Notes on 'The Handmaid's Tale' (1985) by Margaret Atwood (b. 1939)
A landmark work of feminist dystopian fiction, The Handmaid’s Tale explores the living conditions in a totalitarian and religiously conservative patriarchy where reproduction as a result of a drop in fertility rates has become the centre of government policy. Despite the fact that Margaret Atwood has argued that The Handmaid’s Tale is a work of speculative fiction, not science fiction, it won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (1987) and was nominated for the Locus and Nebula awards.