The literary influences on The Handmaid’s Tale were also numerous. The title comes from Chaucer, one of my faves. It’s a “tale” rather than a history, as by the time it is given a name, several hundred years after the events take place, no one is able to establish very firmly what exactly went on and who exactly these people were. This is a problem historians frequently have: there are gaps in the record. And so it is with our Handmaid.

  The second influence is, of course, the Bible. This is a very complex work, having not begun as a book at all but as a collection of scrolls. Only when the codex book arrived—the book form we have now, with the spine up one side and a series of pages that you turn—did the “biblia,” the little books, become one book; and only then did it take on the semblance of a unified work. As it was written down at different times—very different times—and by different people, it contains a lot of mixed messages. One of the messages is very favourable to widows, orphans, poor people, and the oppressed. But you can extract quite different messages from it, such as grinding your enemies to nothing and putting curses on them whereby they eat their own children, and many have favoured such messages.

  In The Handmaid’s Tale, so-called Biblical literalism is used to control women (and low-status men) for political reasons and to support a power elite. If you think that’s the essence of Christianity, I would argue that you are sorely mistaken. In the text, you can find the Lord’s Prayer as the Handmaid reinterprets it for her own circumstances. It therefore baffles me quite a lot when people decide that this book is “anti-Christian.” Any religion has a positive node and a negative one—as my old friend Fanny Silberman, Auschwitz survivor, used to say, “There’s good and bad of everyone”—and Gilead is the bad. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a good. Over to you on that one.

  The other literary influences come from the world of utopias and dystopias, of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. A “utopia” is a literary depiction of a society better than ours; the late nineteenth century was very fond of those, and wrote a great many of them—because so many advances had been made in such things as medicine and technology and the production and distribution of material goods that optimistic people didn’t see why things couldn’t just keep improving. Highlights of the utopia in English were William Morris’s News from Nowhere and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Unfortunately, along came the First World War, in which Europe tore itself apart, and then the Second World War, in which it tore itself apart some more, and, in the interim, Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Stalin’s U.S.S.R.—all of which proposed themselves at first as utopias—everything would get better—and all of which turned into dystopias, or societies worse than ours. So the literary utopia became very hard to write plausibly, and literary dystopias gained ground. Highlights include Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. If you’d like to know more about my take on all of that, there’s a chapter in my SF book, In Other Worlds, that goes into it in tedious detail.

  The Handmaid’s Tale is a literary dystopia—a world worse than ours—and the influence on its form is thus the utopia/dystopia tradition itself. I was reading a lot of that kind of fiction as a teenager, and I later studied it as a graduate student, so sooner or later I was fated to take a crack at it, just to see if I could do it. And so I did. It was a slightly mad thing to do in the 1980s, as this kind of fiction was not in vogue then. In the present day, dystopias are thick on the ground, possibly because a lot of young writers are somewhat dismayed by the prospect before them.

  Which brings us to the present day. People often ask me the following two questions:

  Do you think The Handmaid’s Tale is more relevant now than when you wrote it back in the mid-1980s?

  And, another version of the same question: Do you think The Handmaid’s Tale is prophetic?

  Those are tantalizing questions. To the first I would answer: Whether the book actually is more relevant or is not more relevant is hardly for me to say; but it is clear that a lot of people—especially people in the United States—think it is more relevant now. During the last presidential election, the book’s title became a social media meme, with posters saying things like “Someone tell the Republicans that The Handmaid’s Tale is not a blueprint,” or else “Here comes The Handmaid’s Tale.” Why was that? Because the Four Wise Republicans had opened their mouths and said what they really thought, and what they really thought was that women who were “really” raped would not get pregnant because their bodies had a way of preventing that; and that there was a difference between “real” rape and “not-real” rape, or rape that only looked and felt like rape but wasn’t really. It was all reminiscent of witch trials, in which they tied you up and threw you into the water, and if you drowned you were innocent but if you floated you were guilty, so they could burn you. Dead either way, looks like.

  As a generalization, let us say: absolutist governments have always taken an inordinate interest in the reproductive capabilities of women. In fact, human societies have taken such an interest. Who shall have babies, which babies shall be “legitimate,” which shall be allowed to live, and which shall be killed (in ancient Rome it was up to the father, etc.), whether abortion shall be allowed or not, or up to what month; whether women should be forced to have babies they didn’t want or couldn’t support, and so forth. In general, hunter-gatherer societies spaced children and abandoned those they couldn’t feed, but agricultural societies encouraged lots of childbirth, the better to work the farms and provide slave labour; and once mass armies got going, they really encouraged childbirth, since extra bodies were needed for what Napoleon called “cannon fodder.” Hitler gave out medals to mothers who had lots of kids—there was a dearth of cannon fodder, due to the First World War—whereas Stalin allowed abortion as a means of birth control—they had more mouths than they could feed, thanks to the failure of the collectivization of farming.

  So the real question to be asked about the inordinate interest taken by the powers that be in birth and who gives it, and child-snatching and who does the snatching, is the usual one in mystery stories: Cui bono? Who profits by it?

