the kinds of things they're now doing, but at that time they didn't have the power to do them. I believe that people who say those kinds of things will do those things if and when they get power: They're not just funning around. So that was one of the inspirations. If you're going to make women go back into the home, how are you going to do that? If America were to become a totalitarian state, what would that state look like? What would its aims be? What sort of excuse would it use for its atrocities? Because they all have an excuse of some kind. It would not be Communism in the United States; it would have undoubtedly been some sort of religious ideology-which it now is. By the way, that's not an "anti religion" statement. Recently, someone said, "Religion doesn't radicalize people, people radicalize religion." So you can use any religion as an excuse for being repressive, and you can use any religion as an excuse for resisting repression; it works both ways, as it does in the book. So that was one set of inspirations.

The second inspiration was historical. The 17 th-century foundation of America was not, "Let's have a democracy." It was "Let's have a theocracy," which was what they established in the New England states, such as Massachusetts. Harvard-in and around which the novel is set -began as a theological seminary in the 17th century, and the Puritans excluded anybody who didn't believe in their theology.

The third inspiration was simply my reading of speculative fiction and sci-fi, especially that of the '30's, '40's, and '50's, and my desire to give the form a try. Most of the ones I'd read had been written by men and had male protagonists, and I wanted to flip that and see what such a thing would look like if it were told from the point of view of a female narrator. It's not that those earlier books didn't have women in them, and not that women didn't play important parts; it's that they were not the narrators.

Watson: Yes, yes. So having written this book when you did and having realised that this might happen one day, did the election results and the new health bill in the US hit you hard? Was it a very depressing moment for you?

Atwood: I'm not easily depressed by these sorts of things. It's happened before. If you were born in the '90s, you were born into a world where quite a few rights for various groups had been established, at least in the West, and you thought that was normal. But if you're older than that and you were born into a world in which this was not the case, you saw the fights that went into those rights being established, and you also saw how quickly-in the case, for instance, of Hitler-that you could take a democratically minded fairly open society and turn it on its head. So, it has happened before, but it's also un-happened before, if you see what I mean. History is not a straight line. Also, America is not Germany; America is very diverse; it has a number of different states in it. I don't think America is rolling over in acquiesce to all of this, as you've probably seen from reading the news. You've probably seen that women dressed as Handmaids have been turning up in state legislatures and just sitting there. You can't kick them out because they're not making a disturbance, but everybody knows what they mean.

Watson: Thank you for answering my question so thoroughly. It's amazing how The Handmaid's Tale has been read and discussed since its publication. It's never faded from view. What is it about it, do you think, that makes it so endlessly interesting to new generations of readers, beyond the fact that it speaks to a specific political moment?

Atwood: There were a couple of rules I had for writing it, and one of them was that I would put nothing into it that had not been done at some time or in some place. All of the details have precedents in real life. Some of them are mentioned in the afterword, set at a historical conference that takes place several hundred years after the end of Gilead. The television series is following the same rule - they've added in some stuff, such as female genital mutilation, but they're keeping to the rule that nothing goes in that doesn't have a precedent in reality. So that's one reason: People know that I wasn't just making up horrors to be entertaining.

I also tried to be faithful, not to some abstract ideology, but to how people actually behave when they're under a lot of pressure. There's a great deal of literature on that. I was just reading a piece on male child soldiers kidnapped by Boko Haram - basically they either had to kill people the way they told them to, or they would be killed. When that's the choice, a lot of people will do things they would never otherwise have done, in order to stay alive.

Another thing is, if offered a position of power within a relatively powerless position, some people will take that. People say, "Why do you have Aunt Lydia?" "Why do you have the female aunt being so controlling to women?" And I say because they would be! That's how such a power structure would operate, that's how they've operated in the past: You give somebody a bit more power over the others, and they will take it. So it's not a case of all women being angelic. We know that's not true. Women are human beings, a mixed lot. I tried to be true to human nature.

So the book isn't a violation of human nature, and it's not a just an invention. It's based on stuff that people have really done and therefore could do again. Then there's no gadgets in it, there's no technology in it that we don't already have. In the mid 1980s we didn't have some of the stuff in the television series-believe it or not, there were no cellphones then and there was no internet. But there were credit cards, so they could already track you and control you through your credit cards.

Watson: That's really freaky for me. I've just done a film called The Circle which is about how easy it is and would be to control huge groups of people with the amount of data that's been collected.

Atwood: Dave Eggers' book?

Watson: Yes, exactly.

Atwood: I reviewed it for the New York Review of Books.

Watson: I'll have to read it-that's amazing. Well, I read the book and became kind of obsessed with it.

Atwood: My review will explain the cover to you. [ laughs] My theory is that it's a manhole cover.

Watson: Speaking of translating books into films, The Handmaid's Tale has been adapted a number of times before, do you have a favorite adaption?

Atwood: Well, this [Hulu] television series is very good.

Watson: Yes, it's insanely good.

Atwood: The opera was also good.

Watson: There was an opera?

Atwood: Yes, it debuted in 2000.

Watson: Do you like seeing your work adapted, or do you find it hard?
(Interview continues on page 2)

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Emma Watson interviews Margaret Atwood about 'The Handmaid's Tale'

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A version of this story appears in the July 21, 2017 issue of Entertainment Weekly. Pick it up on stands Friday, or buy it here now. Don't forget to subscribe for more exclusive interviews and photos, only in EW.

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Margaret Atwood on what 'The Handmaid's Tale' Means in the Age of Trump

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Margaret Atwood on what 'The Handmaid's Tale' Means in the Age of Trump

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Margaret Atwood on What ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Means in the Age of Trump (Published 2017)

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Atwood on whether her dystopian classic is meant as a “feminist” novel, as antireligion or as a prediction.

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The Guardian article about Margaret Atwood and dystopias

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The Guardian article about Margaret Atwood and dystopias

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On Thursday, just as I am saying goodbye to Margaret Atwood at the end of our interview, I get a text message. "Oh," I say. "Bob Dylan's won the Nobel prize." She is about to have her photograph taken, and is arranging a rakish grey felt hat atop her steely curls. She looks at me, opens her mouth very slightly, and widens her eyes. They are the faintly unrealistic blue of a Patagonian glacier.

On Thursday, just as I am saying goodbye to Margaret Atwood at the end of our interview, I get a text message. "Oh," I say. "Bob Dylan's won the Nobel prize." She is about to have her photograph taken, and is arranging a rakish grey felt hat atop her steely curls. She looks at me, opens her mouth very slightly, and widens her eyes. They are the faintly unrealistic blue of a Patagonian glacier.

"For what?" she says, aspirating the word "what" with devastating effect.

If Atwood herself occasionally checks her phone for missed calls from Stockholm on such mornings, she does not admit to it; in any case, fellow Canadian Alice Munro's victory in 2013, commemorated with a generous tribute by Atwood in this paper, will have queered that particular pitch for some years to come.

We are speaking at the British Library, where, later that day, the 76-year-old author will receive a different award: the English PEN Pinter prize. She will also bestow one, too, on Ahmedur Rashid Chowdhury, the Bangladeshi publisher of remarkable courage known as Tutul, who last year survived, in his Dhaka office, a machete-and-gun attack by Islamic extremists. At least nine Bangladeshi activists, writers and intellectuals have been murdered since the beginning of last year.

Atwood's PEN Pinter prize lecture, titled An Improvisation on the Theme of Rights, which she also delivered on Thursday, ends with a reflection on the dystopias of her fiction: that of The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and of her recent MaddAddam trilogy. The first describes an America transformed into a theocracy that treats women as mere childbearing chattels - after a state of emergency is declared following an assassination. ("They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics at the time", the novel's narrator explains.) The second deals with a world in which the planet's resources are severely depleted. A situation, she explained in the lecture, that leads to civil chaos. "Then ... warlords and demagogues take over, some people forget that all people are people, enemies are created, vilified and dehumanised, minorities are persecuted, and human rights as such are shoved to the wall." Not so much a distant and frightening future, she said, as "the cusp of where we are living right now".

Readers of The Handmaid's Tale have indeed found elements of its story looming alarmingly close in recent weeks. See Donald Trump's remarks about women; see the virulently anti-choice Republican vice-presidential candidate Mike Pence. See, even, Trump's Republican detractors, such as Mitt Romney, decrying his remarks on groping because they " demean our wives and daughters". Are we in Gilead - the America of The Handmaid's Tale? "Close, yes. For sure." And everything in it, she says, was based on things that had actually happened. "Including everyone tugging on a rope during hangings so that no one is guilty: that's from English history," she says. "Ceaușescu in Romania forcing women to have children - quotas for childbirth. The fact that, in the United States, teaching a slave to read was against the law. And then sumptuary laws - who can wear what. Who can cover up what, who has to, and can, cover up what part of which bodies - that's been a part of human culture for a very long time."

She mentions an article that famously accurate US psephologist Nate Silver published on his website, fivethirtyeight.com. (His one famous failure was in not predicting Trump's victory in the Republican primaries.) Silver's article includes a pair of maps. One shows how the US would look if only men voted: almost entirely red. The other shows how the US would look if only women voted: almost entirely blue. "It spawned a hashtag," says Atwood (who is a frequent poster on Twitter) "called #Repealthe19th. The 19th Amendment is what gave women the vote. So there are Trump supporters who want to take the vote away from women. The Handmaid's Tale, unfolding in front of your very eyes." (In fact, the Washington Post pointed out that #Repealthe19th spiked as a social media topic not only through the enthusiasm of Trump supporters, but through its being heartily condemned by his detractors; but still, there it was as a notion, red and bleeding and out there.)

Her whistlestop tour through feminism goes like this: "First wave, the vote. Second wave, the image. Now it's about violence and rape and death: we've got down to the nitty-gritty." Earlier this month, when she spoke at the Southbank literature festival in London, she talked about "the most amazingly vicious online abuse" of women. "What century are we in?" she asked. "Apparently, the 12th."

When The Handmaid's Tale was published, she says, the novel was reviewed by British critics as an enjoyable fantasy, and by the Canadians with a certain anxiety ("Could it happen here?"). In America, though, there was a sense of: "'How long have we got?'" She sighs. "Apparently, not as long as I thought ... With any cultural change there is a push and a pushback. Trump has brought out a huge pushback that was originally against immigrants. Now it has shifted to being very misogynistic, partly because of Hillary Clinton. You have not seen anything like this since the 17th-century witchhunts, quite frankly."

Can you understand the appeal of Trump, I ask? "He brings out the temper-tantrum-throwing wilful brat in all of us. 'Why can't I do what I want? Why can't I have what I want? Those other people are stopping me. Those other people have a bigger lollipop that I do, I'm going to take their lollipop away from them.' But on the other hand, he couples that with the most amazing whining." She mentions the complaint by Trump that his microphone malfunctioned during the first televised presidential debate. ("Rubbish.")

"I tell you this," she continues. "Hillary Clinton is a better man than Trump. She has more connection to the traditional male virtues. She has comported herself in a much more manly fashion. Ask any real alpha males that you'll know and they'll say of Trump, 'This is the guy we didn't like at school because he was a bully, but as soon as anyone pushed back at him he started to whine.'"

What does she think, then, of Clinton's campaign? "Well, it's more of a campaign. Trump has taken about 10 different positions on everything, so there is no way of knowing what he really thinks. You actually just don't know. He will adopt a position depending on what reaction is mirrored back to him. Basically, it's very close to being a manifestation of a mob: burn them at the stake, screaming and yelling."

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Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood, a retelling of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Photograph: Penguin

Like the Salem witch trials, then? She proceeds to talk about them: Atwood likes to take a long historical sweep. Her heroes of this tragic episode, dramatised by Arthur Miller in The Crucible, are Rebecca Nurse, who refused to admit that she was a witch and declined to accuse others, meaning she was hanged; and Giles Corey, who refused to plead at his trial, meaning that he was pressed - that is, crushed by heavy stones until his lungs collapsed and he died. By sacrificing himself thus, and not allowing his case to be tried, his family inherited his property, which otherwise would have been confiscated.

