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"There is more than one kind of freedom... Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it." - The Handmaid's Tale

Between September and October I put down my usual collection of science fiction and cookbooks to read books from female authors. I strongly recommend each:

1. Pride and Prejudiced by Jane Austen

2. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

3. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

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The issue has nothing to do with creative fiction. Nobody is bothered by stories that might use real life as a basis of inspiration.

The issue is that these stories are latched onto as 'narrative basis' for some kind of populist ideal, which may frankly just be bigotry.

The story was not picked up upon because it was just 'great writing' - it created buzz because it engendered a kind of bigoted fantasy among those that wanted to buy into the potential truthiness of it all.

Like the 'Man Next Door Who Raped The White Girl' (i.e. Black man) from the 'Reader's Digest', 1952 etc.

It's an issue because people can do whatever they want under the guise of creative fiction, and then try to use it as some kind of scare mongering re: 'This could happen! This is happening!'

I'm Canadian, we had to read the Handmaid's Tale in school. Margaret Atwood is famous for saying 'all these things happened somewhere in history' - essentially she cherry picked the absolute worst bits of history and rolled them into a hyper-fascist theocracy. Which is 100% legitimate and interesting from a creative perspective ... but the TV series became a ridiculous point of reference for the fantastical ignorance of some populists who loved think of this as the interpretation of their political enemies. As a TV series it's great fun. But when it's used beyond that (or more poignantly, used by the studios to play into people's bigotry) then it's not good.

Edit: please see my above comment for reference as to how most of the media picked up on this piece as the basis for a narrative. It's not some corner case conspiracy - it was used by NPR, RollingStone, Wapo, Medium, The Guardian etc. etc..

"The Handmaid's Tale" has an interesting epilogue that touches on this. It's in the style of a later academic lamenting how the narrator didn't say anything about the political power structures of Gilead when, of course, the whole narration had been about the personal power structures.

The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

The 4-Hour Body - Tim Ferriss - Lot's of anecdotes from Ferriss' own experiments.

S. - by J.J. Abrams - Layers upon layers. Unlike anything I've read before and a true Abrams experience. Check it out if you haven't heard of it!

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software -
Charles Petzold - Fascinating PopSci book on the origins of Computers and Code. Each chapter seems to build on the knowledge you've built from previous chapters. Interesting read for the programmer/computer engineer and VERY approachable.

Everyone has read 1984, and The Handmaid's Tale, and Brave New World in high school. Or if not there then in their freshman lit class. Therefore those books are the yardsticks that all dystopian hot takes on current events must measure themselves against, no matter how nonsensical.

Shakespeare had Ovid and Homer and the Bible to pull his references and allusions from, but our shared canon is considerably poorer.

They did a bad job on sci-fi, I think -- while I liked Dune, it certainly isn't the one SF book I'd include.

The Handmaid's Tale is far better, but is listed as "Feminist Speculative Fiction"; if I'd read the category first, I would have skipped the book, but the book is great, along with her other writing.

In a list of 100, I'd probably include 3. The Handmaid's Tale is fine; Snow Crash or maybe a Heinlein or a "golden age of sci-fi" choice.

(Edited to fix incorrect title, thanks)

I only recently read The Handmaid's Tale, and it hit pretty hard. Especially because it, like any good story of that type, is not nearly so outlandish as it seems. Things that might have seemed absurd at the time in Brave New World and 1984 have come to pass and been accepted as the way things are, with people even clamoring for the next step.

The dimly illuminated cultural regression from Atwood's novel is far from absurd on modern reading, and in fact we've seen such hyper-conservative cultural shifts play out. It's not that far-fetched to substitute isolationist nationalism for regressive theocracy, when both have the same ultimate goals: reconcentration of power in an oligarchy, just like in the "good old days." Not that we've ever strayed that far from the concept, but still...

I read a lot this year, so I'll just point out some highlights:

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante - The highlight of the year. I'm now partially through the 3rd book in the series. And amazing portrait of the friendship between 2 girls as they grow up and try to escape the violence and poverty of their small town in Naples.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel - My guess is that plenty of people here have read it. Great read about the fall of civilization due to a massive flu outbreak.

