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‘Make Margaret Atwood fiction again!’ Despite encountering them repeatedly over the past few years, I still cannot entirely believe the sheer number of op-eds declaring that ‘we’ — a slippage which often seems really to mean ‘women in Saudi Arabia’ — are ‘living in The Handmaid’s Tale’ ‘How far are we from Gilead?’ ‘Could The Handmaid’s Tale happen today?’ asks the typical journalist, before providing the ‘chilling’ answer upfront, usually in the very headline: ‘For some women, it’s already reality’ It’s like a tic, or an exercise in wish-fulfilment   The Handmaid’s Tale is certainly the world’s best-known sterility apocalypse It is also one of the most successful novels of the last century, and now, together with its sequel The Testaments, of this century When in October The Testaments was jointly awarded the 2019 Booker Prize with Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, a gracious Atwood told Evaristo that ‘It would have been quite embarrassing for me… if I had been alone here, so I’m very pleased that you’re here too’ In fact, in light of the appropriative relation of Atwood’s novels to North American black women and their history, she has every reason to be embarrassed    At this stage, The Handmaid’s Tale franchise is fully a fandom Celebrities throw Handmaid parties; people hold their themed weddings in front of a set made to resemble the Gileadean ‘Wall’ that gender-traitors get hanged on; liberal-feminist websites delightedly issue po-faced injunctions to the world at large not to do any of this, and especially not — think of the handmaids you’re offending — to dress up as a ‘Sexy Handmaid’ at Halloween   A personal encounter with Atwood’s breeder-dystopia is also currently the mainstream trope of political coming-to-consciousness testimonies in the era of Trump and #MeToo For some reason, it is taken as given not only that the text is ‘feminist’, but that it is archetypally so Despite its author’s (and the cast of the Hulu Handmaid’s Tale’s) repeated disavowals of feminist intent, the text’s synonymity with