In many books, there is a warning against the main character. Do not trust this person, or do not go that route. But in dystopian novels, the warning is towards the society as a whole. They are written to show the extreme of a society, as in 1984, shows the full extreme of totalitarianism and in The Handmaid's Tale shows what nuclear war can do to a civilization. Both novels stand as a view into the near future and somewhat answer the question "what if."

The meaning of dystopia is the opposite of the word utopia. Utopia is a perfect place and literally translates to "nowhere." "The Handmaid's Tale is the first of her works to be dominated by feminist concerns" writes Barbara Holliday, (Gale, n.pag.) "[Atwood] has been concerned in her fiction with the painful psychic warfare between men and women. [But] in The Handmaid's Tale, a...