The Testaments

Margaret Atwood, The Testaments, (2019)

To those who have questioned this material and its dating, I can now say with assurance that half a dozen independent suites have verified our first assumptions, though I must qualify that somewhat.  The Digital Black Hole of the twenty-first century that caused so much information to vanish due to the rapid decay rate of stored data— coupled with the sabotage of a large number of server farms and libraries by agents from Gilead bent on destroying any records that might conflict with their own, as well as the populist revolts against oppressive digital surveillance in many countries— means the it has not been possible to date many Gileadean materials precisely. A margin of error of between ten and thirty years must are assumed.  Within that range, however we are as confident as any historian can usually be (Laughter.) [p.409].

COMMENT

Libraries appear in Margaret Atwood’s fiction fairly often and she has strong, well-informed opinions about them.  This satirical paragraph is a good example.  At the end of the story, historians of the future try to piece together the evidence to figure out what really happened.   In Atwood's informaiton dystopia, digital material has utterly vanished,  vulnerable to war and misused to prop up a surveillance state.  In this story many of the words that do survive survive on paper.  Aunt Lydia records her own testimony using a antique-style pen and ink meant for teaching drawing.