However, she says, after a fairly long disquisition on the legal history of 17th-century Massachusetts, this is not at all what the Trump situation is like. "Salem was much more dignified ... Salem at least had rules for the trials." She hunts around for a better comparison. It's like Night of the Hunter, she says. "Robert Mitchum. Directed by Charles Laughton. Just a great film. At the end they catch this guy who's been murdering women and has been trying to get hold of some children to kill them too. He is seen off by Lillian Gish playing an old lady in a rocking chair with a shotgun." (A sudden vision arrives, unbidden, of Atwood in a rocking chair with a shotgun.) "She peppers him with shot, he gets caught and put in jail and there's a mob outside who want to lynch him. So the very same Christian, righteous people who have played the virtuous townspeople are now screaming for his blood. This is what it's like. Those mob scenes at Trump rallies: burn her, lock her up, kill her. They think they are at the wrestling, but let those people out, and you have a lynchmob."

We turn to the scenarios she sketched in the MaddAddam trilogy: a world of internet insecurity, pig-human hybrids, environmental devastation, oil fetishists and complete corporate takeover of states. Do dystopian novels, I wonder, actually do anything? Can they change behaviour? They are, she says, more like weathervanes than guides on averting disaster. "All dystopian novels are telling you to do is make sure you've got a lot of canned goods and a gun." Do you have canned goods and a gun in Toronto? "I'm too freaking old. I'm probably not going to make it through the zombie apocalypse anyway."

The literary news, as we speak, has been recently all about the "unmasking" by an Italian investigative journalist of the real identity of Elena Ferrante, the pseudonymous author of the hugely popular Neapolitan novels. "She probably went too far in putting out a fake autobiography. Which is like an invitation: expose me," says Atwood. (She is referring to Frantumaglia, which is about to be published in English - not an autobiography as such, but a collection of letters, essays, interviews and the like.) "But she's not committed a crime. Nor do I feel that she was a bad person to write under a pseudonym. She did what she wanted to do. It worked spectacularly well, and then there are the books. People will read them a bit differently, that's inevitable. But it doesn't make them bad books."

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'I used to go on the Greyhound bus with copies of my books in a cardboard box, and give readings in school gymnasiums' ... Margaret Atwood in 1972. Photograph: Ron Bull/Toronto Star via Getty Images

Atwood herself published pseudonymously a bit, when she was young - in the student magazine, to fill the pages. And she wrote a comic strip under another name in the 1970s. Then there was a skittish review of one of her own books she wrote once, under the not-very-veiled byline of Margarets Atwood, which referred to certain anagrammatic figures: ethnologist Gwaemot R Dratora, the architect Wode M Gratataro, and the profile-writer Greta Warmodota. Invisibility is not her thing: especially when she, and Canadian fellow writers, worked so hard in the 1970s to improve their own visibility. "I don't think I'm entitled to whinge too much, because it's my fault. I used to go on the Greyhound bus with copies of my books in a cardboard box, and give readings in school gymnasiums. I'd sell my own books and collect the money, put it in a brown paper envelope and take it back to the publisher." She looks at me with wide eyes. "What sort of a wimp are you? Have you never tramped through the snow with your books in a cardboard box - on a sled?"

The latest book that she is, metaphorically at least, carrying around with her on a sled is neither dystopian nor utopian, but a story based on The Tempest, called Hag-Seed - part of a series of Shakespearean reworkings commissioned from writers including Jeanette Winterson and Anne Tyler. In her deft story, Prospero is a director called Felix, deposed from his position as artistic director of an important theatre. Bent on revenge, he stages a version of The Tempest in a prison, and plots his payback. I worry, though, that Prospero is a part often taken on by actors reaching the end of their careers. I hope there's to be no talk of Atwood's abjuring magic, or any nonsense like that. No, she tells me. No need to fear. "The last part actors usually take is Lear. That really makes people cry."

This is very Atwood: nearly everything she says is delivered precisely, and lightly iced with irony, whether she's being immensely warm, or plunging her dagger into some unfortunate victim.
* Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood is published by Penguin at £16.99. To order it for £11.99 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p on online orders over £10. A £1.99 charge applies to telephone orders.

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Margaret Atwood: 'All dystopias are telling you is to make sure you've got a lot of canned goods and a gun'

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On Thursday, just as I am saying goodbye to Margaret Atwood at the end of our interview, I get a text message. "Oh," I say. "Bob Dylan's won the Nobel prize." She is about to have her photograph taken, and is arranging a rakish grey felt hat atop her steely curls.

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The New Yorker article about Margaret Atwood and dystopias

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The New Yorker article about Margaret Atwood and dystopias

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Her fiction has imagined societies riddled with misogyny, oppression, and environmental havoc. These visions now feel all too real.

When Margaret Atwood was in her twenties, an aunt shared with her a family legend about a possible seventeenth-century forebear: Mary Webster, whose neighbors, in the Puritan town of Hadley, Massachusetts, had accused her of witchcraft. "The townspeople didn't like her, so they strung her up," Atwood said recently. "But it was before the age of drop hanging, and she didn't die. She dangled there all night, and in the morning, when they came to cut the body down, she was still alive." Webster became known as Half-Hanged Mary. The maiden name of Atwood's grandmother was Webster, and the family tree can be traced back to John Webster, the fifth governor of Connecticut. "On Monday, my grandmother would say Mary was her ancestor, and on Wednesday she would say she wasn't," Atwood said. "So take your pick."

Atwood made the artist's pick: she chose the story. She once wrote a vivid narrative poem in the voice of Half-Hanged Mary-in Atwood's telling, a sardonic, independent-minded crone who was targeted by neighbors "for having blue eyes and a sunburned skin . . . a weedy farm in my own name, / and a surefire cure for warts." Webster's grim endurance at the end of the rope ("Most will have only one death. / I will have two.") grants her a perverse kind of freedom. She can now say anything: "The words boil out of me, / coil after coil of sinuous possibility. / The cosmos unravels from my mouth, / all fullness, all vacancy." In 1985, Atwood made Webster one of two dedicatees of her best-known novel, "The Handmaid's Tale," a dystopian vision of the near future, in which the United States has become a fundamentalist theocracy, and the few women whose fertility has not been compromised by environmental pollution are forced into childbearing. The other dedicatee of "The Handmaid's Tale" was Perry Miller, the scholar of American intellectual history; Atwood studied under him at Harvard, in the early sixties, extending her knowledge of Puritanism well beyond fireside tales.

Having embraced the heritage of Half-Hanged Mary-and having, at seventy-seven, reached an age at which sardonic independent-mindedness is permissible, and even expected-Atwood is winningly game to play the role of the wise elder who might have a spell up her sleeve. In January, I visited her in her home town of Toronto, and within a few hours of our meeting, while having coffee at a crowded café, she performed what friends know as a familiar party trick. After explaining that she had picked up the precepts of medieval palmistry decades ago, from an art-historian neighbor whose specialty was Hieronymus Bosch, Atwood spent several disconcerting minutes poring over my hands. First, she noted my heart line and the line of my intellect, and what their relative positions revealed about my capacity for getting things done. She wiggled my thumbs, a test for stubbornness. She examined my life line-"You're looking quite healthy at the moment," she said, to my relief-then told me to shake my hands out and let them fall into a resting position, facing upward. She regarded them thoughtfully. "Well, the Virgin Mary you're not," she said, dryly. "But you knew that."

Atwood has long been Canada's most famous writer, and current events have polished the oracular sheen of her reputation. With the election of an American President whose campaign trafficked openly in the deprecation of women-and who, on his first working day in office, signed an executive order withdrawing federal funds from overseas women's-health organizations that offer abortion services-the novel that Atwood dedicated to Mary Webster has reappeared on best-seller lists. "The Handmaid's Tale" is also about to be serialized on television, in an adaptation, starring Elisabeth Moss, that will stream on Hulu. The timing could not be more fortuitous, though many people may wish that it were less so. In a photograph taken the day after the Inauguration, at the Women's March on Washington, a protester held a sign bearing a slogan that spoke to the moment: " make margaret atwood fiction again."

If the election of Donald Trump were fiction, Atwood maintains, it would be too implausible to satisfy readers. "There are too many wild cards-you want me to believe that the F.B.I. stood up and said this, and that the guy over at WikiLeaks did that?" she said. "Fiction has to be something that people would actually believe. If you had published it last June, everybody would have said, 'That is never going to happen.' " Atwood is a buoyant doomsayer. Like a skilled doctor, she takes evident satisfaction in providing an accurate diagnosis, even when the cultural prognosis is bleak. She attended the Toronto iteration of the Women's March, wearing a wide-brimmed floppy hat the color of Pepto-Bismol: not so much a pussy hat as the chapeau of a lioness. Among the signs she saw that day, her favorite was one held by a woman close to her own age; it said, " i can't believe i'm still holding this fucking sign." Atwood remarked, "After sixty years, why are we doing this again? But, as you know, in any area of life, it's push and pushback. We have had the pushback, and now we are going to have the push again."

Unlike many writers, Atwood does not require a particular desk, arranged in a particular way, before she can work. "There's a good and a bad side to that," she told me. "If I did have those things, then I would be able to put myself in that fetishistic situation, and the writing would flow into me, because of the magical objects. But I don't have those, so that doesn't happen." The good side is that she can write anywhere, and does so, prolifically. She is equally uninhibited about genre. Atwood's bibliography runs to about sixty books-novels, poetry, short-story collections, works of criticism, children's books, and, most recently, a comic-book series about a part-feline, part-avian, part-human superhero called Angel Catbird. She is offhanded about her versatility. "I always wrote more than one type of thing," she said. "Nobody told me not to." On one occasion, over tea, she showed me her left hand: it had writing on it. "When all else fails, you do have a surface you can write on," she said.

Atwood travels frequently, and has often spent months at a time living in foreign countries, sometimes under conditions that a less flexible artist might find impossibly distracting. She started writing "The Handmaid's Tale" on a clunky rented typewriter while on a fellowship in West Berlin, in 1984. (Orwell was on her mind.) She spent a winter in the remote English village of Blakeney, in Norfolk, where her only means of calling North America was a telephone kiosk that was usually used for storing potatoes, and where the stone-floored cottage in which she wrote was so cold that she developed chilblains on her toes. When her daughter, Jess, who was born in 1976, was eighteen months old, Atwood and her partner, the novelist Graeme Gibson, made a round-the-world trip. After winding through Europe, they visited Afghanistan-a keen student of military history, Atwood wanted to see the terrain where the British had been defeated-as well as India and Singapore. They proceeded to Australia, for the Adelaide Literary Festival, then returned to Canada, via Fiji and Hawaii. They made do with carry-on luggage the whole way. ^^

Home is a mansion in the Annex neighborhood of Toronto, near the university. She and Gibson have lived there for more than thirty years, and a basement office serves as the headquarters of Atwood's company, O. W. Toad, Ltd. (The whimsical name is an anagram of "Atwood," but sometimes there are postal inquiries as to the existence of a Mr. Toad.) Atwood does not drive, and, for exercise as well as for efficiency, she likes to walk around her neighborhood; she often encounters en route some friend of a half-century's standing, and they will stop and discuss the past and future surgeries of loved ones-the inevitable discourse of the septuagenarian. Sometimes she drags a heavy shopping cart, loaded with books, for donation to the local library.

Atwood is enormously well read, and is an evangelist for books she admires, especially by young writers. When I was visiting, she pressed into my hands "Stay with Me," a novel by the twenty-nine-year-old Nigerian writer Ayobami Adebayo. Sarah Polley, the Canadian film director and writer, who is a friend of Atwood's, told me, "Usually, after seeing her, I come home with a full notebook, half in her handwriting and half in mine, of every movie and book I had heard of while talking to her-a full course load." Polley recently wrote the script for a six-part Netflix adaptation of Atwood's 1996 novel, "Alias Grace," which is based on a true-life murder mystery in nineteenth-century rural Canada. The book earned Atwood her third of five Booker Prize nominations.

