The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

I've meant to read this book for forever, and now that it's a Hulu series I've heard more and more about it. I haven't watched the show at all, but I guess its increase in popularity has given me more motivation to read the book because I finally got around to it.

This book is about a creepy dystopian future (or actually, now it's probably in the past since this book was written in the 80s or 90s) where this small group of religious nutjobs has taken over the country and implemented super strict Old Testament rules over society. This means that women are not given any power or choices, and they are known simply by their husband's names. Most people are infertile and so there are women who are known as handmaids, who are basically there to try and get pregnant to increase the incredibly low birth rate. The book is told from the perspective of Offred, a handmaid, who tells about her past from before everything changed, and what has happened to her since then.

I had to read this in a few chunks because it was a little bit scary. Scary in the Brave New World and 1984 senses--like this is a dystopian future that seems slightly possible, and even if it's not totally likely, there are some aspects of it that could happen if we are not careful. Like the country being taken over by a really crazy uber religious minority and imposing a completely different set of rules over the country? Not likely, but look what happened to Afghanistan. Decades ago, women were allowed to walk around on their own and wear whatever they wanted, but the Al-Queda took over the government and took away all freedoms that women had had before then. That's what I kept thinking while reading this book--I wanted to complain that it is totally impossible that all of these changes could be implemented within one person's lifetime, that this woman could remember the time Before but still be living in this world as it is now (kind of my complaint about Ready Player One), but aspects of this literally happened in Afghanistan. That's what made this so scary to me.

However, it felt like Atwood kind of dropped the ball on the world-creating aspect of her job. She never really described why or what happened--she says vaguely that the President and Congress were all killed and there were never new elections, but she never really explains who did it or why, and although you know it's just the nebulous "they" who are in charge now, I really wanted to know more about it. I think that's something that we are more used to with these dystopian novels now--there's always spot where the narrator gives you a clear-cut explanation for what's happened and how it happened, and it really didn't happen in this book. It seemed like an oversight to me as the reader. I also kind of hated reading about her past with her husband and daughter and how they got taken away from her--but that's just a personal qualm because I hate any sort of storyline that affects children negatively.

But the book definitely made me think about these possibilities--I couldn't stop thinking it over after finishing it this afternoon. I was reading the Wikipedia page about the book and read about how many people classify this book as science fiction but Atwood doesn't like that classification--she argues that it's speculative fiction, because it's something that really could happen and isn't just based on technology in the future. I definitely don't see this book as a science fiction, and I like her thoughts about it. I feel like I have many more half-baked thoughts about this book and its real meaning, but it's been a long day and I don't want to spend all night writing this up so I'll leave it here.