The Handmaid's Tale
I just finished reading The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. The Handmaid's Tale is a science fiction (or as the author prefers to call it, speculative fiction) story of a dystopian patriarchal fascist state founded by ultra-right wing fundamentalists. Because of pollution, radioactivity and disease, birth rates have plummeted. Fertile women are enslaved and assigned to high-ranking government officials for the purpose of impregnation. The wives of the officials must cooperate with this arrangement because it is the only way to fulfill the mandate to "be fruitful and multiply." Biblical passages are used (and misused) by the regime to justify the forced polygamous arrangments.
The Handmaid's Tale is in the American Library Association's list of most banned books. I recall vaguely when the movie came out in 1990 that there was a lot of uproar from various fundy Christian groups. As an old friend of mine used to say, "If you throw a rock into a pack of dogs, the one that yelps is the one you hit."
The movie version, from what I've heard, isn't very good. The book, on the other hand, is fantastic. It has been dismissed in some quarters as "feminist literature" but I didn't see it that way at all. I saw it as a cautionary tale of how quickly a free society can turn into a totalitarian one (think of the rapid rise of Nazism in pre-WWII Germany). It is also a warning about how regular folks, like you and I, tend to allow such things to occur by being complacent and even cooperative as freedoms are taken away (first from others, then eventually, from ourselves), until we find it is too late.
Margaret Atwood is a very smart and insightful person. Here (in three parts) is a discussion she had with Bill Moyers:
The Handmaid's Tale is in the American Library Association's list of most banned books. I recall vaguely when the movie came out in 1990 that there was a lot of uproar from various fundy Christian groups. As an old friend of mine used to say, "If you throw a rock into a pack of dogs, the one that yelps is the one you hit."
The movie version, from what I've heard, isn't very good. The book, on the other hand, is fantastic. It has been dismissed in some quarters as "feminist literature" but I didn't see it that way at all. I saw it as a cautionary tale of how quickly a free society can turn into a totalitarian one (think of the rapid rise of Nazism in pre-WWII Germany). It is also a warning about how regular folks, like you and I, tend to allow such things to occur by being complacent and even cooperative as freedoms are taken away (first from others, then eventually, from ourselves), until we find it is too late.
Margaret Atwood is a very smart and insightful person. Here (in three parts) is a discussion she had with Bill Moyers:
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