Atwood is warmly recognized in Toronto, whether she is on the street, in a restaurant, or in the subway. (She once slipped me one of her senior-citizen tickets, with a sly arch of the eyebrow.) Traffic cops nod to her in crosswalks, and every encounter I had with her was interrupted by a supplicant autograph hunter or selfie seeker. She never declined. "In the age of social media, you cannot say no, because you'll get 'Mean Margaret Atwood was rude to me in a restaurant,' " she told me one lunchtime, after graciously signing yet another young woman's notebook. (Atwood speaks in a low, ironical monotone but adopts a querulous squeak when impersonating imagined detractors.) She would look striking even if she were not familiar. She owns an array of brightly colored winter coats-jewel red, imperial purple-with faux-fur-trimmed hoods that frame her face, as do her abundant curls of silver hair. She has high cheekbones and an aquiline nose, the kind of features that age has a hard time withering. Her skin is clear and translucent, of the sort that writers of popular Victorian fiction associated with good moral character.

One morning, I accompanied her to the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, at the University of Toronto, where she has donated her archive: four hundred and seventy-four boxes' worth of papers, so far. She had requested in advance to see materials related to "The Handmaid's Tale," and a small study room had been reserved for our use. Boxes had been rolled in on a cart, and one of them contained Atwood's handwritten draft. On an early page, she describes the plain contours of the room in which Offred, the novel's narrator, lives-"A chair, a table, a lamp"-though Atwood had not yet refined the detail that, in the published version, gives the opening paragraph of the second chapter a menacing power: "There must have been a chandelier, once. They've removed anything you could tie a rope to." Another box was labelled "Handmaid's Tale: Background," and Atwood pried the box open to reveal files containing sheaves of newspaper clippings from the mid-eighties.

"Clip-clippety-clip, out of the newspaper I clipped things," she said, as we looked through the cuttings. There were stories of abortion and contraception being outlawed in Romania, and reports from Canada lamenting its falling birth rate, and articles from the U.S. about Republican attempts to withhold federal funding from clinics that provided abortion services. There were reports about the threat to privacy posed by debit cards, which were a novelty at the time, and accounts of U.S. congressional hearings devoted to the regulation of toxic industrial emissions, in the wake of the deadly gas leak in Bhopal, India. An Associated Press item reported on a Catholic congregation in New Jersey being taken over by a fundamentalist sect in which wives were called "handmaidens"-a word that Atwood had underlined.

In writing "The Handmaid's Tale," Atwood was scrupulous about including nothing that did not have a historical antecedent or a modern point of comparison. (She prefers that her future-fantasy books be labelled "speculative fiction" rather than "science fiction." "Not because I don't like Martians . . . they just don't fall within my skill set," she wrote in the introduction to "In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination," an essay collection that she published in 2011.) The ritualized procreation in the novel-effectively, state-sanctioned rape-is extrapolated from the Bible. " 'Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her,' " Atwood recited. "Obviously, they stuck the two together and out came the baby, and it was given to Rachel. No kidding. It is right there in the text." In Atwood's book, the Handmaids are cultivated, like livestock. "I'm taken to the doctor's once a month, for tests: urine, hormones, cancer smear, blood test," Offred recounts. "The same as before, except that now it's obligatory." Only after completing several chapters does the reader queasily realize that Offred's innocuous-sounding name is a designation of ownership: the Commander in whose household the narrator serves is named Fred. A decade ago, the book was banned from high schools in San Antonio, Texas, on the ground that it was anti-Christian and excessively explicit about sex. In an open letter to the school district, Atwood pointed out that the Bible has a good deal more to say about sex than her book does, and defended her fiction's essential truthfulness, speculative or not. "If you see a person heading toward a huge hole in the ground, is it not a friendly act to warn him?" she wrote.

With the novel, she intended not just to pose the essential question of dystopian fiction-"Could it happen here?"-but also to suggest ways that it had already happened, here or elsewhere. While living in West Berlin, Atwood visited Poland, where martial law had only recently been lifted; many dissidents were still in jail. She already knew members of the Polish resistance from the Second World War, who had gone into exile in Canada. "I remember one person saying a very telling thing: 'Pray you will never have occasion to be a hero,' " she said. Atwood's longtime literary agent, Phoebe Larmore, told me of seeing Atwood during the writing of "The Handmaid's Tale." "I had been quite ill that year, and Margaret came and sat on my sofa, and I think she looked worse than I did," Larmore recalled. "I asked her what was happening. She said, 'It's the new novel. It scares me. But I have to write it.' "

"The Handmaid's Tale" became a best-seller, despite some sniffy reviews, like one in the Times, by Mary McCarthy, who wrote, "Even when I try, in the light of these palely lurid pages, to take the Moral Majority seriously, no shiver of recognition ensues." It has since sold so many millions of copies that Atwood considers them uncountable. Her friend the novelist Valerie Martin was the first to read the finished manuscript; they were both teaching in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. "There is kind of a disagreement about what I said," Martin told me. " She says that I said, 'There is something in it.' But what I think I said is: 'You are going to be rich.' " The book quickly became canonical. Atwood's daughter was nine when it was published; by the time she was in high school, it was required reading for graduation.

Despite the novel's current air of timeliness, the contours of the dystopian future that Atwood imagined in the eighties do not map closely onto the present moment-although recent news images of asylum seekers fleeing across the U.S. border into Canada have a chilling resonance with the opening moments of the television series, which shows Moss, not yet enlisted as a Handmaid, attempting to escape from the U.S. to its northern neighbor, where democracy prevails. Still, the U.S. in 2017 does not show immediate signs of becoming Gilead, Atwood's imagined theocratic American republic. President Trump is not an adherent of traditional family values; he is a serial divorcer. He is not known to be a man of religious faith; his Sundays are spent on the golf course.

What does feel familiar in "The Handmaid's Tale" is the blunt misogyny of the society that Atwood portrays, and which Trump's vocal repudiation of "political correctness" has loosed into common parlance today. Trump's vilification of Hillary Clinton, Atwood believes, is more explicable when seen through the lens of the Puritan witch-hunts. "You can find Web sites that say Hillary was actually a Satanist with demonic powers," she said. "It is so seventeenth-century that you can hardly believe it. It's right out of the subconscious-just lying there, waiting to be applied to people." The legacy of witch-hunting, and the sense of shame that it engendered, Atwood suggests, is an enduring American blight. "Only one of the judges ever apologized for the witch trials, and only one of the accusers ever apologized," she said. Whenever tyranny is exercised, Atwood warns, it is wise to ask, " Cui bono?" Who profits by it? Even when those who survived the accusations levelled against them were later exonerated, only meagre reparations were made. "One of the keys to America is that your neighbor may be a Communist, a serial killer, or in league with satanic forces," Atwood said. "You really don't trust your fellow-citizens very much."

Now, Atwood argues, women have been put on notice that hard-won rights may be only provisional. "It's the return to patriarchy," she said, as she paged through the clippings. "Look at his Cabinet!" she said of Trump. "Look at the kind of laws that people have put through in the states. Absolutely they want to overturn Roe v. Wade, and they will have to deal with the consequences if they do. You're going to have a lot more orphanages, aren't you? A lot more dead women, a lot more illegal abortions, a lot more families with children in them left without a mother. They want it 'back to the way it was.' Well, that is part of the way it was."

Atwood was born in Ottawa, but she spent formative stretches of her early years in the wilderness-first in northern Quebec, and then north of Lake Superior. Her father, Carl Atwood, was an entomologist, and, until Atwood was almost out of elementary school, the family passed all but the coldest months in virtually complete isolation at insect-research stations; at one point, they lived in a log cabin that her father had helped construct.

Her mother, also named Margaret-among her intimates, the novelist goes by Peggy-was a dietitian. In the months in the woods, she secured workbooks from school for Atwood and her brother, Harold, who is three years her senior. "The faster you could do them, the sooner you could go out and play, so I became very rapid and superficial in my execution of those sorts of things," Atwood said. In inclement weather, the children amused themselves by making comic books and by reading. A favorite book was "Grimms' Fairy Tales," which Atwood's parents bought, by mail order, in 1945. "I don't remember finding any of them frightening," she wrote later. "By and large, bad things happened only to bad people, which was reassuring; though children have a bloodthirsty sense of justice, they don't learn mercy until later."

Her father had grown up poor, in rural Nova Scotia. Her mother, whose family was also from Nova Scotia, grew up in slightly better circumstances: Atwood's maternal grandfather was a country doctor, and an aunt had been the first woman to get a master's degree in history from the University of Toronto. Atwood's parents were resilient and curious and devoted to the outdoors, and the Atwood children were encouraged to be the same. They sledded across a still frozen lake at the start of the season, and canoed across it during the summer months. In Atwood's second novel, "Surfacing," a psychological thriller threaded with twisted family relations that was published in 1972, she depicted the landscape of her youth with unsentimental, sensual precision: "The water was covered with lily pads, the globular yellow lilies with their thick center snouts pushing up from among them. . . . When the paddles hit bottom on the way across, gas bubbles from decomposing vegetation rose and burst with a stench of rotten eggs or farts." When Atwood was about ten, her father built a vacation cabin on an unoccupied island in the lake. The family still retreats there in the summer.

In 1948, Margaret's father received an appointment at the University of Toronto. (Three years later, another daughter, Ruth, was born.) Margaret, having been raised as her brother's peer by an unshrinking mother, was unschooled in the conventions of little-girl society. "In the woods, you wore pants not because it was butch but because if you didn't wear pants and tuck the tops into your socks you would get blackflies up your legs," she said. "They make little holes in you, into which they inject an anticoagulant. You don't feel them when they are doing it, and then you take your clothes off and find out you are covered with blood." In "Cat's Eye" (1988), Atwood drew on the experience of being transferred from a navigable wilderness to the more treacherous civilization of prepubescent girls. The book's narrator, Elaine, explains that she has a classmate who "tells me her hair is honey-blond, that her haircut is called a pageboy, that she has to go to the hairdresser's every two months to get it done. I haven't known there are such things as pageboys and hairdressers."

Atwood started writing in earnest in high school. Her parents, who lived through the Depression, were encouraging but practical. She told me, "My mother said, caustically, 'If you are going to be a writer, you had better learn to spell.' I said, airily, 'Others will do that for me.' And they do." She followed her brother to the University of Toronto. (A neurophysiologist, Harold Atwood is a professor emeritus in the department of physiology.) Atwood enrolled in the philosophy department, but after discovering that logical positivism was its mainstay, rather than ethics and aesthetics, she switched to literature.

The university's literature curriculum was unapologetically British: she started with "Beowulf" and took it from there. Canadian literature had yet to be considered worthy of study. A decade later, in 1972, Atwood made a contribution to its establishment as a proper field, with her lucid survey "Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature." In that book, which made her a household name in Canada, she persuasively posited that, whereas the controlling idea of English literature is the island, and the pervasive symbol of American literature is the frontier, the dominant theme in Canadian literature is survival: "Our stories are likely to be tales not of those who made it but of those who made it back from the awful experience-the North, the snowstorm, the sinking ship-that killed everyone else."

As an undergraduate, she audited Northrop Frye's celebrated course on the Bible and literature. Frye helped her secure a fellowship at Harvard, where, in the sixties, she began to write a doctoral thesis on what she called the "English Metaphysical Romance"-the gothic fantasy novels of the nineteenth century. She never finished it. Atwood had embarked on an academic career not for the love of teaching or scholarship but because making a living as a writer seemed an implausible aspiration. "It was thought presumptuous-this is way before the age of creative-writing programs, and writers, to be serious, ought to be dead," she recalled.

