Yeah, but that’s why she calls her book Science Fiction. 
Atwood is sort of the Ursula K. Le Guin of SciFi.
Did Offred really live in pre-Gilead times? I completely forgot that, but then I haven’t read the books since it first came out.
It was a military takeover, wasn’t it?
The rulers were free to set up the system they wanted, once they’d defeated all opposition (and presumably, at that point, had all the guns).
If the backstory was that the ‘handmaid’ system evolved, rather than having been imposed at gunpoint, then I’d agree that it would be implausible that the protagonist could remember the pre-‘handmaid’ system–those changes would take generations, if they had to evolve.
But they didn’t evolve. The system was a done deal as soon as those holding the guns said it would be that way.
Even in situations where the military takes things over, things don’t change that fast. There’s plenty of fairly recent examples of revolutions and coups, and people still get married like they did before and have kids and play soccer. The moment of extreme change is the war itself.
Dictatorships that have tried to make society completely change have almost always failed. The Soviet Union had grand designs for universal atheism that never took hold, for instance.
Even Orwell, in “1984,” didn’t change things TOO much; the proles still lived their lives getting married and having babies and going to pubs, and it was clearly an ongoing effort about 30 years or so in the making to get Outer Party members to act and feel differently than they had before.
Catholics.
I agree, this is getting off the point of the thread.
I…what?
Please de-funny the joke by explaining :).
I take it you don’t know many Catholics. The days of Catholics families routinely having 9 kids are loooooooong gone. In fact, if you poll Americans Catholics on abortion, you get about the same breakdown in pro/anti as you find in the general population. The pope might be against birth control, but American Catholics in general? Sorry, no.
The Iranian Revolution happened that quickly.
It was just that I assume both are tired of being compared to each other. That’s all.
Yes. And ‘no private property’ happened right away after the Russian Revolution–that was a major change in people’s lives.
If under a particular dictatorship marriage and family doesn’t change much, that’s more because the dictatorship didn’t choose to impose any changes, than because a dictatorship is incapable of making changes.
At the moment I can’t think of any actual “serious fiction” ones that were legit attempts to make a plausible turn (though I do know they’re out there) but “Enemies Foreign And Domestic” by Matthew Bracken is a pretty crazy one since it was written under George W Bush and features a left-wing dictatorship. It’s been a while since I read it but IIRC basically a terrorist attack using domestically purchased assault rifles happens under his watch that is so bloody that Bush decides to united with both sides and proclaim serious gun control and confiscation (remember this was back when libertarians and infowars absolutely hated Bush) A bunch of mishandled confiscation raids that result in innocent deaths lead to a mini-civil war between the libertarian right and the loyal right + liberal left and leads to harsher and harsher attacks on civil rights until a Democrat President takes control the next election and seeing as how everything is already in place, decides to take the plunge and invoke a total left wing totalitarian state in the United States, and it gets crazier from there!
In the book (I haven’t seen the series and probably won’t), there is a flashback at one point where Offred (before she became Offred) and her lover and child try to escape to Canada (I think) but are captured at the border by the Gilead(eans?).
[Moderating]
This thread is walking a fine line between Cafe Society and Great Debates. I recognize that it’s fundamentally about a work of fiction, and hence should ideally be in CS, but at the same time, the nature of that work of fiction is such that any discussion of it must necessarily be at least somewhat political. In an attempt to maintain this fine-tuning, I would like to ask that discussion (in this thread, at least) stick exclusively to policies/social constructs which actually show up in The Handmaid’s Tale, and that we avoid discussion of “Well, modern politicians are already doing this other thing, which is not in the book, but which is just as extreme”.
That said, I have not myself read the book, and so I’m not entirely sure where that line is. So I would like to request that you’uns be self-policing, and to use the “Report Post” feature (with an explanation of the issue) if you think anyone is crossing the line.
History usually does move at a glacial pace but occasionally dramatic changes can occur very quickly, as in the former Soviet Union. Oh, people who pay attention to events and trends could tell that major rot was happening but to the average Josef thing went seriously sideways really fast.
And as far as left-wing dictatorship books go, “Not This August” is generally regarded as a classic in this sub-genre.
The criticism of the book was that it was implausible–that extreme changes don’t really occur when a military takeover occurs.
