From Literary Hub:
John Freeman: The question I think all speculative fiction, and I think some of us who are politically active, want to know: Is now the time to be very, very worried?
Margaret Atwood: When was the time not to be very, very worried? Should we be more worried than ever before?
Andrew O’Hagan: Yes. Definitely.
JF: Maybe we should start when you both began as writers. Margaret, you in the early 1960s; Andy, you were, this was the early 1990s… What were the structural concerns that occupied you at the time, and how do they differ to some degree from what you see in front of you now as writers?
AO: Well, there was a basic reality that one could conjure with, certainly when I started. The situation now makes you feel slightly nostalgic for the Cold War, when the oppositions were pretty simple and almost charming, in fact quite delightful.
You know, one of the things that happened during the Cold War was that the CIA and the shape of the Council for Cultural Freedom decided the best way to tackle Russian ideology was to put money behind a literary magazine, Encounter, which it funded for some time thinking that, you know, somehow having an effect on the kinds of poets that would be published, and the way that F.R. Leavis would be handled as a critic, and the way that certain novelists would be discussed would be a decisive step forward in the war with Russia to rule humanity. And that makes me almost tickled pink to think that that was the level we operated on once upon a time, because now, of course, what’s happening is so deeply sinister, and it’s happening in the very basic units of veracity, of actuality, of what we can believe to be true.
Although there always was techniques and propaganda, of course, and lies—we always knew that—they were never operating at the level of everybody’s everyday life, I think, in the way that they are now. Everybody who opens a laptop and sits down for a mug of coffee in the morning is immediately confronted, I think, by a miasma of confected life and trying to separate out in order to have an opinion about what’s happening with the environmental crisis, or what’s happening in the election, or whether you can trust even the most basic reports.
Well, writers now, I think, are facing that every day, that you have got to see yourself, whether you want to or not, as having a responsibility, especially when it comes to nonfiction. You’ve got a responsibility to tackle that miasma and, if you like, the government institutional lying which is now an everyday reality for us.
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Yet it was Hulu’s television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale that jangled the nerves most vividly and to such startling effect. Set in the near future, it imagined Gilead: an authoritarian mutation of the United States, in which the constitutional apparatus has been forcibly dismantled and replaced by the patriarchal rule of “Sons of Jacob”, stripping women of all rights and enslaving those who remained fertile as handmaids, serially raped in a pseudo-biblical “ceremony” to provide the childless governing caste with progeny.
The Handmaid’s Tale was ostensibly televisual fiction. Yet in its uncompromising exploration of fear and power and its abuse, it also captured the lightning of the moment in a bottle of dystopian genius. It was nothing short of mesmeric, all the more so on repeated viewings. When the series was ordered in April 2016, Trump was the frontrunner to win the Republican nomination but not quite the presumptive candidate. It was still orthodox to assert that Hillary Clinton would trounce him in the election itself. His unapologetic misogyny had been perfectly clear at the first Republican contenders’ debate in August 2015, in which he sparred with the moderator, Megyn Kelly, and insulted Rosie O’Donnell. But the notorious Access Hollywood tape – “grab them by the pussy” – did not become public until October 2016, by which stage The Handmaid’s Tale was already in production. Yet, through luck, intuition or a combination of the two, the series became a disturbing text for our times. Produced by Atwood, author of the original novel, and Elisabeth Moss, who played the lead character, June/Offred, it did more than a thousand news bulletins to capture all that was most toxic about the new populist right and the shredding of constitutional norms.
More here.