Margaret Atwood built Gilead out of things that already existed: puritan theocracy and a fertility panic; even the uniforms were borrowed. The best books in its shadow do the same trick: a world that is one bad vote away, rendered in ordinary detail. Here are seven, including one I wrote myself.
1. The Power — Naomi Alderman (2016)
The premise is a single biological reversal: teenage girls develop the ability to deliver electric shocks, and within a generation the world reorganizes around it. Alderman's subject is what power does to whoever holds it. The novel follows four people across the decade in which the new order hardens into the old one with different names. The framing device, a male author submitting the manuscript thousands of years later, lands the quietest punch on this list.
2. The Children of Men — P.D. James (1992)
Published seven years after The Handmaid's Tale and covering the other side of the fertility coin: humanity has simply stopped reproducing. The last children were born in 1995, the year that became known as Omega; by 2021, where the novel sits, the youngest people alive are in their mid-twenties, and Britain under the Warden has settled into a managed decline, everyone cooperating in the dignified administration of the end. James understood that a society without a future can skip the jackboots entirely; comfort is enough to keep people from asking why the prams are empty.
3. The Fifth Sacred Thing — Starhawk (1993)
Two Americas occupy the same coastline: a green, consensus-run San Francisco and the theocratic, corporate south that wants it back. Starhawk wrote the conflict between a society built on consent and one built on control, and the book's central question is harder than most dystopias allow: what do you do when the invaders genuinely believe they are saving you? The answer the book gives is neither naive nor easy, which is why it still gets read thirty years on.
4. Swastika Night — Katharine Burdekin (1937)
Written in 1937, before the war it describes. Seven hundred years after a Nazi victory, Hitler is worshipped as a god and women are kept as breeding stock, while history has been erased so thoroughly that the Empire's subjects cannot imagine another world. Burdekin saw further than the regime itself, to its endpoint: a power so complete it must manufacture enemies to survive. It is the bleakest entry on this list.
5. The Water Cure — Sophie Mackintosh (2018)
Three sisters raised on an island, taught that men are poison and the sea is safety, until three men wash ashore. Mackintosh strips dystopia down to a household: the world ended offstage, and what remains is a family built on fear disguised as love. It reads like The Handmaid's Tale with the theology replaced by therapy-speak; the rituals are softer, the control the same.
6. Red Clocks — Leni Zumas (2018)
Under the Personhood Amendment embryos hold full legal rights, ending abortion and IVF in one stroke. Four women in a small Oregon town feel the law land in different ways: a teacher writing the life of a 19th-century polar explorer; her student, pregnant with nowhere legal to go; a wife suffocating in a marriage she cannot say out loud; an herbalist on trial as a modern witch. Zumas wrote the near future in the present tense, and the flatness is the point: the law does the dramatic work so the prose does not have to.
7. My Brother on the Moon — Maximilian Coolheit Vorfahrenheit (2025)
Disclosure: I wrote this one. Nobody in Ventenstein knows which part of the day belongs to the sick: once a day the illness takes over, at an hour nobody is told in advance. Auzel Makadam buries the dead it makes while his own name sits in the bounty ledger. Dexs is the closest thing Auzel has to company. About 68 pages, shorter than any other entry here, which is either a mercy or a flaw depending on your taste. Free on Kindle Unlimited, and free for everyone October 10-11: amazon.com/dp/B0G1KNPF4X.
FAQ
Which of these is closest to The Handmaid's Tale?
Red Clocks, for the near-future legal machinery, and Swastika Night, for the erased-history horror. Alderman's The Power is the thematic mirror — same question, opposite experiment.
Are any of these by indie authors?
Just mine. The other six are the canon. I put my book last because it is the shortest and the newest; the list stands without it.
Shortest entry?
Mine, at ~68 pages. Next shortest is The Water Cure at around 220.