Manna by Mitchell Brain

So here’s the link to this story: Manna. I don’t often read webstories or self-published ebooks, I guess just due to prejudice? And yeah, sure, it might have benefited from some editing, but I still read the entire thing this morning. Near-future dystopian society, and (spoiler alert!) escape to a utopian society. And yet, it’s so realistic… so many of the technologies mentioned in this story are definitely not that far off, and there are going to be big decisions to be made about how we’ll use them (whether for good or for evil). But for now, just go read the story.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)

I first read this book in high school English, and it was already 20 years old at the time — I’ve got to say, it holds up well. Perhaps too well. It’s a story of a futuristic dystopia where people’s health and the environment are destroyed by chemicals, pollutants, etc. The women are sorted by a kind of caste system:

• Wives: high society mucky-mucks, mostly richer, mostly older, mostly can’t have their own children. They wear blue.
• Marthas: was Martha Stewart around in the ’80s? It seems like maybe this is where Atwood got her inspiration. These ladies are mostly older, mostly can’t have their own children, and are mostly poorer. They’re the cooks and cleaners for the Wives. Marthas wear green.
• Handmaids: they wear red, of course. (The colour of sex!) Handmaids do the baby-makin’, and then they hand the babies off to the Wives. Then they’re assigned to another household, where they do the same thing again. Handmaids are incubators.

The men are sorted too, and the poorer dudes are assigned Econowives (who wear red/green/blue-striped dresses because they fulfill all the above roles — their name and costume cracks me up, in a really perverse way). The really rich guys have a Wife, a couple of Marthas, and a Handmaid.

Overall, the idea of woman as host body to fetus reminds me of this story, where a brain-dead woman is kept on life support so the fetus growing inside her belly can be born. Marlise Munoz collapsed in November, when she was just 14 weeks along. A fetus is nowhere near viable at that point anyhow, but due to laws in Texas, the hospital refuses to take her off life support — even though that’s what her family wants, and that’s what Munoz’s own end-of-life directives were. According to the article linked, “the hospital’s plans for the fetus — as well as its health and viability — remain unknown.”

Women as incubators in 2014 — maybe this was the dystopia Atwood was writing about.