To mention actual extreme changes that have occurred in real life after takeovers would seem to be on point, when the claim is 'this book can be fairly criticized for depicting extreme changes because such changes are implausible’…
If the plausibility of a plot’s extreme events is the issue, then how can discussion of real-life examples of extreme developments be ruled out of bounds?
I read the book when it first came out, which was just after the Reagan administration, which means she wrote it while he was in office. You have to understand the book in that context. The religious right, which was a new entity, at least as a political movement, elected Reagan, ironically, over the genuinely religious Carter. Prior to backing Reagan, people didn’t generally “vote their faith,” and many ministers of very conservative congregations told their congregants to stay out of politics.
I’m really not sure what rallied the right in 1980, but they elected a president, and there was all kinds of talk about making America a theocracy (or, making America a theocracy “again”). America was a Christian nation founded on Christian values by Christian founding fathers, blather, blather.
When I read the book, I saw it as a sort of argument of reductio ad absurdum-- an attempt to show a modern US strictly following biblical precepts. It was ridiculous, and was supposed to be. It was supposed to show that the religious right’s utopia was a dystopia, but also just stupid.
I’ll admit, I was 18 or 19, and I found it a little scary, probably in a way that I wouldn’t if I reread it now. Heck, depending on when exactly it came out, I might have read it when I was still a virgin, in which case, I probably would have found it horrifying. But at any rate, I remember that women older than I was found it a little unnerving.
I think it was less the possibility that it could actually happen, then the knowledge that there were people in the country who wanted it to happen. Or, so we thought. I don’t really know what the religious right of the 1980s meant when they professed a wish to return to biblical times and values. They did say things like that. Maybe they just hadn’t read the bible all that carefully.
I agree with the OP. Our culture has been moving steadily away from being religiously conservative. While the pendulum could eventually swing the other way, it’s hard to take seriously a claim–made now or at any point in the twentieth century–that we are moving towards being a “theocracy.”
I remember well the panic about “theocracy” during the George W. Bush years. You know, there are people now living who remember a time when abortion was largely illegal, there was prayer and Bible reading in public schools, obscenity was much more harshly censored, a woman’s getting pregnant out of wedlock was considered so wrong that it couldn’t even be spoken of in public, led to her being completely shunned and pretty much ruined her life. Was America in 1960 a “theocracy?”
We just elected a president who has tried to ban Muslims from entering the country and who has a prominent white nationalist on his staff. Our Vice President finds women so wicked he will not be alone in the presence of one who is not his property, I mean wife. Our last president was pilloried for eight years by the right wing for suspicion of not being a Christian, but actually a secret Muslim. Red state America has been rolling back access to abortion, teaching abstinence only sex education that has been proven to not decrease teen pregnancy and rewriting history books to refer to slaves as immigrants. Just this week, New Orleans had to remove a statue dedicated to white supremacy in the dead of night under police protection. You really need to pay more attention.
We just elected the most socially liberal Republican president ever, a thrice-married man nominated by the Republican electorate, something that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. He didn’t try to “ban Muslims” and even if he had, that would in no way be proof that he was trying to implement a “theocracy.” Heck, a radical atheist might want to ban Muslims. I assume you’re talking about Steve Bannon, who is not a white nationalist. Pence has never said nor done anything to indicate that he considers his wife his “property.” Abortion is less restricted in America that it is in many Western European nations, which in every other context are liberals’ model nations. I could go on, but there’s really no point in replying to this stuff. Statements like this aren’t evidence that America is becoming more culturally conservative, they’re evidence that the left has become so extreme that they see any deviation from leftism as “right-wing extremism.”
Does the name Jane Wyman mean anything to you?
In December, 2015 Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering our country.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/01/31/is-this-a-muslim-ban-look-at-the-history-and-at-trumps-own-words/?utm_term=.a5cbb2d836bf
Several states have introduced unnecessary medical procedures inflicted in women trying to get an abortion and here is a state by state list of what lies doctors are required to tell women seeking abortions.A State-by-State List of the Lies Abortion Doctors Are Forced to Tell Women
White men dictating women’s reproductive rights based on their religious beliefs sure sounds a lot like a theocracy to me.