Room by Emma Donoghue - Beautiful, heartbreaking, troubling and uplifting.

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood - A classic, glad to finally read it.

The Room by Jonas Karlsson - Absurdist take on corporate life about a man who finds a room in his office building that shouldn't be there.

Welcome To Night Vale by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor - For fans of the podcast. I highly recommend both.

Uglies/Pretties/Specials by Scott Westerfeld - YA trilogy about a future in which everybody is made pretty once they reach a certain age. Not great literature, but a fun read. Although the second one is a little blah.

Get In Trouble by Kelly Link - Excellent collection of fantastical yet mundane short stories.

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine - Powerful exploration of race in America. I feel like I need to read it a few more times.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman - Still one of my favorite authors. Story of a baby whose family is brutally murdered and ends up being raised by spirits in a graveyard.

1. Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem - I've been on a giant math books kick. I really enjoyed Simon Singh's other book, The Code Book, so this one is awesome.

2. The Code Book - If you're really into the history of cryptography, this book is for you.

3. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck - Not a really a revelatory book by any sorts. But a fun read.

4. The Handmaid's Tale - Revisiting this since the TV series came out and I really felt like getting traumatized all over again.

Zero population growth would be a terrifying dystopia. Have you read /watched the Handmaid's Tale or Children of Men?

It? What is it? The Testaments? The Handmaid's Tale?

Margaret Atwood has written much more than those two books - she is a prolific author. According to Wikipedia she's she has published 17 books of poetry, 16 novels, 10 books of non-fiction, eight collections of short fiction, eight children's books, and one graphic novel, as well as a number of small press editions in poetry and fiction. Her works are popular, both with the general public and with critics.

Jared Diamond - "Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed" (non-fiction)

Iván Repila - "The Boy Who Stole Attila’s Horse": short intense novel about 2 boys who are trapped in a well

Margaret Atwood - "The handmaid's tale"

Khaled Hosseini - "The kite runner"

Agatha Christie - "The murder of Roger Ackroyd" (very surprising plot)

Andy Weir - "The Martian"

Charles Dickens - "David Copperfield"

Clare Mackintosh - "I let you go"

Carlos Ruiz Zafón - "The Shadow of the Wind"

M.R. Carey - "The girl with all the gifts"

I haven't read any especially good literary criticism, however (as I obviously failed to make clear) I do enjoy reading and discussing a book.

What I hated was attempting to mash meaning into every word in the story, even when there was obviously none intended by the author.
An example I remember was when, in The Great Gatsby, it was mentioned in passing that someone had blue eyes, and the teacher went on and on about how that represented sadness, how it showed the economic differences between the classes, etc, etc. No, it meant that the eyes were blue. stop putting words in the author's mouth.

As for the kind of books that I had to read -- I found the Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood) to be utterly horrid. Bad writing, large plot holes, poor continuity, etc.

To be fair, many of them (eg, A Streetcar Named Desire) I disliked simply because I found the characters distasteful and unappealing. ("meaningless people with meaningless lives")

> Margaret Atwood furiously resists the idea that her stuff is Science Fiction because "SF is talking squids in outer space".

It was a little more nuanced than that. Her argument was that The Handmaid's Tale wasn't really science fiction because it was set in a dystopian "now". Recall there wasn't anything particularly advanced about the technology in the story and its timeline forked from ours sometime in the 1970s (the book took place in the 1980s I think). She instead preferred if the story were called "speculative fiction".

While some of that could rightly be attributed to not wanting to be shelved as science fiction, that's also not the full story. Pre-internet, Margaret Atwood's audience was primarily a literary audience. So it makes sense that she'd want this new book to be shelved in the same place her old books were shelved. Otherwise she might lose out on some of her core audience.

Atwood being a repeat offender of looting "the treasury of SF ideas" is baseless hyperbole, and your entire rant falls on a throwaway comment she made 30 years ago. She looted the "treasury of SF ideas" in the same way Delany looted Moby Dick to write Nova or Jo Walton looted Greek myth to write The Just City