4. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood writes such convincing and powerful dystopias that it would be an oversight to only have one. The Handmaid's Tale comes from a radically different place from Oryx and Crake, and is arguably one of the most important dystopian fictions out there. Set in a totalitarian world where extreme Christianity has taken over America, Atwood shows us a world of oppression under a racist, sexist, and homophobic regime without mercy. Atwood explores controversial themes that show how ahead of her time she is. Though only written in 1985, Atwood imagines this Christian takeover put into play by a staged terrorist attack blamed on Muslim extremists where the president is killed, allowing this theocracy to step in. We follow the story of Offred. Women have had essentially all rights removed from them, and lower-class women have been turned into handmaids, given new names based on their male owner (Offred is literally Of Fred). These handmaids are essentially slaves of reproduction. Rich husbands do not reproduce with their rich wives, but have ceremonial reproductive sex with their handmaids. Fred begins an illicit affair with Offred, sleeping with her outside of ceremony for non-reproductive means, which leads to a series of highly illegal events. Atwood has always called her work "speculative fiction" rather than "science fiction" because she writes about technologies that already exist, whereas science fiction should be limited to literature concerned with advances which are not in our foreseeable grasp. With that as the case, it changes how we see books like The Handmaid's Tale, or Oryx and Crake. It can take very little for the entire world to crumble, and takes a lot for those inside this mess to be able to fight against it.