Oh, the similarities to fundamentalist Islam are absolutely warranted, I just wanted to address the incorrect claim that Atwood wrote Handmain about Iran or Islam (which is false).
Of course all fundamentalist oppressive branches of religions, be it Christianity, Islam, Judaism or whatever, converge to similar shapes.
Atwood was worried about trends in the US and imagined a world where the earliest conservative Puritan Christianity -- that she considers a foundational part of America -- made a comeback. So no "gender equality". The early Puritans didn't behave "like Islam", any similarities are a result of a convergent evolution of sorts; their sins are entirely their own: fundamentalist Christianity. Atwood said much, that these were faults of the West she was describing.
I'm all for Death of the Author, but the specific claim I refuted was about what Handmaid was intended to be about (not other valid interpretations) and only the author can answer that. And she did!
"The deep foundation of the United States—so went my thinking—was not the comparatively recent 18th-century Enlightenment structures of the Republic, with their talk of equality and their separation of Church and State, but the heavy-handed theocracy of 17th-century Puritan New England—with its marked bias against women—which would need only the opportunity of a period of social chaos to reassert itself."
"The deep foundation of the United States—so went my thinking—was not the comparatively recent 18th-century Enlightenment structures of the Republic, with their talk of equality and their separation of Church and State, but the heavy-handed theocracy of 17th-century Puritan New England—with its marked bias against women—which would need only the opportunity of a period of social chaos to reassert itself.""
"Like the original theocracy, this one would select a few passages from the Bible to justify its actions, and it would lean heavily towards the Old Testament, not towards the New.
[...]
Surely the Gilead command would have moved to eliminate the Quakers, as their 17th-century Puritan forebears had done."
"I made a rule for myself: I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist. I did not wish to be accused of dark, twisted inventions, or of misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behavior. The group-activated hangings, the tearing apart of human beings, the clothing specific to castes and classes, the forced childbearing and the appropriation of the results, the children stolen by regimes and placed for upbringing with high-ranking officials, the forbidding of literacy, the denial of property rights—all had precedents, and many of these were to be found, not in other cultures and religions, but within Western society, and within the “Christian” tradition itself. (I enclose “Christian” in quotation marks, since I believe that much of the Church’s behavior and doctrine during its two-millennia-long existence as a social and political organization would have been abhorrent to the person after whom it is named.)"
I didn't mention the show, isn't this thread and article about books?
> It was a thinly veiled world-building exercise on the subjection of women in Islam… then it ends. Nothing really happens.
The Handmaid's Tale wasn't about Islam but about religious Christian fundamentalism and, by Atwood's own words, an extrapolation of trends she saw in the US.
It's a good book, it seems contentious to list it as a "bad book" as a given, and expect people to agree with you. It's an acclaimed book and well received by other authors.
> Nothing really happens.
Bizarre take.
In structure it has a lot of parallels to 1984, the protagonist is trapped in an oppressive regime seemingly without escape, some authority figures are ambiguous, there's some hope but it can turn into a trap, and finally a sort of open end (both Winston's and Offred's fates are implied but unresolved, though Offred's is more ambiguous) and a an epilogue explaining the regime and its implied downfall.
Do you also find 1984 as a novel where nothing happens?
> Books that are simply bad books and in addition to being bad take an aggressive, political bent. (eg: the handmaid's tale)
Weird example. The Handmaid's Tale is quite good.
Edit: wow, downvotes for stating a book is quite good. HN at its worst.
Edit 2: in fact it's so bizarre, also seeing other commenters here downvoted for saying Handmaid is a good book, that I struggled to see the reason for the ire. I'm not from the US, mind you, so it took me a while to add 2 and 2 and remember Atwood and Handmaid are in the current political climate of the US an anti-Trump stance. So that has to be the reason. Saying Handmaid is a good book implies you're anti-Trump and therefore invites downvotes (but also upvotes from the other camp, I'd guess). Wow.
True in principle, but I find in practice the Hugo and Nebula seldom disappoint me (in the sense of having wasted my time, not that every winner is a masterpiece). And these are not the only prizes (or genres), I just mentioned two. There are also magazines, reviews, etc. Sometimes following an author you like on Twitter or whatever helps see what they like.
Friend's recommendations aren't gamified. Actual friends I mean, not facebook contacts.
In any case, these were just examples that Amazon is NOT the place to go for browsing books. I'm sure people must do it, but I don't know of anyone who goes to Amazon to look for book recommendations...
You claimed I said it was "trivial" which I didn't, I said it was "relatively easy".
Then you went into that nonsense of if it's so easy then why don't you do it and become a millionaire yadda yadda, which is a dumb cliche and also uncalled for, since I was merely writing my opinion, not challenging you or calling you out.
