Who here has read The Handmaid's Tale?

I am reading it now and I have to say the part where the president and congress and gunned down and it is blamed on Islamic extremists and the right wing Christian government takes over gives me the creeps - especially since it was written in 1985. All I can think of is John Ashcroft and the Patriot Act. Shudder, shudder...

often of late. Very prescient and very frightening.

I was chilled when I read it about 10 years ago. Now it just seems like it could happen even more than it did then. Especially if dubya steals the presidency again.

And very possible

and I never forgot it. I bet John Asscrack is using it for a checklist for his perfect "Christian" world.

and prescient novel

That is why it worried me greatly when I read Oryx and Crake, about what genetic engineering will do to us.

we had a book Club

We did two long threads on A Handmaids tale Back then threads stayed up long enough to discuss things thoroughly <sigh>
I just finished Cats Eye by Atwood and it is wonderful

Margaret Atwood is one of my favorite writers.

I understand there is a video of it but I have never been able to access one.

It was a very thought provoking book. I did not enjoy the movie as much.

Saw the movie about 10 years ago, then read the book. Scary stuff. :scared:

in a house which later became the site of a horrific murder. (The Michael Peterson trial). It has been a minor obsession of mine the last two years, and I started a book about it but dropped it. Not as interesting as it first seemed.

Husband murdered his wife on the stairs (there's a shot of the staircase in the movie with Faye Dunaway and Miranda Richardson).

Creepy, atmospheric book. Movie not as good. Amazon has it.

"Red Room, Red Room... over there..."

At the core is the "control" issue. No matter how it plays out, the need to control, and the resistance/resentment of the controlled, is the key.

I read it recently; I don't think you could read it any time in the last 4 years without drawing comparisons.

Oryx & Crake is also a clear warning about genetic engineering, for those who can hear it!

when I first read the book years ago, I thought it was entertaining and spooky but very far out and highly unlikely. Now it seems all too possible. Especially the part about killing off Congress to install a theocracy. The thugs have their assault weapons back, now. Sigh.

Native Tongue....vol 1 of a trilogy (by far the best of the series; the third is just weird)



Set in the twenty-second century after the repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment, the novel reveals a world where women are once again property, denied civil rights and banned from public life. In this world, Earth’s wealth relies on interplanetary commerce, for which the population depends on linguists, a small, clannish group of families whose women breed and become perfect translators of all the galaxies’ languages. The linguists wield power, but live in isolated compounds, hated by the population and in fear of class warfare.

But a group of women is destined to challenge the power of men and linguists. Nazareth, the most talented linguist of her family, is exhausted by her constant work translating for the government, supervising the children’s language education in the Alien-in-Residence interface chambers, running the compound, and caring for the elderly men. She longs to retire to the Barren House, where women past childbearing age knit, chat, and wait to die. What Nazareth does not yet know is that a clandestine revolution is going on in the Barren Houses: there, word by word, women are creating a language of their own to free them of men’s domination. Their secret must, above all, be kept until the language is ready for use.

The women’s language, Láadan, is only one of the brilliant creations found in this stunningly original novel, which combines a page-turning plot with challenging meditations on the tensions between freedom and control, individuals and communities, thought and action. A complete work in itself, it is also the first volume in Elgin’s acclaimed Native Tongue trilogy.

by Sinclair Lewis.

Back in 1935 he wrote of a President who barely won a contested election and gradually, or not so gradually, turned the US into a fascist state by preying on the fears of the citizenry during a crisis.

He promised rights to the oppressed, but took them away out the back door. He forced the media to adore him, and made Hearst his waterboy. He claimed to be a servant of God, but many wondered if he was just a crook. He used the police and the military for oppression, not protection.

Sound familiar? I read it many years ago and remember vaguely that Windrip came to a very bad end. I've thought about this book many times over the past three years, but can't find a copy around here. I think it ended with him hiding behind a small child for protection-- showing him for the miserable coward he truly was. Or maybe that was in another book-- memory fades with time.

Several Amazon reviewers also see extraordinary parallels between Windrip and Shrub.

In Stephen King's "The Dead Zone," when John Smith goes to assassinate Congressman Stillson, he grabs an infant and uses it as a shield, ruining his political career.

Is "It Can't Happen Here" The title? I'll have to look it up, I read Lewis' "Dodsworth" and thought it well-written but hardly an Earth-shattering premise.

thought it might be "The Stand" or even "Lucifer's Hammer." Similar situations through all of these doomsday books.

Yes, Lewis' is titled "It Can't happen Here" but it's been out of print for years. A good used book store or library is about it now. Amazon and eBAy get stupid prices for some out-of-print books like this one.

Lewis wrote a lot of stuff, and much of it not all that far above hackery, with some gems thrown in to make him still read. There may yet be some schoolkids with Babbit or Arrowsmith on their Reading lists. ICHH is one of the potboilers, but a pretty good read. Notable mainly because of, well, now.

you can read It Can't Happen Here online - here's a link:

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/l/lewis/sinclair/happen/

I thought it would still be under copyright.

(Better download it before someone notices)

Not to worry, ladies, it will never happen in our lifetime.

Loved it then; hits a little too close now, I think.

Now!


:D

i saw the posibility then; hoped not to live to see it actualized.

You might like "The Gate to Women's Country" by Sherri S Tepper. It's a little more SiFi, but that can be a good thing.

It was definitely a very creepy story. There are some comparisons to be made between the tactics used to gain power in the book, and the tactics that have been used by the present administration, but I don't think we're quite to that extreme, or that we will be for a long time.

When you think about it, the bizarre and creepy thing is that for most of our history--continuing in some nations until the present day--woman really has been viewed as nothing more than a vessel for bearing an heir.