A Short Intro to Shakespeare (though not to his work)

William Shakespeare

He came from Warwickshire (in the middle of England, not the South East, where London is). Most of the county was covered with the Forest of Arden. His birthplace was Stratford-on-Avon. And, lest you should wonder, the name means that this place was a “straight ford” on the Avon River. “Avon” originally meant just “river,” so there are a few Avon rivers in England. In fact, the Welsh word for “river” (afon) is pronounced the same way.

His birthplace, as far as Londoners were concerned, meant that he spoke with a strong country accent. That would not have been a big problem, socially, at the time. The famous Sir Francis Drake, for example, was a Devon boy, and would have talked like one of the Pirates of the Caribbean. (grin).

Shakespeare’s father was, at first, quite prominent in this little place. He was in the town government, for example. He was able to ensure that young Shakespeare could get an education in the Stratford Grammar School, which was about 200 years old at the time and still stands. Shakespeare entered the school at about age six or seven and may have had to leave, due to his father’s financial and social problems, about age thirteen. He would have learned his letters, numbers, a little Greek, and (more importantly) the Latin language, as well as Classics and composition. (One of Shakespeare’s friends later wrote that Shakespeare had “little Latin and less Greek.” His English was pretty good, though).

What he did after he left school, we don’t know. One story is that he put in time as a butcher. That would have added subjects to his education that he never would have learned in school.

At the age of eighteen married a twenty-six-year-old woman named Anne Hathaway. She gave birth to Susanna about six months later. Then came the twins, Hamnet and Judith, two years later. Hamnet died of plague at the age of eleven. Susanna married a prominent doctor and did well. Judith, sadly, had troubles including, for a while, excommunication by the church.

Young Master William eventually went to London between 1585 and 1592, and started a career on the stage as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called “The Lord Chamberlain’s Men,” which became the “King’s Men” after James I succeeded Elizabeth I. His early plays were mostly comedies and histories; his later ones were tragedies. His last works were “tragicomedies” or “romances,” a more complex kind of comedy. This group includes The Tempest. Finally, a small group of his plays are called “problem plays” because there is no way to place them into any of those categories. Computer analysis has shown that some of his plays were collaborations with other playwrights, so we can now say which parts of them were his and which ones weren’t.

He was a successful businessman. He eventually built a new theatre (The Globe). He made money from a grain handling business in Stratford. Shakespeare seems to have retired from the stage in about 1613 at the age of 49. This would make him an old man for the time. The average life span, including the very common infant deaths, was probably around 30. So, not surprisingly, he died in Stratford just three years later.

Shakespeare made sure that both girls inherited money from him directly, although Susanna got the majority of it. And speaking of his will, there is some controversy that it gave to his wife so little: furniture and his “second best bed.” Apparently, though, the custom was that the widow inherited a third of the estate anyway, and the second best bed is the one that the man and wife customarily slept in. The best bed was for guests. So he wasn’t as hard-hearted as one would think.

Shakespeare’s Portraits

Two portraits of Shakespeare were traditionally accepted as genuine, although both were created after his death. The first is an engraving on the title page of The First Folio, a large collection of his plays that was put together and published by Shakepeare’s friends after his death. The other is a statue in the Stratford church, part of a memorial put up for him soon after his death.

Recently, several other portraits of Shakespeare have been found: The Cobbe Portrait and the Chandos Portrait among them. Those, plus the First Folio portrait by Droeshout are below.

The Sanders Portrait has also been identified as a painting of Shakespeare, and was recently proven to have been painted during his lifetime.

"Atlas Shrugged" vs "The Lord of the Rings" Quotation

I found this and loved it. Source is John Rogers.

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Interestingly, The Lord of the Rings  and Atlas Shrugged were the first two hardcover books that I special-ordered from a bookstore. I have pretty much outgrown my interest in Atlas Shrugged...I have not, for example, bothered to watch the movie. On the other hand, my interest in The Lord of the Rings remains high.

