'Fear makes you feeble': 'Handmaid's Tale' author urges fight amid 'darkness all around'

Margaret Atwood may have accurately predicted some aspects of the present day in her dystopian novel "The Handmaid's Tale," but she had tried not to believe Donald Trump could win last week's election.

The 1985 novel — now a hit HULU show – described a world in which women are considered property that some saying foretold the recent rollback of reproductive rights.

But the Canadian author told a gathering Tuesday in Calgary that she had hoped Republicans would not win the U.S. election, reported the Campbell River Mirror.

“I searched, I invoked, ‘Oh God, let it be sun,' but it was darkness all around,” Atwood told a forum hosted by the Alberta Teachers’ Association, Calgary Catholic Local 55 and Calgary Public Local 38.

Atwood now predicts that the president-elect will be locked in a power struggle with Elon Musk and other billionaire backers once he re-enters the White House.

“Watch what goes on inside the White House," she said. "We have several people with quite large egos backed by two billionaires who also have large egos and who don’t like each other. I think bookies are going to start making book on how long Donald Trump is going to last because is he really necessary for these billionaires anymore?

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"On the other hand, are they necessary for him? Who shall win?”

Atwood said she based "The Handmaid's Tale," which depicts a society governed by religious fundamentalists who force some to bear children for wealthy, infertile couples, on discussions the religious right had been having for decades.

But she urged her audience not to surrender to fear that more of her predictions would come true.

“I don’t think we should be afraid at all, by which I don’t mean that there isn’t something horrible happening,” Atwood said. “I mean that fear makes you feeble.”