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By Root 504 0

or even religious—we so often produce hell? I’m not sure, but so it is. Maybe it’s the lumpiness of human beings. What do you do with people who somehow just don’t or won’t fit into your grand scheme? All too often you stretch them on a Procrustean bed or dig a hole in the ground and shovel them into it. With so much stretching, hole-digging, and shovelling going on as the twentieth century ground on, it was difficult to place faith in the construction of utopias, literary or otherwise. It became much easier to depict awful societies not as the tawdry Before side of an After happy-face future but as the much worse thing we might instead be heading toward. The future societies imagined by mid-and late-twentieth-century writers, and indeed by early-twenty-first-century ones, are much more likely to be dark than bright.

Throughout this chapter I’ve been using the term ustopia, and now I’ll expand on it. Utopia, as you know, comes from Thomas More’s book of that name—which in his case may mean either “no place” or “good place,” or both. Some are of the opinion that More’s book was a sort of joke: utopia can’t exist because fallen human nature doesn’t permit it. Nevertheless, his term stuck, and now, by general usage, utopias are thought to portray ideal societies or some version of them. Their program is to do away with the ills that plague us, such as wars, social inequality, poverty and famine, gender inequalities, fallen arches, and the like. (People—especially women—are always better looking in nineteenth-century utopias than the authors thought they were in real life.)

Dystopias are usually described as the opposite of utopias—they are Great Bad Places rather than Great Good Places and are characterized by suffering, tyranny, and oppression of all kinds. Some books contain both—a sort of “look on this picture, then on that,” as Hamlet puts it—one, noble and virtuous; the other, corrupt and vicious. Polar opposites.

But scratch the surface a little, and—or so I think—you see something more like a yin and yang pattern; within each utopia, a concealed dystopia; within each dystopia, a hidden utopia, if only in the form of the world as it existed before the bad guys took over. Even in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four—surely one of the most unrelievedly gloomy dystopias ever concocted—utopia is present, though minimally, in the form of an antique glass paperweight and a little woodland glade beside a stream. As for the utopias, from Thomas More onwards, there is always provision made for the renegades, those who don’t or won’t follow the rules: prison, enslavement, exile, exclusion, or execution.

Forty years after having abandoned my “metaphysical romance” thesis with its chapters on good and bad societies, I find I have produced—so far—three novel-length ustopias of my own: The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood.

Why did I jump the tracks, as it were, from realistic novels to dystopias? Was I slumming, as some “literary” writers are accused of doing when they write science fiction or detective stories? The human heart is inscrutable, but let me try to remember what I thought I was up to at the time.

First, The Handmaid’s Tale. What put it into my head to write such a book? I had never done anything like it before: my previous fiction had been realistic. Tackling a ustopia was a risk. But it was also a challenge and a temptation because if you’ve studied a form and read extensively in it, you often have a secret hankering to try it yourself.

I began the book—after a few earlier dry runs—in Berlin in the spring of 1984. I had a D.A.A.D. fellowship, in a program run by West Berlin to encourage foreign artists to visit, as the city was at that time encircled by the Berlin Wall and its inhabitants felt understandably claustrophobic. During our stay we also visited East Berlin, as well as Poland and Czechoslovakia, and I thus had several first-hand experiences of the flavour of life in a totalitarian—but supposedly utopian—regime. I wrote more of the book once I was back in Toronto, and completed