On the third hand, if there is one, Ayn Rand deserves respect as one of a small number of authors who have made a living and a reputation by writing in the English language, although it was not their first language. I call them "ESL Authors," and they are an oddly assorted lot. Ayn Rand, of course, but also Joseph Conrad, Kahlil Gibran, and even Helen Keller. I may do a post on them some day.

Sign into Google Docs (Google Drive) as a Non-Default User

It used to be very easy to switch from one user to another in Google Docs, back before it became part of Google Drive. You sign out as one user; you sign in as another. Duck soup.

Now, things are rather more difficult. When you, the default user, signs out, your friendly face appears, along with a prompt for the password, and there is no visible option to change to another user's account.

It took a little work to discover the solution buried in Google's help pages. You should attempt to log in from a browser window that cannot report who you are. Most browsers have an option like this. In Firefox, you create such a window by selecting "New Private Window" from the File Menu. In Google Chrome, you create an "Incognito" window instead. In recent versions of Internet Explorer, you create an "inPrivate" window. Attempting to log in from one of these windows allows you to enter both the user name you want and the appropriate password, just like in the old days when things were a little simpler.

Aircraft Carrier Vikramaditya

You can tell that a country's proud of a ship when it releases a new postage stamp to celebrate the ship's commissioning. India just did that to celebrate its controversial aircraft carrier Vikramaditya.

Critics of the "new" ship call it "too old," "too late and expensive," and "too weak to match its rivals." It certainly was not the bargain that India had hoped it would be, but it is, nevertheless, a large step in capability for the Indian navy at a price that is justifiable, or close to justifiable.

The ship has an extensive history. It was the Soviet ship Baku from 1982 until 1991, when it needed a new name: Azerbaijan had become an independent country, so its city of Baku became a foreign capital, as far as the Russians were concerned. It would never do to have a capital ship named after someone else's capital city. Consequently, Baku was renamed Admiral Gorshkov. It continued to serve the Russian fleet until 1996 when, for financial reasons, it was decommissioned. In 2004, It was offered to the Indians at what seemed an unbelievably good price: free, on the condition that any necessary repairs and reconstruction be done at a Russian shipyard and that a billion dollars of Russian fighter planes be bought for it.

As I said, the offer seems unbelievably good. No one should have believed it unless he was hopelessly optimistic, corrupt, or some combination of the two. In the end, the ship did receive extensive modifications that changed it from a Kiev class heavy aviation cruiser to a pure aircraft carrier. However, the ship arrived five years late (December 2013) and cost $2.3 billion, exclusive of the air wing.

Is that cost excessive? Well, that depends, in part, on whether an equivalent aircraft carrier could be bought for less money. There is no such carrier. The equivalent carrier that the Indians are currently building, the new Vikrant, may be $3.8 billion by the time it is finished. Like the Vikramaditya, it will arrive five years later than planned.

Realistically, the alternative to buying Vikramaditya was to defer India's dream of a two-carrier navy into the indefinite future. Without Vikramaditya, India's sole carrier in the near term would be the antique INS Viraat, still creaking on with its eleven surviving Harrier planes. In 2018, Vikrant would take Viraat's place, but the two-carrier navy would have to wait until whenever a second Vikrant-class carrier could be built.

On the other hand, if a second carrier could be brought into service now, to serve alongside Viraat, then a two-carrier navy could be achieved immediately. Its strength would only be increased when Vikrant replaces Viraat in 2018. This is the only acceptable option for India. Its navy's experience since 1957, when it obtained its first carrier, is that carriers are essential to the nation's security. India has used a carrier effectively in two wars with Pakistan. The upgrade to two carriers responds not only to Pakistan, which continues to be hostile and volatile, but to a resurgent China, which has recently launched its first carrier, Liaoning, and plans to build more. Buying Vikramaditya gives India a chance to keep up with its regional rival in the number and capabilities of its carriers.