Atwood started her career as a poet. Her first professionally published collection, "The Circle Game," won the Governor General's Award in 1966, and has never been out of print. The poems, which take the ring-around-the-rosy children's game as a starting point for an exploration of male-female relationships, show Atwood's early aptitude for the unflinching, visceral metaphor. A lover examines the speaker's face "indifferently / yet with the same taut curiosity / with which you might regard / a suddenly discovered part / of your own body: / a wart perhaps." Atwood's first novel, "The Edible Woman," which was written in 1964 and published five years later, is a contemporary satire in which a young woman, having just become engaged-her husband-to-be is clearly the wrong guy-finds herself unable to eat.

Some reviewers hailed Atwood's work as a voice of the burgeoning feminist movement. (A reviewer in Time said that the novel had "the kick of a perfume bottle converted into a Molotov cocktail.") She resisted the identification. "I was not in New York, where all of that kicked off, in 1969," she said. "I was in Edmonton, Alberta, where there was no feminist movement, and would not be for quite some time." Atwood was then married to Jim Polk, who had been a classmate at Harvard, and whose teaching job had taken them to the Canadian Northwest. (They divorced in 1973.) "I had people interviewing me who would say, 'How do you get the housework done?' I would say, 'Look under the sofa, then we can talk.' "

In the sometimes divisive years of second-wave feminism, Atwood reserved the right to remain nonaligned. "I didn't want to become a megaphone for any one particular set of beliefs," she said. "Having gone through that initial phase of feminism when you weren't supposed to wear frocks and lipstick-I never had any use for that. You should be able to wear them without people saying you are a traitor to your sex." In a 1976 essay, "On Being a 'Woman Writer': Paradoxes and Dilemmas," Atwood described the mixed feelings experienced by women writers old enough to have forged a writing life before representatives of the women's movement came along to claim them. "It's not finally all that comforting to have a phalanx of women . . . come breezing up now to tell them they were right all along," she wrote. "It's like being judged innocent after you've been hanged: the satisfaction, if any, is grim."

Given that her works are a mainstay of women's-studies curricula, and that she is clearly committed to women's rights, Atwood's resistance to a straightforward association with feminism can come as a surprise. But this wariness reflects her bent toward precision, and a scientific sensibility that was ingrained from childhood: Atwood wants the terms defined before she will state her position. Her feminism assumes women's rights to be human rights, and is born of having been raised with a presumption of absolute equality between the sexes. "My problem was not that people wanted me to wear frilly pink dresses-it was that I wanted to wear frilly pink dresses, and my mother, being as she was, didn't see any reason for that," she said. Atwood's early years in the forest endowed her with a sense of self-determination, and with a critical distance on codes of femininity-an ability to see those codes as cultural practices worthy of investigation, not as necessary conditions to be accepted unthinkingly. This capacity for quizzical scrutiny underlies much of her fiction: not accepting the world as it is permits Atwood to imagine the world as it might be.

Atwood and Gibson, who met in Toronto publishing circles, spent the seventies living on a farm outside the city. The countryside was cheap, and it provided a congenial environment for Gibson's two teen-age sons; it also provides the setting for what Atwood acknowledges as some of her most autobiographical writing, in the short-story collection "Moral Disorder" (2006). The title story details the less picturesque aspects of country life. "Susan the cow went away in a truck one day and came back frozen and dismembered," Atwood writes. "It was like a magic trick-a woman sawed in half on the stage in plain view of all, to reappear fully restored to wholeness, walking down the aisle; except that Susan's transformation had gone the other way."

Atwood resists critics' attempts to find parallels between her life story and her fiction, and has no desire to write a memoir. "I am interested in reading other people's, if they have had fascinating or gruesome lives, but I don't think my life has been that fascinating or gruesome," she said. "The parts of writers' lives that are interesting are usually the part before they become a well-known writer." In the mid-eighties, shortly before she started to write "The Handmaid's Tale" but was already Canada's most celebrated novelist, a documentary filmmaker named Michael Rubbo spent several days with Atwood and her family at their island retreat in northern Quebec. Rubbo sought to locate the source of Atwood's inspiration and to uncover the origins of her often gloomy themes, but most of his film is devoted to showing the ways that Atwood politely declined to conform to her inquisitor's thesis. "I use settings, but that is not to be confused with using real people, and things that have actually happened to those real people," she tells the filmmaker, while his camera lingers on her hands: she is slicing through the blood-red stalks of rhubarb plants with a chef's knife and casually discarding the poisonous leaves.

At one point, the Atwoods are given control of the camera, and conduct a strange pantomime in which Atwood sits with a brown paper bag over her head while other family members offer sentence-long characterizations of her. "That woman is my daughter, and she's incognito," Atwood's mother says, in the most illuminating of the remarks. Atwood, after removing the bag, says, "Michael Rubbo's whole problem is that he thinks of me as mysterious and a problem to be solved. . . . He's trying to find out why some of my work is sombre in tone, shall we say, and he's trying for some simple explanation of that in me or in my life, rather than in the society that I am portraying." At another moment, she suggests that her novels should be thought of as being in the tradition of the Victorian realist or social novel, and should be read in the light of objective facts, rather than subjective experience.

Some of her most perceptive readers have taken this approach. The novelist Francine Prose, reviewing "Alias Grace," noted that "Atwood has always had much in common with those writers of the last century who were engaged less by the subtle minutiae of human interaction than by the chance to use fiction as a means of exploring and dramatizing ideas." At its best, Atwood's fiction summons an intricate social world, whether it be a disquieting vision of the future, as in "The Handmaid's Tale," or a vividly rendered past, as in "Alias Grace" or "The Blind Assassin"-a genre-bending tour de force set partly in small-town Canada in the nineteen-twenties, for which Atwood won the Booker Prize, in 2000.

Like her Victorian forebears, Atwood does not shy away from the idea that the novel is a place to explore questions of morality. In an e-mail, she wrote to me, "You can't use language and avoid moral dimensions, since words are so weighted (lilies that fester vs. weeds, etc.) and all characters have to live somewhere, even if they are rabbits, as in 'Watership Down,' and they have to live at some time . . . and they have to make choices." The challenge, she noted, is avoiding moralism: "How do you 'engage' without preaching too much and reducing the characters to mere allegories? A perennial problem. But when the large social issues are very large indeed ('Doctor Zhivago'), the characters will act within-and be acted upon by-everything that surrounds them."

At the same time, Atwood's best fiction is sustained by a specificity of detail-a capacity for noticing-that might be expected from one whose scientist father introduced her to a microscope at a young age. One morning, while we were walking in her neighborhood, Atwood bumped into an old friend, Adrienne Clarkson, a college contemporary who went on to have a distinguished career as a broadcaster, and, for six years, as the governor general of Canada. "We are going to crawl into our eighties together," Clarkson said, inviting us to her home for tea. The women reminisced about studying with Northrop Frye. "He is the person who talked me into going to grad school instead of moving to Paris, and living in a garret and drinking absinthe," Atwood said. "But, Adrienne, you did move to Paris."

"You came to visit," Clarkson said.

"And you were painting your fingernails a beautiful shade of red," Atwood continued.

"How frivolous of you to remember that," Clarkson said, fondly.

"How novelistic of me to remember it," Atwood said.

Not long ago, a history society at the University of Toronto, which was compiling a video archive of notable alumni, asked to interview Atwood about her college days. On a chilly afternoon in January, she found her way to an upper room in the university's Gothic Revival student center. Four eager undergraduates, all women, were there to film and quiz her. Atwood sat by a leaded-glass window against a gray sky, and amiably answered questions about what it was like being a young woman on campus in the fifties. "Whatever things are like when you are young, they seem normal, because you have nothing to compare them to," she said. "For instance, I would not ever have worn jeans to high school. It would not have been permitted except on football days. They wanted us to wear jeans on football day, so we could sit on the hill and not have anyone looking up our skirts. It takes a while to figure this out, but now I realize that must have been the reason."

In those days, Atwood said, there was no fear of rape on campus, as there seemed to be today. "I am not saying that it didn't happen, but you would never hear of it," she said. "And I would suspect that the chances of that happening were quite low, because what everybody was afraid of then was getting pregnant. The boys were afraid of getting pregnant, too, because you could end up married at an early age that way, and people didn't particularly want that. But there was no Pill."

One young interviewer, wide-eyed, said, "It is very interesting to consider the importance of the Pill, not just for women but in changing society. I hadn't really considered it."

Atwood continued talking about changing mores-the supplanting of the panty girdle by nylon tights, and the consequent innovation of the miniskirt. But when one of the students fumbled with the camera, in an effort to renew its memory card, Atwood took the opportunity to turn the tables.

"I was astonished to see that the Polaroid camera has come back- why? What do you do with a Polaroid picture?" she asked.

The students, delighted, offered a chorus of explanations: such images combined the instant gratification of the selfie with the pleasure of a physical object that could be pinned on a wall. Atwood went on to seek their views on other surprisingly resurgent technologies-vinyl records, even cassette players-and then shifted to something more up-to-date. "Do you know an exercise app called Zombies, Run?" she asked.

"Is that, like, where you go for a run and zombies chase you?" one student asked. Yes, Atwood said: the app, a kind of interactive podcast, plays an apocalyptic story line in a listener's ears as she jogs, thus making a workout more entertaining, if you like that sort of thing. "I'm in one of the episodes," Atwood announced. She has a cameo as herself: her voice is supposedly being transmitted over a crackling phone line from Toronto.

Finally, the students' camera was working. Atwood faced it again, and said, brightly, "So, let's see. What else do you want to know?"

Her openness to younger people is, in part, a consequence of the passage of time: there are many more younger people around than older ones, so she'd better be open to them, if she's going to be open to anybody. But it is also temperamental. Zombies, Run! was co-created by Naomi Alderman, a British novelist in her early forties, who is also a video-game designer. She and Atwood became friends after Atwood chose to be her mentor, through a program sponsored by Rolex. "She was intrigued that I might know about something she doesn't know about yet, and I might be able to tell her about it," Alderman said. "I don't think she judges anything in advance as being beneath her, or beyond her, or outside her realm of interest." Alderman has accompanied Atwood and Gibson on several bird-watching vacations, including one earlier this year in the rain forests of Panama. "We stayed in tents," Alderman told me. "And the first night I was going back to my tent and my headlamp caught these blue shining glints on the jungle floor, and every single one of these glints was a pair of spider's eyes staring at me. When I told Margaret, she was very disappointed-she really wanted to see the spiders."

Atwood's embrace of technological innovation is sometimes more theoretical than practical: she has yet to master streaming video, so she still watches DVDs. Occasionally, her fascination with technological processes, combined with an incomprehension of them, can have productive results. A dozen or so years ago, when videoconferencing technology was still a novelty, Atwood wondered whether it might be possible to develop a means of conducting book signings remotely. "I thought of the writing flying through the air, and materializing somewhere else," she said. Her flight of fancy, combined with some technical and marketing know-how assembled by Matthew Gibson, her stepson, resulted in the LongPen, a robotic device that enables a writer-or anyone-to sign a paper remotely in a manner that replicates the speed and pressure of the original autograph, and is indistinguishable from it. (Gibson has since created an e-signature company, Syngrafii, and it sells the LongPen, which is marketed less to weary authors than to financial and legal companies.)

Atwood was an early adopter of Twitter, signing up in 2009; she now has about a million and a half followers, though she is aware that some of that number must be bots. "I do sometimes get 'I miss your dick'-they don't read the fine print," she said. She appreciates followers who have a specialized interest in the sciences; they help her keep abreast of recent developments that might be of interest for a future writing project, or resonate with a past one. She engages, often cheerily, with her followers and others, sometimes on topics that another writer might avoid. "Only 'race' is the human race, sez me. (And says science.)," she wrote in response to one user's speculation that she was Jewish. "But no, I wouldn't have ended up in a Hitler death camp for that reason."