  In the world of The Handmaid’s Tale, babies are thin on the ground among the upper classes. So they are snatched from those who have them and distributed to the upper-echelon folks who want them. There are lots of historic examples to draw upon, some of them being the Argentine generals who snatched the babies of women suspected of being anti-government and then tortured and killed the mothers, and the nuns in Ireland who snatched the babies of unwed mothers, and sometimes just babies who had been left temporarily in their care, and sold them to rich, childless Americans. It was not unheard of in the 1940s and 1950s for such mothers in North America to be told that their babies had died at birth, when in truth they’d been sold.

  And since The Handmaid’s Tale leadership is a bunch that strip-mines the Bible to find stuff they can use to their own advantage, it’s the woman’s fault if no baby appears. There are a lot of historical precedents for that as well.

  So, is this story more relevant now than when it was first published? I’d say that unfortunately it probably is, insofar as there are now much more concerted efforts to claim the bodies of women as state property. To a person of my age, such efforts are profoundly Stalinist, not to mention Hitlerian. But maybe that’s just me. As a footnote, let us say that the institution of the draft similarly claims men’s bodies as state property. Something to ponder.

  The second question: Is the novel prophetic? No. No novel is prophetic except in retrospect. No one can predict the future really because there are too many variables and too many unknowns. The best-laid plans of mice and men too often go pear-shaped. You can make an educated guess, and a plausible attempt, but that’s about all.

  There. I have now told you lots of things about The Handmaid’s Tale: its ancestry, its genesis, its past, and its present. As for its future, that will be in your hands—the hands of its readers—because that is where the future of any book always resides. The writer writes it, then relinquishes control over it and waves goodbye to it at the train station, and the book sets off on its travels to unknown lands and unknown minds. It will meet some people who like it and some people who dislike it. That happens to any book. That so many have liked it, over so many years, still astonishes me.

  We Are Double-Plus Unfree

  (2015)

  “A Robin Red breast in a Cage, Puts all Heaven in a Rage,” wrote William Blake. “Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall,” wrote John Milton, channelling God’s musings about humankind and free will in the third book of Paradise Lost. “Freedom, high-day, high-day, freedom…!” chants Caliban in The Tempest. Mind you, he is drunk at the time, and overly optimistic: the choice he is making is not freedom, but subjection to a tyrant.

  We’re always talking about it, this “freedom.” But what do we mean by it? “There is more than one kind of freedom,” Aunt Lydia lectures the captive Handmaids in The Handmaid’s Tale. “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 robin redbreast is safer in the cage: It won’t get eaten by cats or smash into windows. It will have lots to eat. But it will also not be able to fly wherever it likes. Presumably this is what troubles the inhabitants of Heaven: they object to the restriction placed on the flight options of a fellow winged being. The robin should live in nature, where it belongs: it should have “freedom to,” the active mode, rather than “freedom from,” the passive mode.

  That’s all very well for robins. Hooray for Blake!, we say. But what about us? The safe cage or the dangerous wild? Comfort, inertia, and boredom or activity, risk, and peril? Being human and therefore of mixed motives, we want both; though, as a rule, alternately. Sometimes the desire for risk leads to boundary-crossing and criminal activity, and sometimes the craving for safety leads to self-imprisonment.

  Governments know our desire for safety all too well, and like to play on our fears. How often have we been told that this or that new rule or law or snooping activity on the part of officialdom is to keep us “safe”? We aren’t safe, anyway: many of us die in weather events—tornados, floods, blizzards—but governments, in those cases, limit their roles to finger-pointing, blame-dodging, expressions of sympathy, or a dribble of emergency aid. Many more of us die in car accidents or from slipping in the bathtub than are likely to be done in by enemy agents, but those kinds of deaths are not easy to leverage into panic. Cars and bathtubs are so recent in evolutionary terms that we’ve developed no deep mythology about them. When coupled with human beings of ill intent they can be scary—being rammed in your car by a maniac or shot in your car by a mafioso carries a certain weight, and being slaughtered in the tub goes back to Agamemnon’s fate in Homer, with a shower-murder update courtesy of Alfred Hitchcock in his film Psycho. But cars and tubs minus enraged wives or maniacs just sit there blankly.

  It’s the sudden, violent, unpredictable event we truly fear: the equivalent of an attack by a hungry tiger. Yesterday’s frightful tigerish threat was Communists: in the 1950s, one lurked in every shrub, ran the message. Today, it’s terrorists. To protect us from these, all sorts of precautions must, we are told, be taken. Nor is this view without merit: such threats are real, up to a point. Nonetheless we find ourselves asking whether the extreme remedies outweigh the disease. How much of our own freedom must we sacrifice in order to defend ourselves against the desire of others to limit that freedom by subjugating or killing us, one by one?

