![]() ![]() I’d read extensively in science fiction, speculative fiction, utopias and dystopias ever since my high school years in the 1950s, but I’d never written such a book. “It can’t happen here” could not be depended on: Anything could happen anywhere, given the circumstances.īy 1984, I’d been avoiding my novel for a year or two. ![]() Change could also be as fast as lightning. ![]() Having been born in 1939 and come to consciousness during World War II, I knew that established orders could vanish overnight. but then they disappeared.” I heard such stories many times. During my visits to several countries behind the Iron Curtain - Czechoslovakia, East Germany - I experienced the wariness, the feeling of being spied on, the silences, the changes of subject, the oblique ways in which people might convey information, and these had an influence on what I was writing. Every Sunday the East German Air Force made sonic booms to remind us of how close they were. The keyboard was German because I was living in West Berlin, which was still encircled by the Berlin Wall: The Soviet empire was still strongly in place, and was not to crumble for another five years. In the spring of 1984 I began to write a novel that was not initially called “The Handmaid’s Tale.” I wrote in longhand, mostly on yellow legal notepads, then transcribed my almost illegible scrawlings using a huge German-keyboard manual typewriter I’d rented. ![]()
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