For years, Atwood has argued that Twitter in particular and the Internet in general have been good for literacy. "People have to actually be able to read and write to use the Internet, so it's a great literacy driver, if kids are given the tools and the incentive to learn the skills that allow them to access it," she said, while being interviewed at a digital-media conference in 2011. She has been a champion of Wattpad, a story-sharing site founded in Toronto a decade ago. In her view, it not only provides a place for North American teen-agers to publish their own zombie tales; it also offers cell-phone-equipped readers in the developing world with an entry point into fiction, even if they have no access to libraries, schools, or books. Her 2015 novel, "The Heart Goes Last," which takes the premise of for-profit prisons to monstrous, comic ends, was excerpted on Wattpad. Atwood has also published a collection of poems, "Thriller Suite," serially, on Wattpad; the book has been viewed more than three hundred and eighty thousand times since then, presumably reaching many readers who had never bought a volume of poetry.

She believes that early fears, among some observers, that the advent of the Web would mean the end of books were misplaced. "I think we know now that, neurologically, there are reasons why that isn't going to happen," Atwood said. "Installments on a phone-those, the brain can handle. 'War and Peace,' maybe not. Though 'War and Peace' was first published in installments, by the way." She is fond of saying that, with all technology, there is a good side, a bad side, and a stupid side that you weren't expecting. "Look at an axe-you can cut a tree down with it, and you can murder your neighbor with it," she said. "And the stupid side you hadn't considered is that you can accidentally cut your foot off with it."

A few years ago, Atwood became the first author to participate in a conceptual art project, the Future Library, which was conceived by a Scottish artist named Katie Paterson. In the course of a hundred years, a hundred writers will contribute a manuscript to the project. The manuscripts will remain unread except for their titles-Atwood's is "Scribbler Moon"-until 2114, when they will be printed on paper made from a thousand pine trees that have been planted in the Nordmarka, a forest not far from where the library will be maintained, in Oslo, Norway.

"Being the kind of child who buried things in the back yard in jars, hoping that someone else would dig them up sometime, I of course liked this project," she told me. Atwood has a keen interest in conservation: she uses her Twitter feed to highlight ecological issues ranging from the decimation of the bee population to ocean pollution. The optimism inherent in the Future Library-the belief that there will be readers, and a world for them to inhabit-seems at odds with some of the darker scenarios in Atwood's fiction, and I suggested as much to her.

"This is not a question of expect," she said. "It is a question of hope. It is a question of faith rather than knowledge. You wouldn't do it unless you thought there was a chance." Humans, she said, "have hope built in," adding, "If our ancestors had not had that component, they would not have bothered getting up in the morning. You are always going to have hope that today there will be a giraffe, where yesterday there wasn't one." At the same time, Atwood loves to entertain notions of how degraded our future might become, and what effect that might have on the human race. She speculates that, if our atmosphere becomes too carbon-heavy, with a dwindling in the oxygen supply, one of the first things that will happen is that we will become a lot less intelligent.

But a novelist necessarily imagines the fate of individuals; the human condition is what the novel was made for exploring. "We just actually can't bear the idea of nothing," Atwood said. "I think that is partly to do with grammar. You say, 'I will be dead,' but there is still an 'I.' There is still a subject." Her novels, she went on, are not without hope, either. "The Handmaid's Tale" has a coda, in the form of an address given, in 2195, by a keynote speaker at an academic conference, the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies. Civilization has survived, even to the point of sustaining groaningly bad academic puns. (Women fleeing Gilead, a professor notes, cross the border via "The Underground Frailroad.") "I have never done everybody in," Atwood said. "I have never polished them all off so that there's nobody left alive, now, have I? No. "

In the early aughts, she began an ambitious cycle of novels exploring a different kind of dystopian future. The Maddaddam Trilogy-"Oryx and Crake," "The Year of the Flood," and "Maddaddam"-was published between 2003 and 2013. The books depict a North American landscape that is ravaged by ecological disaster and inhabited by a genetically modified race of quasi-humans, the Crakers. As usual, Atwood researched her subject voraciously, and this time she was further enabled by the Internet. The trilogy crackles with a gleeful inventiveness that is sometimes tonally at odds with its apocalyptic content: the Crakers' skin cells have been modified to repel ultraviolet rays and mosquitoes, for example, and the capacity for sexual jealousy has been edited out of their genome.

One evening in Toronto, Atwood invited me to her home, where we sat in its spacious kitchen on tall stools at a counter, overlooking her wintry, barren-looking garden. Graeme Gibson poured three glasses of whiskey while Atwood sorted through Christmas cards, dispensing with the chore as efficiently as if she were slicing rhubarb. I remarked on an aspect of "Oryx and Crake" that had moved me. The protagonist, Snowman, apparently left alone in the world, strives to remember unusual words he once knew. Atwood writes, " Valance. Norn. Serendipity. Pibroch. Lubricious. When they've gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been." Reading this passage in recent months led me to think about the catastrophic devaluation of intellection that seems to have occurred in American society: the willful repudiation of rigorous thinking, and objective facts, that helped propel Trump to victory. I remarked to Atwood that it felt like a prescient metaphor.

"It feels like real life," Atwood replied, quickly. "I am sure every generation feels that way, as they see younger people coming up who don't know what they are talking about." She asked if I knew Edith Wharton's short story "After Holbein": "This old gentleman in New York society goes off to visit this hostess of his youth, and they sit at this enormous table, and everything is as wonderful as he remembers it, and there are bouquets of flowers, and this delicious food, and they have this wonderful conversation and she looks as beautiful as ever. And you see it all from the point of view of the servants, and it's two old people sitting at a table eating gruel, and the flowers are all bunches of newspaper."

News comes often to Atwood of friends who have died, or are ailing. Gibson has been given a diagnosis of early dementia, and they are both supporters of the Canadian dying-with-dignity movement. "The story of Wharton's that really terrifies me is 'The Pelican,' " she went on, recalling a tale in which a well-born widow takes to giving public lectures to support her young son, and then continues to give them for decades, even after the son is a grown man. "People are very sympathetic, but the lecture itself is like watching someone unreeling from her mouth a very long spool of blank paper," Atwood said. "That's the metaphor that frightens me-that I am going to be up in public, unravelling from my mouth a long spool of blank paper."

In March, Atwood came to New York City, for the annual National Book Critics Circle award ceremony, where she was being given a lifetime-achievement award. (Atwood recently remarked, on an Ask Me Anything thread on Reddit, that she is at the "Gold Watch and Goodbye" phase of her career.) The ceremony was held at the New School, and the collective mood of the assembled editors, critics, and writers-a concentration of New York's liberal intelligentsia in its purest form-was celebratory, as such events always are, but also agitated and galvanized. That morning, President Trump had issued his first federal budget plan, and he had proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as ending funding for public broadcasting, and closing agencies devoted to social welfare and environmental oversight. The crowd felt like bruised defenders of a civilization that they hadn't realized was susceptible to attack.

Trump's agenda was criticized by many of the award recipients. Michelle Dean, a young Canadian writer who won the association's annual prize for excellence in reviewing, declared, "The struggle we presently find ourselves in is not a mistake, and not a fluke. . . . It crept into our lives while we were napping. Power sometimes works that way, but I still wish we hadn't missed it." Lately, Dean added, she'd been rereading "The Handmaid's Tale" for the first time since high school: "There are so few books like that being published right now. The application of literary intelligence to this question of power-it's kind of out of style. And many writers just seem more interested in exploring the self."

Two days before Trump's Inauguration, Atwood had published an essay in The Nation, in which she questioned the generalities sometimes made by left-leaning intellectuals about the role of the artist in public life. "Artists are always being lectured on their moral duty, a fate other professionals-dentists, for example-generally avoid," she observed. "There's nothing inherently sacred about films and pictures and writers and books. 'Mein Kampf' was a book." In fact, she said, writers and other artists are particularly prone to capitulating to authoritarian pressure; the isolation inherent in the craft makes them psychologically vulnerable. "The pen is mightier than the sword, but only in retrospect," she wrote. "At the time of combat, those with the swords generally win."

At the New School, when Atwood, wearing a long black dress with a patterned black shawl draped around her shoulders, was summoned to the stage, she took a cheekier tack than she had taken in the Nation essay. "I'm very, very, very happy to be here, because they let me across the border," she said, her voice low and deliberate. Atwood characterized literary criticism as a thankless task. "Authors are sensitive beings," she observed, to titters of amusement. "You, therefore, know that all positive adjectives applied to them will be forgotten, yet anything even faintly smacking of imperfection in their work will rankle until the end of time." An author whom she had reviewed once berated her use of the adjective "accomplished," she recalled. " 'Don't you know that "accomplished" is an insult?' " she deadpanned. "I didn't know."

Then her remarks took an exhortatory turn. "Why do I do such a painful task?" she said. "For the same reason I give blood. We must all do our part, because if nobody contributes to this worthy enterprise then there won't be any, just when it's most needed." Now is one of those times, she warned: "Never has American democracy felt so challenged." The necessary conditions for dictatorship, Atwood noted, include the shutting down of independent media, which mutes the expression of contrary or subversive opinions; writers form part of the fragile barrier standing between authoritarian control and open democracy. "There are still places on this planet where to be caught reading you, or even me, would incur a severe penalty," Atwood said. "I hope there will soon be fewer such places." Her voice dropped to a stage whisper: "I am not holding my breath."

In the meantime, she thanked the book critics, though even her gratitude carried a note of subversion. "I will cherish this lifetime-achievement award from you, though, like all sublunar blessings, it is a mixed one," she said. "Why do I only get one lifetime? Where did this lifetime go?" ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated the city in Texas where "The Handmaid's Tale" was banned. It also mistakenly cited the date of first publication in the U.S., rather than in Canada.

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Margaret Atwood, the Prophet of Dystopia

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Rebecca Mead on Margaret Atwood, the author of dystopian novels about misogyny, oppression, and environmental destruction, such as "The Handmaid's Tale."

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Interview of Margaret Atwood in the L.A. Times

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Interview of Margaret Atwood in the L.A. Times

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Hulu's upcoming adaptation of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" has everyone seeing red. Literally. Women dressed like the narrator of the classic yet still disturbingly relevant dystopian novel have been showing up everywhere, from Comic-Con to the the National Mall. They made an appearance over the weekend at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival, as did Atwood herself. Before speaking to a packed-to-the-rafters audience at USC's Broward Hall, she gave The Times a quick Facebook Live interview about her possible clairvoyance, the power of technology and whether or not "The Handmaid's Tale" is a feminist book.

Have you seen the handmaids?

I just saw the handmaids; they were in proper formation. They very modestly did not speak to us. But if you go up and ask them for a card, they will give you a card that says, "Don't let the bastards grind you down" in Latin. And they will explain to you what it means in English. They're doing their job.

The handmaids have been appearing all over the country. On top of being a splendid marketing tool for the show on Hulu, what is it like to see these creatures from your imagination, not just embodied, but such a central part of a larger political conversation right now?

It's very weird. But we have to give some credit to the designer of the outfits, which are now very iconic. I've seen various iterations of this outfit over the years and she's done a wonderful job. Her name is Ane Crabtree.

It is quite strange [the first images of the handmaids] came to me on Twitter. Someone took a video and sent it to me, I wasn't expecting that. The [handmaids] who turned up at the Texas Legislature were not from Hulu. They popped up in the form of signs during the huge [women's] march in January.

Actresses dressed as Handmaids marketing Hulu's "The Handmaid's Tale" walk through the crowd at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. (Patrick T. Fallon / For The Times)

This book was written in 1985, but it's seen as so prescient. How does it feel to have written something that seems like it's coming true?

Oh course, you write such things in the hopes that they will therefore not come true. On the plus side, a lot of the people are reading the book. On the negative side, for reasons that you would not necessarily wish. It's ambivalent.

