Margaret Atwood made a remark on Kara Swisher's podcast On With Kara Swisher that stuck with me.
When The Handmaid’s Tale was published as a novel, she received no death threats. Years later, when it became a television series, the death threats arrived. When she asked why there were none for the book, she was told:
“Because those people don’t read.”
It’s a sharp line. It gets a laugh. No one laughed on the podcast. And it contains some truth.
But it’s not the whole truth.
This wasn’t just about books versus television. It was about when a warning stops feeling abstract and starts feeling personal.
When The Handmaid’s Tale existed only as a novel, it lived in the realm of interpretation. Readers had to build the world in their minds. That takes effort, reflection, and a willingness to engage with metaphor. Dystopia, at that stage, still felt like a thought experiment.
But television does something different.
It removes distance.
It makes the nightmare visible, immediate, shareable, and unavoidable. It removes the intellectual buffer and replaces it with lived imagery. Red robes. White bonnets. Ritualized power. Public punishment. Private terror. No footnotes required.
And that is the moment when some viewers stopped seeing it as “just a story.”
Because suddenly, it wasn’t about a future that might happen.
It felt uncomfortably close to a future they wanted, feared, or recognized.
And that’s when the threats began.
Not because it was fiction.
Because it was recognition.
The Difference Between Warning and Accusation
Dystopian fiction has always served two purposes:
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To warn.
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To accuse.
As long as a story remains abstract, people can safely file it under “ideas,” “politics,” or “philosophy.” But once it becomes visual and mass-distributed, it shifts into something more dangerous — it becomes cultural confrontation.
For many viewers, The Handmaid’s Tale wasn’t an attack on women’s rights.
It was an attack on their identity, their beliefs, their power structures, and their fantasies of control.
And that’s the pivot point.
Criticism can be tolerated.
Exposure is harder.
But being recognized inside a dystopia? That produces rage.
Why the Threats Came Later
The death threats didn’t appear because Atwood suddenly became more controversial. The ideas were always there. The difference is that television turned the story into a mirror large enough for millions to stand in front of at once.
And mirrors make people angry when they don’t like what they see.
What terrifies authoritarian personalities most is not disagreement. It’s visibility without permission. It’s being shown, without editorial control, as what they resemble.
A dystopia is only comfortable when it feels safely distant.
Once it feels familiar, it stops being entertainment.
This Is the Moment We’re Living In
We are now in a historical phase where:
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Fiction is being mistaken for instruction.
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Satire is misread as aspiration.
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Warnings are treated as threats.
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And storytellers are increasingly targeted not for what they invent — but for what they expose.
The danger isn’t that dystopian stories are too dark.
The danger is that too many people look at them and don’t see a warning anymore.
They see a trial run.
The Real Lesson in Atwood’s Story
So no, it’s not simply that “those people don’t read.”
It’s that:
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Books allow distance.
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Images demand confrontation.
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And recognition is what ignites hostility.
The threats didn’t arrive when The Handmaid’s Tale was imagined.
They arrived when it was seen.
And in that difference lies everything we need to understand about the current moment.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
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