Margaret Atwood set a rule for herself when she was writing The Handmaid’s Tale in 1984.
“I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist,” she wrote in a 2018 article about the origin story of her most haunting novel.
All the atrocities depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale — the public executions, the forced childbearing, the indentured servitude — had precedents. “[And] many of these were to be found, not in other cultures and religions,…