I think that the television series has given a huge boost to that as well. Putting the trailer ad right in the middle of the Super Bowl, another unexpected move. I would call that guerrilla marketing.

There was a little kerfuffle at the Tribeca Film Festival about whether it's a feminist reading. And you call it an alternative future. It's not sci-fi?

It's not sci-fi in a galaxy far, far away and in another time. It's SF on this planet here, now, shortly. More like "1984" and less like "Star Wars."

Do you consider it a feminist book?

If you DJ reality, that is, if you make a mash-up of actual reality, which is partly what that book is, you're going to end up with something that inevitably people will say, "This is feminist." Because you cannot avoid that.

Just as if you do a mash-up of reality from the point of view of African Americans in this country, you're going to end up with something that will say, "This is Black Lives Matter." It's not that people necessarily have started out from that premise. But if you're looking at reality, that will be the result because that is reality.

I didn't put anything into the book that has not happened sometime, somewhere. Or wasn't happening then and isn't happening now. So you can call that feminist, if you like. I didn't start from ideology, I started from what I was collecting and seeing. But of course, I must have been instigated, must I not?

That's No. 1, No. 2. I always want to know what people mean by that word. Some people mean it quite negatively, other people mean it very positively, some people mean it in a broad sense, other people mean it in a more specific sense. Therefore, in order to answer the question, you have to ask the person what they mean.

You're an early adapter of Twitter and digital technology. Do you think this is something that helps people organize? Something that would help prevent the circumstances of "Handmaid's Tale"?

In early stages, it would help people organize, as it has done. But unfortunately, it also helps dictatorial regimes identify where you are and who you are. There's a sketch on the Onion, some years ago that said, "The CIA has just invented this wonderful new thing to identify everybody in the country and it's called Facebook." That was a joke, but...

In a democracy, when you're still allowed to have protest marches without being shot and arrested, I think, yes, it's a very good drawing-together and news-disseminating tool. But as you can see, it can also be used to disseminate news for purposes that you might not necessarily endorse. It's a tool, but who is using that tool, and what are they using it for?

In this regime, in Gilead No. 1, those women do not have cellphones. And No. 2, if they did, they would probably take out the SIM cards and grind them to powder because they don't want people knowing where they are.

You participated in the women's march. Did you see the science march?

The science thing is very, very worrying. I didn't participate in it because I was on a plane. But I know a lot of scientists, I grew up with scientists and I disseminated the news of the science march on my Twitter. The science thing is extremely worrying. We lived a version of that in Canada. We had the same kinds of things being defunded under the previous regime. Part of the intent was to get get rid of any data with climate change and environmental pollution. License to pollute your drinking water and have your kids drink that, and you're not allowed to know what's in it.

Is there anything you want to say to your readers?

Keep the faith. Whatever that may be. Don't get too depressed yet, because I have a belief in America being very diverse and ornery, and containing a lot of people who are not going to roll over very easily for a totalitarian dictatorship. That is what I think.

It has been a bit of a shock to the very young, who don't remember things like this in the past. They think this is the very, very worst thing that has ever happened. But trust me, it isn't. Your mission is to keep this from not being any worse than it is.

"The Handmaid's Tale" premieres on Hulu on April 26.
See the most-read stories in Entertainment this hour "

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Margaret Atwood answers the question: Is 'The Handmaid's Tale' a feminist book?

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Hulu's upcoming adaptation of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" has everyone seeing red. Literally. Women dressed like the narrator of the classic yet still disturbingly relevant dystopian novel have been showing up everywhere, from Comic-Con to the the National Mall. They made an appearance over the weekend at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival, as did Atwood herself.

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February 9, 1986
Book Review
By MARY McCARTHY

By Margaret Atwood. THE HANDMAID'S TALE

urely the essential element of a cautionary tale is recognition. Surprised recognition, even, enough to administer a shock. We are warned, by seeing our present selves in a distorting mirror, of what we may be turning into if current trends are allowed to continue. That was the effect of ''Nineteen Eighty-Four,'' with its scary dating, not 40 years ahead, maybe also of ''Brave New World'' and, to some extent, of ''A Clockwork Orange.''

It is an effect, for me, almost strikingly missing from Margaret Atwood's very readable book ''The Handmaid's Tale,'' offered by the publisher as a ''forecast'' of what we may have in store for us in the quite near future. A standoff will have been achieved vis-a-vis the Russians, and our own country will be ruled by right-wingers and religious fundamentalists, with males restored to the traditional role of warriors and us females to our ''place'' - which, however, will have undergone subdivision into separate sectors, of wives, breeders, servants and so forth, each clothed in the appropriate uniform. A fresh postfeminist approach to future shock, you might say. Yet the book just does not tell me what there is in our present mores that I ought to watch out for unless I want the United States of America to become a slave state something like the Republic of Gilead whose outlines are here sketched out.

Another reader, less peculiar than myself, might confess to a touch of apathy regarding credit cards (instruments of social control), but I have always been firmly against them and will go to almost any length to avoid using one. Yet I can admit to a general failure to extrapolate sufficiently from the 1986 scene. Still, even when I try, in the light of these palely lurid pages, to take the Moral Majority seriously, no shiver of recognition ensues. I just can't see the intolerance of the far right, presently directed not only at abortion clinics and homosexuals but also at high school libraries and small-town schoolteachers, as leading to a super-biblical puritanism by which procreation will be insisted on and reading of any kind banned. Nor, on the other hand, do I fear our ''excesses'' of tolerance as pointing in the same direction. Liberality toward pornography in the courts, the media, on the newstands may make an anxious parent feel disgusted with liberalism, but can it really move a nation to install a theocracy strictly based on the Book of Genesis? Where are the signs of it? A backlash is only a backlash, that is, a reaction. Fear of a backlash, in politics, ought not to deter anybody from adhering to principle; that would be only another form of cowardice.

The same for ''excessive'' feminism, which here seems to bear some responsibility for Gilead, to be one of its causes. The kind of doctrinaire feminism likely to produce a backlash is exemplified in the narrator's absurd mother, whom we first hear of at a book-burning in the old, pre-Gilead time - the ''right'' kind of book-burning, naturally, merely a pyre of pornographic magazines: ''Mother,'' thinks the narrator in what has become the present, ''You wanted a women's culture. Well, now there is one.'' The wrong kind, of course.

The new world of ''The Handmaid's Tale'' is a woman's world, even though governed, seemingly, and policed by men. Its ethos is entirely domestic, its female population is divided into classes based on household functions, each class clad in a separate color that instantly identifies the wearer - dull green for the Marthas (houseworkers); blue for the Wives; red, blue and green stripes for the Econowives (working class); red for the Handmaids (whose function is to bear children to the head of the household, like Bilhah, Rachel's handmaid in Genesis, but who also, in their long red gowns and white wimple-like headgear, have something of the aura of a temple harlot); brown for the Aunts (a thought-control force, part-governess, part-reform-school matron). The head of the household - whose first name the handmaid takes, adding the word ''of'' to show possession -''Offred,'' ''Ofwarren'' - is known as the Commander. It is his duty to inseminate his assigned partner, who lies on the spread thighs of his wife. THE Commanders, presumably, are the high bureaucracy of the regime, yet they are oddly powerless in the household, having no part in the administration of discipline and ceremonially subject to their aging wives. We are not told how and in what sense they govern. The oversight perhaps accounts for the thin credibility of the parable. That they lack freedom, are locked into their own rigid system, is only to be expected. It is no surprise that our narrator's commander, Fred, like a typical bourgeois husband of former times, does a bit of cheating, getting Offred to play Scrabble with him secretly at night (where books are forbidden, word games become wicked), look at his hoard of old fashion magazines (forbidden), kiss him, even go dressed in glitter and feathers to an underground bunny-type nightclub staffed by fallen women, mostly lesbian. Nor is it a surprise that his wife catches him/ them. Plusca change, plus c'est la meme chose. But that cannot be the motto for a cautionary tale, whose job is to warn of change.

Infertility is the big problem of the new world and the reason for many of its institutions. A dramatically lowered birth rate, which brought on the fall of the old order, had a plurality of causes, we are told. ''The air got too full, once, of chemicals, rays, radiation, the water swarmed with toxic molecules.'' During an earthquake, atomic power plants exploded (''nobody's fault''). A mutant strain of syphilis appeared, and of course AIDS. Then there were women who refused to breed, as an antinuclear protest, and had their tubes tied up. Anyway, infertility, despite the radical measures of the new regime, has not yet been overcome. Not only are there barren women (mostly shipped to the colonies) but a worrying sterility in men, especially among the powerful who ought to be reproducing themselves. The amusing suggestion is made, late in the book at a symposium (June 25, 2195) of Gileadean historical studies, that sterility among the Commanders may have been the result of an earlier gene-splicing experiment with mumps that produced a virus intended for insertion into the supply of caviar used by top officials in Moscow.

''The Handmaid's Tale'' contains several such touches of deft sardonic humor - for example, the television news program showing clouds of smoke over what was formerly the city of Detroit: we hear the anchorman explain that resettlement of the children of Ham in National Homeland One (the wilds of North Dakota) is continuing on schedule - 3,000 have arrived that week. And yet what is lacking, I think - what constitutes a fundamental disappointment after a promising start - is the destructive force of satire. ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' had it, ''A Clockwork Orange'' had it, even ''Brave New World'' had it, though Huxley was rather short on savagery. If ''The Handmaid's Tale'' doesn't scare one, doesn't wake one up, it must be because it has no satiric bite.

The author has carefully drawn her projections from current trends. As she has said elsewhere, there is nothing here that has not been anticipated in the United States of America that we already know. Perhaps that is the trouble: the projections are too neatly penciled in. The details, including a Wall (as in Berlin, but also, as in the Middle Ages, a place where executed malefactors are displayed), all raise their hands announcing themselves present. At the same time, the Republic of Gilead itself, whatever in it that is not a projection, is insufficiently imagined. The Aunts are a good invention, though I cannot picture them as belonging to any future; unlike Big Brother, they are more part of the past - our schoolteachers.

But the most conspicuous lack, in comparison with the classics of the fearsome-future genre, is the inability to imagine a language to match the changed face of common life. No newspeak. And nothing like the linguistic tour de force of ''A Clockwork Orange'' - the brutal melting-down of current English and Slavic words that in itself tells the story of the dread new breed. The writing of ''The Handmaid's Tale'' is undistinguished in a double sense, ordinary if not glaringly so, but also indistinguishable from what one supposes would be Margaret Atwood's normal way of expressing herself in the circumstances. This is a serious defect, unpardonable maybe for the genre: a future that has no language invented for it lacks a personality. That must be why, collectively, it is powerless to scare. ONE could argue that the very tameness of the narrator-heroine's style is intended as characterization. It is true that a leading trait of Offred (we are never told her own, real name in so many words, but my textual detective work says it is June) has always been an unwillingness to stick her neck out, and perhaps we are meant to conclude that such unwillingness, multiplied, may be fatal to a free society. After the takeover, she tells us, there were some protests and demonstrations. ''I didn't go on any of the marches. Luke [ her husband ] said it would be futile, and I had to think about them, my family, him and her [ their little girl ] .'' Famous last words. But, though this may characterize an attitude - fairly widespread - it does not constitute a particular kind of speech. And there are many poetical passages, for example (chosen at random): ''All things white and circular. I wait for the day to unroll, for the earth to turn, according to the round face of the implacable clock.'' Which is surely oldspeak, wouldn't you say?