  And is that sacrifice an effective defence? Minus our freedom, we may find ourselves no safer; indeed we may be double-plus unfree, having handed the keys to those who promised to be our defenders but who have become, perforce, our jailers. A prison might be defined as any place you’ve been put into against your will and can’t get out of, and where you are entirely at the mercy of the authorities, whoever they may be. Are we turning our entire society into a prison? If so, who are the inmates and who are the guards? And who decides?

  * * *

  —

  We human beings have been exploring the border between freedom and unfreedom for a very long time. Once, the alternative to freedom was not imprisonment but death. In the millennia we spent as hunter-gatherers, we had neither passwords nor prisons. Everyone in your small group knew and accepted you, though strangers were suspect. No one got put in jail because there were no buildings to serve that purpose. If a person became a threat to the group—for instance, if he became psychotic and expressed a desire to eat people—it would be the duty of the group to kill him, whereas nowadays it would be the duty of the group to lock him up, in order to keep others from harm. A justice system with an incarceration option depends on permanent architecture: you can’t throw someone into a dungeon unless you have one.

  After the advent of agriculture, the alternative to freedom became not death but slavery. It was now more desirable to enslave the threats to your group than to kill them. That way, they could be set to work tilling your soil, thus creating a surplus for you and making you rich. Sampson isn’t tossed off a cliff, as were the captured male Trojans in the Homeric epics. Instead, he is blinded and set to work grinding grain like a donkey.

  Of course, once the profitability of slaves had been recognized, the rule of supply and demand created a thriving market for slaves. You could find yourself enslaved not only by being on the losing end of a war, but by being in the wrong place at the wrong time: in the path of a slave-raiding party, for instance.

  In the medieval period, everyone in the upper percentages wanted a castle, and every castle had a dungeon: dark, dismal, cold, hopeless, and rat-infested, or such is their filmic image. Dungeons were status symbols: everyone who was anyone had one. They had multiple uses: you could keep witches in them until it was time to burn them; you could shackle criminals in them, though it was often more economical to just hang them; and you could put rivals to the throne in them until you could fabricate enough evidence to proclaim them traitors and chop off their heads. And dungeons could be valuable wealth-creators, since holding foreign nobles for ransom could be lucrative. The trade was simple: you, the dungeon-possessor, got a lump sum of cash, and your prisoner got his freedom. In the reverse version, you paid a foreign dungeon-owner to sequester the political enemy of your choice.

  And so it went, for hundreds of years, up to the modern age. In the nineteenth century, freedom and unfreedom began to assume their present-day forms. “Freedom” had become reified by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment: it was what the embattled farmers of the American Revolution were supposed to have been fighting for, though in practical terms they were fighting for the freedom of not paying taxes to Britain. The French revolutionaries started out with liberty, equality, and fraternity, a noble ideal that included freedom from the aristocrats, though in the short term it ended in tears, thousands of severed heads, and Napoleon.

  But once Byron got hold of freedom, there was no turning back: freedom as an idea was here to stay. His Prisoner of Chillon was romantic because he didn’t have freedom; that dubious character Fletcher Christian mutinied against Captain Bligh—in Byron’s version—as a gesture against tyranny and a bid for freedom. And Byron himself lost his life while fighting, more or less, for the Greeks in their attempt to regain their own political freedom. Not “Dieu et mon droit” but “Freedom” was engraved on the banner waved by many a nineteenth- and twentieth-century revolutionary: slaves’ freedom from slavery in the American South, South Americans’ freedom from Spain, Russians’ freedom from the tsar, workers’ freedom from capitalist exploitation, women’s freedom from patriarchal systems in which they had the rights of children but the responsibilities of adults. And, eventually, freedom from Nazism and Iron Curtain Communism.

  Freedom to write, freedom to publish, freedom of speech: all are still being fought for in many countries in the world. Their martyrs are numerous.

  With so many so willing to die in its name, why have citizens in many Western countries been willing to surrender their hard-won freedoms with barely more than a squeak? Usually it’s fear. And fear can come in many forms: sometimes it comes down to the fear of not having a pay cheque. As long as the trains run on time and you yourself are employed, why make a fuss if a few people here and there are being strung up by their thumbs?

  And by the time the thumb-stringing really gets going, fear of another kind sets in. You can protect your thumbs only by staying below the surface of the frog pond: don’t stick your head up or croak too loudly, and, you are assured, as long as you don’t do anything “wrong”—a shifting category—nothing bad will happen to you.

  Until it does.

  And since the free press will already have been suppressed, and since any independent judiciary will already have been dismantled, and since any independent writers, singers, and artists will already have been squashed, there will be no one left to defend you. If there’s one thing we ought to know by now, it’s that absolutist systems with no accountability and no checks and balances generate monstrous abuses of power. That seems to be an infallible rule.

  * * *

  —

  But all of that may seem a little old-fashioned. It harks back to the mid-twentieth century, with its brutalism, its strutting dictators, its mass military spectacles, its crude in-your-face uniforms. The citizen-control methods of modern Western governments are much more low-profile: less jackboot than gumboot. Our leaders are applying the methods of agribusiness cattle-raising to us: ear-tag, barcode, number, sort, record. And cull, of course.