First off, I find the ideas and themes explored by Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale much scarier than most science fiction I’ve read minus Michael Crichton. Speculative fiction explores ideas and possibilities that are actually possible in the day and age that the book has been written. The dangerous or intensely scary situations put in place by our other books The Left Hand of Darkness and Kindred while realistic and definitely scary for the characters experiencing them, we at least know that these situations would never play out in our own lives. But at the time of the writing of the Handmaid’s Tale, there is a bunch of controversy over issues extremely relevant to the situations in the book such as women’s rights, including rights concerning abortion with Wade vs. Roe, and issues concerning the rise of the religious right, and the increasing awareness of environmental problems.

I can understand why Margaret Atwood was somewhat unhappy with her work being categorized as science fiction literature mainly because that was not her goal or her meaning when she wrote the book. To Atwood, not only was Science Fiction overly represented as a man’s game, but she also wanted her book to be a reflection of what realistically could happen if some extreme historical events were to take place. The power and intrigue of her book is not the alien United Nations or the concept of time travel we’ve seen in our other two books, but rather it’s the fact that all the events and circumstance of a Handmaid’s Tale are eerily conceivable in the eyes of the reader. We know as we are reading her work that had a few organized and insanely minded people could change the entire system of the United States.  I think that it is also somewhat humorous that these crazy situations described in the Handmaid’s Tale are not all that different than what everyone is saying about all the hell that will break loose if Donald Trump were to be elected as president.