Characterization in general is weak in ''The Handmaid's Tale,'' which maybe makes it a poet's novel. I cannot tell Luke, the husband, from Nick, the chauffeur-lover who may be an Eye (government spy) and/ or belong to the ''Mayday'' underground. Nor is the Commander strongly drawn. Again, the Aunts are best. How sad for postfeminists that one does not feel for Offred-June half as much as one did for Winston Smith, no hero either but at any rate imaginable. It seems harsh to say again of a poet's novel - so hard to put down, in part so striking - that it lacks imagination, but that, I fear, is the problem.
Mary McCarthy, whose latest book is ''Occasional Prose,'' will assume the new Stevenson Chair of Literature at Bard College beginning this fall. The Lady Was Not for Hanging
The dedication of ''The Handmaid's Tale'' -''For Mary Webster and Perry Miller'' - holds clues to the novel's roots in our Puritan past. ''Mary Webster was an ancestor of mine who was hanged for a witch in Connecticut,'' Margaret Atwood explained. ''But she didn't die. They hadn't invented the drop yet'' - the part of the platform that falls away - ''so they hanged her but she lived.'' The author's studies in early American history under the Harvard scholar Perry Miller also informs her theme of religious intolerance. ''You often hear in North America, 'It can't happen here,' but it happened quite early on. The Puritans banished people who didn't agree with them, so we would be rather smug to assume that the seeds are not there. That's why I set the book in Cambridge,'' said the Canadian author, who lives in Toronto and has traveled widely in the United States. Like many of her fictional women (she has written poems, essays and novels, notably the feminist classic ''Surfacing''), she is wryly unpolemical. ''Feminist activity is not causal, it's symptomatic,'' she said of the book's antiwoman society. ''Any power structure will co-opt the views of its opponents, to sugarcoat the pill. The regime gives women some things the women's movement says they want -control over birth, no pornography - but there's a price. If you were going to put in a repressive regime, how would you do it?'' Despite the novel's projections from current events, Margaret Atwood resists calling her book a warning. ''I do not have a political agenda of that kind. The book won't tell you who to vote for,'' she said. But she advises, ''Anyone who wants power will try to manipulate you by appealing to your desires and fears, and sometimes your best instincts. Women have to be a little cautious about that kind of appeal to them. What are we being asked to give up?''
- Caryn James
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February 9, 1986 Book Review By MARY McCARTHY By Margaret Atwood. THE HANDMAID'S TALE urely the essential element of a cautionary tale is recognition. Surprised recognition, even, enough to administer a shock. We are warned, by seeing our present selves in a distorting mirror, of what we may be turning into if current trends are allowed to continue.

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Patrick Parrinder

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Cape, 324 pp, £9.95, March 1986, ISBN 0 224 02348 9

'Fear is a powerful stimulant,' says Offred, the heroine of Margaret Atwood's chilling tale of the near future. Trained at the Rachel and Leah Centre and habited in red, Offred belongs to a quasi-religious order of 'sacred vessels', 'two-legged wombs' whose task it is to produce the next generation of the ruling élite in the Republic of Gilead. Gilead is a Puritan tyranny set up, after the assassination of the President and Congress of the United States, in breakaway New England; Offred herself is confined to the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the university is closed and the football stadium is used for public executions, now known as Salvagings.

The name Offred does not mean Offered or Offred, though in terms of the rhetoric of The Handmaid's Tale a good case could be made for either signification. The overt, or offered, meaning of Offred is Of Fred, Fred being the Commander to whose household she has been assigned as sacred vessel or handmaid. But the real meaning of Offred, I believe, is Afraid; though since it is not her real name, she is also Not Afraid. Offred has had a predecessor, who bore the same name and who left behind a single message - Nolite te bastardes carborundum, a piece of familiar schoolboy dog-Latin - before hanging herself from her bedroom lampshade. Atwood's narrator, however, is determined to prove a survivor if nothing else, and her tale at least has survived.

Margaret Atwood's novels are not written to a formula. The Handmaid's Tale, like its five predecessors, is an unrepeatable and starkly individual performance. At the same time, it is the Science Fiction fable that this author (who is at once a poet and a primarily realistic novelist) has long hinted that she intended to write. In The Edible Woman, first published in 1969, one of the characters looked forward to life after the next cataclysm, when 'Birth would be essential again,' and a new Venus Genetrix, the goddess of a new fertility cult, would arise. In a short story, 'The Salt Garden', Atwood created a protagonist suffering from periodic black-outs brought on by visions of the end of the world. One of her black-outs took place while she was making love, and, as she explained to her partner afterwards, 'it was like a nuclear explosion.' ('He thought she was using a simile,' we are told.) In Lady Oracle the narrator, a specialist in bodice-rippers or 'costume Gothics', confided that 'maybe I'll try some science fiction. The future doesn't appeal to me as much as the past, but I'm sure it's better for you.' The future in literary fictions is always a simile or metaphor, never a straight prediction; and, for Atwood's privileged white middle-class characters, it is a metaphor for fear. With The Handmaid's Tale Atwood's art can be seen, more clearly than before, to be based on the proposition that fear is good for you.

Though the structure and setting of each novel are different, there is a recognisable type of Atwood heroine. She is wry, observant, resourceful - and frightened. She is a determinedly free woman, a denizen of the permissive society who is agonisingly aware of finding herself trapped in the wrong place and with the wrong people. The residual puritanism of her upbringing, a 'survival' in the anthropological sense, turns out to be more relevant to her predicament than she or we ever suspected. In Atwood's earlier novels this heroine was invariably a Canadian, often a young woman from an outlying settlement or small town who had come to live in Toronto. Offred, by contrast, is at once a New Englander and someone who no longer even thinks of herself as free. But her tale is entirely consonant with Atwood's sense of her own tradition as set out in Survival (1972), her 'Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature'. Survival is a necessarily bleaker and more Spartan counterpart to Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel - a book which it rivals, however, in sheer momentum and intellectual buoyancy.
The full text of this book review is only available to subscribers of the London Review of Books.

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'Fear is a powerful stimulant,' says Offred, the heroine of Margaret Atwood's chilling tale of the near future. Trained at the Rachel and Leah Centre and habited in red, Offred belongs to a quasi-religious order of 'sacred vessels', 'two-legged wombs' whose task it is to . . .

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ColourTwist: 'After a few pages of Divergent, I was addicted. I could not physically put it down'

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Imagine the publishing world as it might look in a dystopian universe in the distant future. In this world, college English majors - call them "Englies" - aspire to write only one kind of book: the dystopian young adult novel set in the distant future. (Englies of a certain status are permitted to write about dystopias populated by vampires.) Another subset of the population - "the Fans" - provides a kind of slave labor, posting endlessly to dedicated blogs and recording podcasts, providing free marketing for an unceasing succession of aspiring best-seller trilogies.

I couldn't help imagining this world as I read "Divergent," the first in a planned trilogy of young adult novels set in a dystopian future and written by Veronica Roth, who sold the book in a major pre-emptive bid before she even graduated from Northwestern last year. With "Divergent," Roth adds to a genre that has crossed over from having a vague cultural moment to being a full-bore trend, much of it driven by the wild success of Suzanne Collins's "Hunger Games" trilogy.

"Divergent" holds its own in the genre, with brisk pacing, lavish flights of imagination and writing that occasionally startles with fine detail. As the mother of Beatrice, the main character, cuts her daughter's hair, the young narrator notices "the strands fall on the floor in a dull, blond ring." Beatrice sees her reflection only when her hair is cut - the second day of every third month - because she has been born into Abnegation, one of five factions that make up the population. Those who belong to Abnegation believe selflessness begets world harmony; those who choose Candor see honesty as the path to the same goal.

The other groups are Amity, Erudite and Dauntless, and it is this last group that calls out to Beatrice when she is given the opportunity either to stay with her family's group or to choose another allegiance. As part of the initiation process for Dauntless, Tris (a nickname Beatrice adopts to reflect her new self) must prove her mettle with adolescent feats of bravado, like jumping off a moving train onto a rooftop. She endures simulated death traps and jacks up her adrenaline with breathtaking leaps into the unknown.

"Divergent" clearly has thrills, but it also movingly explores a more common adolescent anxiety - the painful realization that coming into one's own sometimes means leaving family behind, both ideologically and physically. It is not a coincidence that Tris falls in love while undergoing initiation into her new tribe. It is precisely the moment when young people discover romance that family life all but evaporates, at least in terms of its emotional significance.

Terrible things happen to the people Tris loves, yet the characters absorb these events with disquieting ease. Here, somehow, the novel's flights from reality distance the reader from the emotional impact that might come in a more affecting realistic (or even fantasy) novel.

In this way, though Roth's "Divergent" is rich in plot and imaginative details, it suffers by comparison with Collins's opus. The shortcoming would not be so noticeable were there less blatant overlap between the two. Both "Divergent" and "The Hunger Games" feature appealing, but not conventionally pretty, young women with toughness to spare. Both start out with public sorting rituals that determine the characters' futures. And both put the narrators in contrived, bloody battles that are in fact competitions witnessed by an audience. Even the language sounds familiar: the Hob is a central geographic point in "The Hunger Games"; in "Divergent," it's the Hub in the remnants of what was once the Sears Tower. For a book that explores themes about the right to be individual and the importance of breaking away from the pack, "Divergent" does not exactly distinguish itself.

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Young Adult Books - Divergent - By Veronica Roth

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Imagine the publishing world as it might look in a dystopian universe in the distant future. In this world, college English majors - call them "Englies" - aspire to write only one kind of book: the dystopian young adult novel set in the distant future.

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George Orwell is back in vogue these days - a far cry from 2014, when The Guardian was debating whether or not 1984 was good bad or bad good fiction. In January this year, shot up the bestseller charts, and the trail doesn't just go cold there. Soon joining it at the top were 1984's old dystopian buddies, Brave New World and It Can't Happen Here; in the meantime, sales of The Handmaid's Tale were up 30 percent in 2016.

We are re-reading these past giants of the genre, even though we're used to the idea of dystopia in our pop culture by now. (Credit where credit's due: The Hunger Games was something of a big factor.) Yet the dystopian novel - as we know it, in its full totalitarian glory - is itself a relatively new phenomenon. Before 1900, only the British satirist Jonathan Swift wrote books that could, with one eye squinted, be called dystopian. So when did dystopias and dystopian themes start taking off in modern fiction? And is there a pattern to their rise and fall throughout the past?

Origins

First, there was the concept of utopia, the yin to dystopia's yang. The former sprung from the mind of Sir Thomas More, who wrote Utopia in 1516. Ironically, More possessed serious reservations about the existence of utopias. (The word itself could be a pun, derived from the Greek word u-topos ("no place") and also eu-topos ("good place"). Such a good place, More seemed to reason, was not anything we knew, and so it must not exist.)

If a utopia is a place that's too good to exist, a dystopia is a place that we certainly don't want to exist.

Today, we can define dystopia as "an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one" ( OED, 2017). The first public usagegoesall the way back to John Stuart Mill in 1868. In a speech to the House of Commons, Mill said, "It is, perhaps, too complimentary to call them Utopians, they ought rather to be called dys-topians, or caco-topians" ('cacotopia' was relegated to the Wastepaper Basket of History). But it wasn't until about 50 years afterward, when authors made the word their own, that the idea of dystopia began to actually take root in the public consciousness.

1920s & 30s: Defining The Genre

Perhaps it makes sense that the modern dystopian novel emerged at the turn of the 20th century. It was a time of political unrest and global anxiety, with two world wars awaiting in the near future. Jack London's 1908 novel Iron Heel was said to be a remarkable prophecy of the impending international tensions that would give way to World War I. Yet we don't see dystopian fiction becoming a more defined genre until the publication of Yevgeny Zamyatin's slender We in 1921.

Before We, fiction about an "ideal" society (with the exception of H.G. Wells and London) tended to end utopian. After We, the genre took a grim downturn (or upturn, depending on which way you're squinting). We set up many of the tropes that would come to dominate dystopian fiction. These included troubled, unresolved endings (very fun!) and a totalitarian government gone mad.

