november11–24, 2019 | newyork 73
The apocalypse of 20th-century sci-fi was always sudden and
explosive: nuclear annihilation, asteroid strike, global pandemic.
Now the apocalypse comes on little cat feet and reveals itself slowly.
Instead of World War III, nativist movements and religious funda-
mentalists, covertly fueled by oligarchs and kleptocrats, combine
to undermine liberal democracies. The disastrous destabilization
of life on Earth—the fires and floods, drowned cities and displaced
refugees—arrives piece by piece, year by year, always a little worse.
We seem to be watching our self-annihilation on the news.
They tried to warn us, of course. Margaret Atwood began her
first dystopian fiction, appropriately, in 1984. The premise of
The Handmaid’s Tale, American democracy giving way to theo-
cratic dictatorship, “seemed—even to me—fairly outrageous,”
she wrote early in the Trump presidency. She had hoped it was
“an anti-prediction.” Her sequel this fall, The Testaments, peers
a bit further into its imagined future, but Atwood, when she
speaks about these books, keeps reminding us that it’s not our
future she’s writing. Her dystopia, like every other, draws on
history to tell a story about the present. “The desired outcome
of The Handmaid’s Tale would have been that it would fade into
obscurity as a period piece, so that my dire warnings would not
prove to be correct,” she told the New York Times. “That’s not
the turn that history has taken.”
No. In Pennsylvania this fall—our Pennsylvania, not Atwood’s
Gilead—Republicans pushed a bill to mandate the ritual burial of
fetal remains, even a fertilized egg lost to miscarriage. What’s left
for visionary artists when our volatile present is overtaking its
own treacherous future? No one wants to start stuffing crude
Trump-like figures into their fiction. “The Trump Dark Age is not
really dystopian, though it might have been if it were more intel-
ligently imagined,” says Joyce Carol Oates. “I’ll say it again,”
tweets Nick Harkaway in London, “dystopian writers are NOT
thrilled at finding the world is out-shittying our novels.” His last
book, Gnomon, took the surveillance state to a terrifying extreme;
now, perhaps weirdly, he and others see a turn toward optimism.
“My new book has been hard to write because it’s about hope,” he
says. “I’m trying to write about someone finding, almost by acci-
dent, the green shoots in the rubble.” Maybe sci-fi writers are
coming full circle, to dream again of rosy futures in spite of every-
thing. They’re running out of time just like the rest of us. ■
Protesters dressed
as characters from
The Handmaid’s Tale in
Spokane, Washington.
