When you think of the future, what do you imagine? Do you think of flying cars and people on Mars? Are there still polar bears and jungles? We like to believe that we’ll never know what the future holds until it has the fortune of becoming the present. However, we often fail to acknowledge that how we treat the present is a direct determinant of our future; our current achievements and prevalent faults indicate how the path of time ahead will unravel.
For most of human history, we have evolved in our bodies, brains and activity in response to the environment for survivability, but we are now in the Anthropocene, an era in which humans are a driving force in Earth’s interconnected systems.
The idea that humans will be able to, if they don’t already, change the Earth so dramatically that they completely control it is an emphatic feature of dystopian fiction. The genre has a unique ability to signal future consequences of current events and parallel real-world circumstances, allowing readers to understand complex issues from otherworldly — or “otherbodily” — perspectives and gain progressive insight.
Margaret Atwood, my favorite author, is a renowned writer known primarily for her novels on historical, speculative and dystopian fiction. Her novels “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Oryx and Crake” paint dystopian futures that feel eerily similar to our reality. Both books explore themes of environmental collapse, scientific and governmental overreach and societal control, warning us of the consequences of unchecked power and human exploitation. In these works, Atwood does not merely speculate about the future — she reflects on existing trends in politics, technology and environmental degradation, illustrating how close we may be to the worlds she envisions.
The themes of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Oryx and Crake” and our reality become intertwined, exploring how medical care and science cross ethical boundaries relative to societal hierarchies. Globally, laws and policies exist to preserve humanity, such as doctors’ “do no harm” promise and bans on human genetic modifications. A different approach is taken in these fictional societies.
In “The Handmaid’s Tale,” pollution has lowered fertility rates, leading to chaos as the radical organization Sons of Jacob overthrows the American government and creates the Republic of Gilead, abolishing women’s and LGBTQ+ rights in God’s name. Handmaids endure forced reproduction with powerful men and receive medical care solely to ensure childbirth, often at their own expense.
Today, some women are denied life-saving abortions until they are “in imminent peril,” echoing the novel’s disregard for “do no harm.” Because of recent abortion policy in the United States, many women have faced death, been subjected to lifelong consequences of their pregnancy struggles or have been forced to give birth — at times even if their bodies are not capable of doing so.
“Oryx and Crake” expands on this idea of exclusive care and elite-controlled livelihood: Only the wealthy and powerful are able both to reproduce and survive. Contrary to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” instead of concealing sexual violence and disempowering women, this society glorifies the sexual exploitation of women and highlights sex as a backdoor to financial freedom in the Pleeblands. Meanwhile, scientists and wealthy residents of the Compounds explore bodily and genetic modifications to make themselves look younger and live longer.
These Compounds produce pills — all only available to the wealthy — to modify oneself and improve immunity to human-made diseases. In this world, instead of being subject to environmental disaster, they change natural selection. The Compounds promoted all sorts of genetic modification while secretly poisoning those who did not purchase pilled treatment for ailments they were being given.
In 2014, CRISPR biomedical technology was used in China to genetically modify the embryos of a monkey and eventually, two twin girls, making them immune to HIV. The world erupted in bioethical debate regarding how far is too far when it comes to using science and technology to change human evolution. This was eerily foreshadowed in “Oryx and Crake,” where Crake uses his scientific knowledge and disdain for the society humans created to make a new species of human he deemed perfect. Viewing his plan as benevolent, he played his own version of God to create a new species that would no longer create, destroy, kill, experience greed or power and would forever live in tandem with the environment once all other humans were extinct.
Crake was afraid of being human. In this sense, the novel was not only dystopian because of the lack of human morals but because human survivability is threatened by the desire to escape the confines of humanity. As we advance in technology and our knowledge, we may begin to feel small enough that we worry not just about whether or not we individually matter but if our species does. Trying to combat disease and human suffering through the modification of our bodies, behavior and environment can be seen as an attempt to overcome the boundaries that make us human and the world natural — a dystopian concept.
This is not to say that I disapprove of modern medicine or innovation at all. I want to highlight the wonderful things humans have overcome while cautioning how many issues, created by us or not, will always be left to overcome. We are not immortal, and our species likely isn’t either, but in trying to make it seem so, we risk losing our appreciation for our innate ability to create, love and take care of one another and our environment in all circumstances of life.
As I have read and interpreted these stories, I have come to realize that dystopian fiction does not necessarily reference “artificialness” in its popular plotlines of zombies and killer aliens but a future in which humans lose and must constantly clean up their mess. While there are many good things about our civilization and plenty of hope for the future, there are equally as many human-made crises pushing us toward a future where humans lose to ourselves.
The theocratic rule in “The Handmaid’s Tale” and the rising corpocracy in “Oryx and Crake” emerge as responses to environmental destruction that challenge humans’ survivability. Ever prevalent are these themes in real life — fossil fuel overreliance, overwhelming food and resource waste, deforestation and pollution never cease. Starvation, homelessness and ecosystem collapse persist while wars and inequality continue worldwide.
In Atwood’s narratives, the powerful seek to “correct” these crises by any means necessary, such as Gilead’s control of reproduction and societal processes and Crake’s individual determination. Similarly, today’s executive orders in the United States and billionaire-backed policies reflect a troubling use of power, as seen in the president’s recent statement, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” This ideology is the backbone of both the Sons of Jacob and Crake’s attempts to repair the diminished livelihood humans have brought upon themselves.
The immense concern I feel after understanding that Atwood’s dystopian futures correlate with the events of the present is unquestionable. Think back to the way you imagine your future — is this future realistic? The crises we endure and will continue to endure make imagining the future hard. However, reading dystopian fiction has helped me envision solutions to modern problems and even problems that have not happened yet but are explored in the genre. If everyone grasped the severity of our human actions and consequences on the Earth, we might work harder not to lose ourselves in the strive for greener grass, limiting our creation of problems and dystopian responses to this understanding.
I implore you to read these books yourself and think about how you can work toward a better, equitable and sustainable future where we are realistic about human agency — where we all have power and a voice, preventing the loss of moral humanity that is so violently discarded in these novels.
Merrigan Butcher is a freshman majoring in anthropology.
Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece that represents the view of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the staff editorial.