Also importantly, Zamyatin's book greatly influenced two fictional works that tower over the rest of the genre to this day: Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's 1939 Brave New World. Both were written in the shadow of a world war. Both predicted an even darker future. Admittedly, the worlds within these two dystopian novels differ vastly, and the influences that Orwell and Huxley feared were not the same. According to critic Neil Postman:

"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumble puppy.

In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us."

But the stage for the genre was set, in spite of any differences. In this early crop of dystopian fiction, we can see the themes over which future novels would continue to obsess: political capital, the meaning of free will, and, perhaps most significantly, fear of the state and the unchecked power of government.

Prominent Dystopian Fiction from the Era

In Huxley's colossally chilling vision, people come to adore the very authorities that undo their capacities for thought. Half of the Big 2.

Whereas Huxley's dystopia is based upon affluence and pleasure, Orwell's 1984 is just gray totalitarianism: a towering cross-examination of government surveillance, information, and the meaning of freedom. Gave rise to the concept of Big Brother. Half of the Big 2.

An often unacknowledged father of modern-day dystopian novels, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We predated both Orwell and Huxley, and inspired Brave New World.

A semi-satirical novel that experienced renewed popularity after 2016. It Can't Happen Here was written in 1935 and predicted a fascist America under the control of a dictator.

1950s and 60s: War And Tech

OK, we're out of the woods of World War II, you say. Time to breathe a sigh of relief! Surely, post-war optimism means that authors are going to start cheering up, right?

Sorry. This chart from Goodreads says, nope!

Political commentary shouldered many of the dystopian themes that emerged from the end of the war. And World War II fueled the prospect of World War III and apocalypses. (See: Kurt Vonnegut's classic Player Piano in 1952 and Philip K. Dick's 1964 The Penultimate Truth.) We do differentiate between apocalyptic fiction and dystopian fiction - but there's always a fair bit of crossover when crumbling societies and their governments are involved.

Incidentally, it was during this time that authors' growing suspicion of technology bubbled to the surface. Some major technological advances during this time included:

the inception of the Turing test (a test for intelligence in computers)

the creation of Sputnik I

the invention of the first personal computer

As a result, dystopian novels began to cross paths more regularly with science fiction worldbuilding, such as in Dick's 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

After witnessing war, authors grew particularly concerned with totalitarian governments' ability to regulate the arts. One of the most popular examples continues to be Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which breathes into awfully vivid life the possibility of a future in which books are burned. (Today, Fahrenheit 451 is banned in many schools in the United States, and so one cannot say that real life does not possess a solid sense of irony.)

Prominent Dystopian Fiction from the Era

The brainwash of an ultraviolent youth in A Clockwork Orange 'sdystopian but complacent society allows author Anthony Burgess to pose this question: "Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?"

Internet thinkpieces about machines presiding over the future are nowhere near as grim as Vonnegut's Player Piano, set in a class-divided society after World War III.

A classic novel of overpopulation. In a crime-ravaged New York City, food is scarce and the government is rationing portions of a mysterious substance they call "Soylent Green."

You wonder: why the title, Fahrenheit 451? It's the temperature at which the paper of books catches fire. In Ray Bradbury's world, all books are banned - and burned.

In which a man who increasingly wonders about the difference between people and androids he must kill. Also the inspiration behind 1982's Blade Runner.

1970s-1990s: Corporations and Poisoned Bodies

While the volume of dystopian fiction declined for a period entering the 1970s, the variance within the genre broadened. If the genre reflects our fears back to us, then in the 1970s we see the public moving past a perpetual fear of war to explore new meadows. Environmental crises dominated the conversation (the Clean Air Act was only passed in 1980) while the onslaught of advertising, misgivings over the body, and economic stagnation ushered in a new era of cynicism.

It was a catalyst for quite a few dystopian classics that took the genre in brilliant new directions.

The Handmaid's Tale, a book in which women's bodies are nothing more than reproductive machines,shook the world when it was published in 1985.

Cyperpunk was born out of William Gibson's 1984 Neuromancer.

Private corporations became a wellspring of repression and public enemy #1 alongside totalitarian governments in many dystopian novels, such as Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

And meanwhile, black satire became all the more pronounced in the genre, as José Saramago showed in the Blindness and its sequel Seeing, which both use an omniscient narrator to great effect.

Perhaps most notably, in 1994, Lois Lowry quietly published The Giver. A slender book about a community in the future that doesn't feel pain anymore, The Giver was a dystopian novel for young adults before the breed was cool. It built upon past traditions of adult dystopian fiction while managing to popularize the genre among young adult readers. This would be significant because of what would occur in the next decade or so...

Prominent Dystopian Fiction from the Era

"A world without color - fantastic!" said no-one ever. Yet people embrace this society within The Giver, which asks what a world with Sameness really is: a dystopia in sheep's skin.

About a robot's death wish in a world where people don't possess the ability - and, worse, the desire - to read.

Saramago uses a third-person omniscient narrator and an ever more ominous tone to create this chilling and ultimately bewildering work about a society suddenly afflicted by blindness.

The dystopian world found in this romping science fiction novel was one of the first to introduce cyberpunk to society, capturing first-time novelist William Gibson the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Philip K. Dick Award in 1984.

A vision of a dystopia steeped in gender discrimination, The Handmaid's Tale was giving folks the shivers decades before it became a popular television show on Hulu.

The Turn Of The Millennium: Youth Betrayed

Today, dystopian fiction is predominantly associated with the young adult genre. Young adult dystopian series -  Maze Runner, Divergent, Ready Player One, among countless more - dominate the shelves, bleeding into Hollywood. The Divergent films alone grossed over $700 million in box office receipts worldwide.

How did we reach this point? In big part, it's due to The Hunger Games, as the trend that The Giver began exploded in popularity among young adults with the publication of Suzanne Collins' series. In dystopian fiction, young adult readers can find a tangle of themes to identify with: themes of self-discovery, of one young person pitted against the whole terrible world. Overall, the rise in dystopian novels since 2000 is said to be a symptom of the pooling anxieties that followed 9/11 and other troubling geopolitical events.

But The Hunger Games still managed to change many aspects of the game. In an essay, the AV Club noted:

The Giver comes from what seems to be a lost tradition in dystopian storytelling. It used to be okay for genetics to eventually yield an individual who wants to break free from societal homogeny, and choose to escape that oppression to a safer community. Now, merely escaping isn't enough - dystopian-thriller protagonists must learn brutally militaristic tactics and enact violence that brings tyranny crumbling down in increasingly bloody action sequences.

And so in today's crop of dystopian fiction, the stakes are bigger than ever. Continuing in a proud tradition, they carry on vindicating the definition of a dystopia: a worst possible world. But what each of them (sometimes) offers is a brief, shining belief that such a world can be fixed. And now, the resurgence of sales for books such as 1984 and Brave New World shows that a vast contingent of us continue to turn towards the genre for comfort, or answers.

Prominent Dystopian Fiction from the Era:

A part of the trilogy that ends with Mockingjay, Hunger Games needs no introduction anymore. Except this: may the odds be with you when you read it.

Like MMORPGs? You perhaps won't be such a fan of them after you read Ready Player One, which won the Alex Award from the American Library Association and the 2012 Prometheus Award.

(Un)coincidentally, 1Q84 is only one number removed from George Orwell's 1984. Once called the dystopian novel to end all dystopian novels, this winding epic is a feat of brilliant imagination that only Murakami could've conjured.

In the background of a burgeoning romance between a Korean-American and a Russian, America teeters on the brink of economic collapse and consumerism threatens to overwhelm all.

Who says you're ugly? This book does. Uglies turns a very dystopian eye upon plastic surgery: in this future, when you turn 16, you get an operation to turn "pretty."

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The Rise of Dystopian Fiction: From Soviet Dissidents to 70's Paranoia to Murakami - Electric Literature

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George Orwell is back in vogue these days - a far cry from 2014, when The Guardian was debating whether or not 1984 was good bad or bad good fiction. In January this year, 1984 shot up the bestseller charts, and the trail doesn't just go cold there.

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High kick: 'I really enjoyed this series so I think that it definitely deserves four and a half out of five stars'

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WIRED article about the success of Dystopias

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WIRED article about the success of Dystopias

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From the "everything old is new again" files: Bygone dystopian fiction is officially back in vogue. As reported last month, Penguin Random House has seen a 9,500 percent sales increase for George Orwell's 1984 since Trump's inauguration; that was enough to propel the book to the top spot on Amazon's bestseller list. The publisher also saw enough demand for It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis' 1935 satirical novel about an authoritarian president, to reissue a paperback edition in December-and then double down with a robust second print run in January.

Nor is this newfound popularity a reflection of blue-state tastes. At Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Texas, general manager Ben Rybeck says copies of 1984 and other titles are "flying" off the shelves. Iconoclast Books in Ketchum, Idaho sold eight copies of 1984 in January-compared to one in January 2016. And at Book Loft in Columbus, Ohio, sales manager Glen Welch has seen unprecedented demand. "All of a sudden, these books started taking off," says Welch, who describes the store's customers as an even split between liberal and conservative. "I haven't seen this before, in my 10 years here."

Part of the appeal of these classics, of course, is a morbid strain of escapism: Dystopian fiction enables readers to taste a darker timeline, albeit one that a protagonist invariably triumphs over. The world could be a lot worse, you think while reading. But the thrill goes beyond the vicarious. A dystopian worldview, whether derived from fiction or real-world events, can have therapeutic value-no matter which side of the aisle your politics belong on.

"We're Saturated With Dystopia"

Dystopian literature has long given writers a means of interrogating the world around them. Orwell conceived of 1984 under the looming threat of the Soviet Union, and Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid's Tale after the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. "We can work our way through problems by telling stories better, at times, than by writing philosophical treatises," says Chris Robichaud, an ethicist at Harvard who teaches a course on utopia and dystopia in fiction and philosophy. "You look to fiction to see how people are wrestling with serious problems." That's valuable for readers as well, especially in a politically divided climate like today's. "We can't look at dystopias as merely some bad slippery slope argument," says Robichaud. "Rather, they challenge us: What are the values in this dystopia, and what do they say about our values right now?"

In fall 2016, Skidmore College professor Nicholas Junkerman taught a course on utopia and dystopia, with a reading list that included Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go -as well as Trump's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. The English professor planned to include modern utopian narratives as well, but found that 20th-century texts-and preoccupations-skewed pronouncedly pessimistic. "We're saturated with dystopia," Junkerman says. That outlook suffuses not just Donald Trump's rhetoric ("American carnage," anyone?), but his supporters' as well: "'Make America Great Again' is about finding our way back to utopia."

Some writers feel the same way. Last year, Alexander Weinstein published Children of the New World, a dystopian short-story collection about our reliance on technology, as a way to warn readers about a possible future. Now, Weinstein is working on his next book, but its scope-it's a fictional field guide to a lost continent-gives him some agita. "Look at this society," he says. "What am I doing writing about fantastical locations, when the world is going down in flames?" Weinstein has no plans to change his current project, although even if he did, the results might not be what one would expect: "It's hard to write dark speculative fiction presently, because it all seems quaint in comparison" to what's happening now, Weinstein says.

People naturally gravitate toward a narrative that validates their own worldview. For some, President Trump's tweets about a conniving elite and a corrupt media echo their feelings that the odds are against them. For others, George Orwell's chronicle of totalitarian doublethink provides comfort that we've fought "alternative facts" before, and we're still standing. Either way, people are reaching out to dark visions to make sense of an increasingly unrecognizable country. A well-told narrative, truthful or not, can awaken a reader's imagination and push them to action-and a neat dystopia is often more satisfying than a complicated truth.

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The Real Reason Dystopian Fiction Is Roaring Back

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From the "everything old is new again" files: Bygone dystopian fiction is officially back in vogue. As reported last month, Penguin Random House has seen a 9,500 percent sales increase for George Orwell's 1984 since Trump's inauguration; that was enough to propel the book to the top spot on Amazon's bestseller list.

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Why should you read "The Handmaid's Tale"? - Naomi R. Mercer