> and invoking then HN rules as a defense shield. What a wiesel.
The HN guidelines ask you to reply to the most charitable interpretation of a comment. Do you honestly think that's what you did with your millionaire comment?
> someone else would have attempted it already.
You don't know that it hasn't (or isn't being attempted), and in any case, everything hasn't happened until it does. Like you said, especially now in the age of LLMs, and especially with Amazon become worse and worse.
A snarky reply. I never said "trivial", and I didn't mean it's easy in absolute terms, just that this seems relatively easy to disrupt compared to other endeavors.
I have no desire to become a millionaire and I already have a job, and do I need to remind you of the HN guidelines you've clearly forgotten?
This should be relatively easy to disrupt for ebooks. It doesn't seem necessary to have the infrastructure and pockets of Amazon to sell ebooks (and be fairer to authors and readers).
I'm not convinced about discoverability, I don't browse random books or look for recommendations on Amazon; to me Amazon is the final stop once I know the ebook I want to buy. Literally a search bar for the book I already want. I don't use Amazon as a shelf of books to peruse, and I never look for recommended products (especially not books).
I think it's mostly the integration with Kindle, and the reputation ("I trust Amazon so I'll enter my credit card"). This should be feasible to overcome by a better platform. And Amazon seem hell bent on ruining their reputation...
Agreed that the comparison is extreme; I wouldn't have made it myself.
But it's also not harmless to work at a company which makes tools/components/software for killing people. It wouldn't be "just an office job". Sometimes it's hard to make the call, e.g. a spreadsheet can be used to tally inventory or prisoners at a work camp, but when your company is directly involved e.g. in enabling surveillance by a nation whose actions you consider immoral, then it's probably time to quit.
If the mention of the US or Trump as the motive for quitting makes anyone irritated, consider the same situation if it was a guy saying he won't work for a company which is developing AI to enable Putin to better identify dissenters or bomb Ukraine.
The criticism of Google and their abandoning of their "Don't Be Evil" motto has been a constant here since before Trump's first term. There's no correlation with Dems being in government.
If anything, what Google (and Meta, etc) show during Trump is how hypocritical their "values" were at their core. When it paid them to pursue carbon neutral policies, and being seen as "inclusive" or whatever, being seen as against violence, they did so. Now that those in power are against all of that, it pays to quietly or not so quietly abandon those policies. They can do this because they were never their core values, they were just convenient for business at the time.
> The problem is that the author may have been right
Even worse, it's very likely the author wasn't even right most of the time. They claim a frequent occurrence is that "the room" turns against them. Now, their rationalization is that they are ego-driven, yadda yadda, no other possibility of why "the room" is often against their position. If they were rational as they claim to be, maybe they could show some insight or introspection into the possibility they are wrong about some or all of the details, at least some of the time.
But no, their conclusion is that humans are ego-driven and it's best to disengage and only debate with truly smart people.
This reminds me of the joke about the guy who's driving and hears a warning on the radio: "beware of a madman driving the wrong way on Av XYZ", and he replies "ONE madman!? There are HUNDREDS of them!"
I've done this, and even more: very often lately I've written a response on HN, let it sit for a few minutes, then delete it.
Not because I think I'm right (I think I'm aware of my flaws), but because I realize I don't feel like arguing about it, maybe my reply is closer to a belief of mine I've no wish to defend, and I suspect any snarky replies might incite a bad back-and-forth that never ends well online, bet it HN or elsewhere. So having gotten the reply out of my system, I delete it before anyone has a chance to reply.
Somehow my brain gets tricked into thinking I've replied, and allows me to drop the whole conversation in peace. It's a neat trick.
I am, too, like the author, very rational and almost always correct, and like the author, I find it hard to understand why irrational ego-driven people who are clearly wrong cannot take my wisdom in stride, or why the room often sides with them.
It's such a burden to be always intellectually superior. If only ideas triumphed over base human emotions!
I'll apply my vast intellect to solving this riddle.
Agreed, I think it's unrelated to nuclear winter, that bit seems like a red herring. But Cold War perceptions definitely permeate our perception of Chernobyl.
Of course all fundamentalist oppressive branches of religions, be it Christianity, Islam, Judaism or whatever, converge to similar shapes.
Atwood was worried about trends in the US and imagined a world where the earliest conservative Puritan Christianity -- that she considers a foundational part of America -- made a comeback. So no "gender equality". The early Puritans didn't behave "like Islam", any similarities are a result of a convergent evolution of sorts; their sins are entirely their own: fundamentalist Christianity. Atwood said much, that these were faults of the West she was describing.
I'm all for Death of the Author, but the specific claim I refuted was about what Handmaid was intended to be about (not other valid interpretations) and only the author can answer that. And she did!