There was a book in the mid eighties written by a woman named Margaret Atwood called The Handmaid's Tale. It was a dystopian near-future novel where there was a nasty civil war in the United States and the regime that rose to power were a bunch of ultra-fascistic Christian fundamentalists. Part of the setting includes vast widespread environmental damage that cataclysmically reduces fertility rates, and so Handmaids are fertile but fallen women (the main character is an adultress) who are passed around high ranking men in attempts to produce babbies. They're called Handmaids because of the Abraham and Sarah thing where Sarah can't have kids because she's barren and so she tells Abraham to "go unto her handmaid" to beget his children. There's a second book but IIRC it wasn't written until much later - it's also pretty good, if a bit implausible.
The book has recently been adapted to a Hulu series - adapted loosely, as they basically hijacked the setting's concept - and so the left is in love with it because it paints Christians as crazy racists, rapists, and slave-sellers who terribly abuse Powerful Liberal Archetypes. The book is pretty good, to be honest, and the Hulu series is actually pretty decent to watch. However, the left likes to hold it up as a likely reality if conservatives are somehow put in charge when the reality is the left is far more likely to institute a fascist regime in the name of environmental damage/climate change. Being acutely aware of the propaganda layer admittedly adds a sense of gallows humor to watching the series.
Is this a book?
Why have I never heard of it?
There was a book in the mid eighties written by a woman named Margaret Atwood called The Handmaid's Tale. It was a dystopian near-future novel where there was a nasty civil war in the United States and the regime that rose to power were a bunch of ultra-fascistic Christian fundamentalists. Part of the setting includes vast widespread environmental damage that cataclysmically reduces fertility rates, and so Handmaids are fertile but fallen women (the main character is an adultress) who are passed around high ranking men in attempts to produce babbies. They're called Handmaids because of the Abraham and Sarah thing where Sarah can't have kids because she's barren and so she tells Abraham to "go unto her handmaid" to beget his children. There's a second book but IIRC it wasn't written until much later - it's also pretty good, if a bit implausible.
The book has recently been adapted to a Hulu series - adapted loosely, as they basically hijacked the setting's concept - and so the left is in love with it because it paints Christians as crazy racists, rapists, and slave-sellers who terribly abuse Powerful Liberal Archetypes. The book is pretty good, to be honest, and the Hulu series is actually pretty decent to watch. However, the left likes to hold it up as a likely reality if conservatives are somehow put in charge when the reality is the left is far more likely to institute a fascist regime in the name of environmental damage/climate change. Being acutely aware of the propaganda layer admittedly adds a sense of gallows humor to watching the series.