At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.

Margaret Atwood was once, via a review of her work, once taken a bit publicly to task by Ursula K. LeGuin for not wanting her books (specifically The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood) to be labeled “science fiction,” because, LeGuin speculated, Atwood did not want to be relegated to the genre ghetto. Atwood, however, responded that it was merely a definitional issue. She preferred “speculative fiction”— which she read as fiction that really could happen but hadn’t — rather than “science fiction” — which she read as things that could not possibly happen. Eventually she and LeGuin talked it all out at a conference, determined they had different and at times overlapping definitions/interpretations, and they ended up at the pub doing lattes and whiskey chasers (OK, I made that last part up).

So to this review’s subject — The Handmaid’s Tale. Is it science fiction or speculative fiction?  Well, turns out it’s neither because Atwood has coined a new word (damn writers!); what we have in The Handmaid’s Tale is a “ustopia.” As Atwood explains in her recent collection of essays In Other Worlds, ustopia is a mash-up of dystopia and utopia because she believes each always has elements of the other embedded within it, though one might have to look hard to find it.

The Handmaid’s Tale is set in a near-future United States, part of which has been taken over by a fundamentalist totalitarian group.  Because of a plummeting birthrate for a host of societal and environmental reasons, fertile women are a rare commodity and so these “handmaids” are rounded up and divvied out to the select powerful.  The story is told from the first person POV of one of the handmaids.

So what is The Handmaid’s Tale:  science fiction, speculative fiction, dystopia, ustopia?  To be honest, I’m not all that invested in the argument. Authors are free to label (or not) their works whatever they’d like, and we readers are free to accept that or disagree, calling them “science fiction,” “literary fiction,” or “Maude” if we so choose. If I had to pick a side, on this one I’d go with Atwood. There really isn’t a lot of “science” in the fiction here: no far future, no advanced technology (a souped-up credit card system is about it), no strange creatures. Even the social system isn’t particularly unusual. In fact, Atwood is often quoted as saying she put nothing in the book that hasn’t appeared somewhere somewhen on this planet.  So no, it really in my mind doesn’t fit the science fiction label; it’s much more a thought experiment — a “what if” idea that leads to a wave of questions and answers. But in the end, it doesn’t really matter. Because what The Handmaid’s Tale is is great.

The writing is simply superb — vivid, precise, poetic in places, filled with evocative similes and metaphors, such as when she describes a set of tulips:

redder than ever, opening, no longer wine cups but chalices; thrusting themselves up to what end? They are, after all, empty. When they are old they turn themselves out, then explode slowly, the petals thrown out like shards

redder than ever, opening, no longer wine cups but chalices; thrusting themselves up to what end? They are, after all, empty. When they are old they turn themselves out, then explode slowly, the petals thrown out like shards

Beyond the sharp image itself, note the color red (specific to the handmaids), the wine and chalice (appropriate image for a book focused so much on religion), “thrusting” (appropriate for a book focused so much on sex), “”empty” (appropriate for a book where infertility is so key), “explode . . . shards” (fits not only some of the players, but also echoes the terrorism that occurs throughout the book). We get this sort of layered imagery/symbol/metaphor throughout the book, making it wonderfully rich.  Just as we see patterns layered throughout as well, such as all the ways the narrator is linked via language or image to being like or treated like a child or a doll. The short chapter dealing with the actual sexual act involving the Handmaid, her Commander, and the Commander’s Wife in its very few pages is fodder for an entire thesis examining the use of language for effect as Atwood finds all sorts of ways — word choice, image, simile, white space, sound, etc — to make this the least sexy sex scene ever presented on the page.

The structure, which alternates between three time periods adds to the sense of rich complexity as the reader moves with the narrator through the time prior to the coup, the time shortly after the coup during her handmaid “training,” and finally through present time. It also does a nice job of keeping the reader wondering about how all this happened, about what happened to the narrator’s husband, her daughter, what happened during their failed escape attempt. The answers get teased out slowly.

The narrator herself is a wonderful construction. Atwood takes a real risk by not making her heroic in the way we usually think of it. Most authors would have had their character working hard to overthrow the cruel regime. The narrator’s focus, though, is on survival.  And she is, realistically I’d say, a very passive kind of character. That isn’t to say we don’t get other sorts in here. Her friend Moira is more the stereotypical protagonist in this kind of work — the one who simply refuses to bow down. The narrator’s chief trainer, Aunt Lydia, is also a strong, active character. The same is true of the wife of the commander to whom the narrator is assigned. Both also show Atwood’s refusal to take the easy way out by making this merely a screed against men; in this world women are both oppressed and oppressor; and the women like Aunt Lydia are fervent believers in what they do. The commander, one of the higher-ups in the new government is also a believer, but things, as the book soon reveals, are a bit cloudier in that regard.

The book is chilling, moving, thought-provoking. Like all good dystopias (or ustopias), all good (dare I say it) science fiction or speculative fiction, it doesn’t present you a society to criticize for all its obvious flaws; it presents you a society that like a funhouse mirror offers up a reflection — warped sure, distorted sure — of our own and makes you see our own flaws, makes you question our own societal fixtures. If you read 1984 and criticize Big Brother, you’re missing the point. It isn’t the Big Brother in his fictional society Orwell wants you to worry about; it’s the Big Brother in our own, or potentially in our own.

And Atwood takes a page from Orwell as well at the very end of the novel, giving us in effect two endings, just as Orwell did with his Newspeak chapter at the close of 1984. And I think for the same purpose, though for spoilers’ sake I won’t go into the details.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a true modern classic and should be not just on everyone’s “to-be-read” shelf but on everyone’s “must-read” shelf.  Though perhaps Atwood would object to those labels and come up with one of her own…