Righty friends are laughing at people spreading this
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
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I can't get over how dumb that book is as distopic novel. Read 1984 or a Brave New World, research the context of when they were made and you can see why their authors could see things like that happening, or worse, it's their way to tell us those things are already here.
Handmaid's tale is just women hysterics because 80s christanity and Reagan bad, but also something about nuclear fallout because why not. It has no basis to conclude something like a theonomic totalitarian state would exist. It's just so disconected from human nature and societal realities.
The distopic novels I mentioned before show how disposable humans are to these totalitarian societies, but even in one of them women can't avoid making themselves the center and telling us how important they are because muh fertility. I'll take one of those BNW artificial wombs, please
"but also something about nuclear fallout because why not"
Probably the Cuban missile crisis/cold war had a hand in that section of the narrative.
I honestly think that's why a lot of boomers are retarded. Existential dread does something permanent to a person's brain.
I meant it as the nuclear thing is secondary to the fertility crisis plot point, most likely because without it, it reads as weird smut
Erm, nuclear war WAS a big fear to GenX and older, and was also the reason behind women becoming cattle - the fallout results in widespread sterility, so fertile women become controlled. They became rare, and thus, a commodity.
They become commodities of the rich and powerful, who need heirs to keep the wealth and power in the family ....
Yes, nuclear unrest was big during the cold war, I still don't get how they supposed that would lead to a religious uprising where women are cattle, even Fallout (the game) is more plausible
And funnily enough it seems only to affect caucasians
Which is dumb because the book implies fertily issues are actually on men's part and they are too dumb to trust the science(TM)
Haven't read the thing since it first came out, but yeah, it was full of holes. It also implied that infertile poor women all worked in mines or some shit. Why is it always mines? But it's Caucasians because, well, things just weren't as consciously "inclusive" as they are now, and making a character "exotic" was done on purpose for different reasons than today (fetishes and the magic negro trope).
Just pointing out that it was in fact very much a product of its time, and it is pretty baffling why it hasn't been updated for a post-9/11 audience ...