Dire Cartographies: The Roads to Ustopia and The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood describes how she came to write her utopian, dystopian works.

The word “utopia” comes from Thomas More’s book of the same name—meaning “no place” or “good place,” or both. In “Dire Cartographies,” from the essay collection In Other Worlds, Atwood coins the term “ustopia,” which combines utopia and dystopia, the imagined perfect society and its opposite. Each contains latent versions of the other. Following her intellectual journey and growing familiarity with ustopias fictio...