Author Margaret Atwood has said she prefers to call her work “speculative fiction” instead of science fiction. Gilead, the theocratic society in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” isn’t just a work of total imagination -- there’s precedence for that world.
In an interview with the PBS NewsHour, the author shared some of the other influential dystopian fiction that helped lay the groundwork for “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

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