Many critics argue, nevertheless, that Vikramaditya stands up poorly against Liaoning. The critics have a point. Although Liaoning is also a rebuilt Soviet ship, its displacement of 59,000 tons (full load) is considerably more than Vikramaditya's 45,400 tons. Accordingly, it can accommodate a larger air wing than Vikramaditya, if it uses planes of about the same size. However, China has no experience with aircraft operations from a carrier and is experimenting to gain it. In light of Liaoning's incomplete functionality, Vikramaditya is more than a match for the Chinese ship now and for some years to come.

Other critics argue that the technology for launching planes from Vikramaditya is ill-chosen. The differences between the three available technologies matter primarily because they determine what planes can fly from the carrier and how much load they can carry.

STOBAR, meaning "Short Take Off But Arrested Recovery" is the technology used by Vikramaditya, Liaoning, every other carrier built by the Russians, and Vikrant. It requires a comparatively small plane with powerful engines that will drive the plane to take-off speed over the short runway available on the carrier's deck. The plane is loaded with modest amounts of fuel and arms to keep it light enough for take off. When the plane lands on the deck, a tail hook catches a wire that slows and stops the plane quickly: that is the "Arrested Recovery" part of the STOBAR equation.

STOBAR Operations (Take Off from Vikramaditya)

STOBAR Operations (Landing on Vikramaditya)

The carriers that Britain is building now, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, use another technology, VSTOL, or "Vertical or Short Take Off Or Landing." The planes required for this technology are actually able to take off or land vertically. However, to increase the amount of weight allowed for the plane at take off or landing, it will usually have a short take off, similar to that in STOBAR, and a short "rolling" landing without need for arrestor wires. If the plane is coming in light, with its weapons expended and much of its fuel used, it has the option to land vertically, like a helicopter.

VSTOL Operations (F35B Vertical Landing on USS Wasp)

VSTOL Operations (F35B Short Take Off and Rolling Landing Planned for HMS Queen Elizabeth) 

The third technology is CATOBAR, "Catapult Assisted Take Off But Arrested Recovery." In it, a plane is attached to a steam-driven catapult that quickly takes it from a standing start to take-off velocity. A recent advance in the technology is EMALS, in which the steam-driven catapults are replaced by magnets that grip the plane and hurl it into the air. CATOBAR launches allow planes to be larger and heavier than short or vertical take-offs do, so they allow a wider range of airplane types and heavier loads to be launched than other launch technologies can manage. On the other hand, CATOBAR is the most expensive and complex launch technology and so only two nations have current experience building CATOBAR carriers, the United States and France.

CATOBAR Operations (Landing and Take Off on Charles de Gaulle)

India is considering making its second home-built aircraft carrier, after Vikrant, a CATOBAR carrier. If it had gone directly to building that ship, however, rather than building its own STOBAR carrier first, it would have multiplied its difficulties past all reason. Arguably, Vikrant is right at the limit of India's shipbuilding abilities. India has had to create the tools to build the tools to build Vikrant, such as a plant to create the right types of steel. Five years late and considerably over-budget, even as a STOBAR carrier, Vikrant would have been impossible to complete as a larger CATOBAR carrier.

Vikramaditya is probably not the dream ship that the Indian Navy could fantasize having. It is more like a used car with a good chassis and a rebuilt engine. There are times and places that such a car is the best solution for a buyer on a schedule and a budget. In addition, the ship has two notable virtues. First, it is the largest ship ever to enter the Indian navy, 16,700 tons more than the INS Viraat; second, its new MIG 29K planes have much greater speed, range, and power than the old, subsonic Harriers on Viraat and are probably competitive with the best planes in the Pakistani air force. Perhaps the postage stamp with Vikramaditya was justified.

What's in a (Geographical) Name?

There's a BBC article up on how many angry responses on Twitter followed a single reference to "the Persian Gulf." It also mentions that a reference to the Persian Gulf by that name recently prompted some Arab diplomats to walk out of a NATO meeting. For reasons of national or ethnic pride, many across the Arab world refer to it as "the Arabian Gulf," and insist that others do the same, despite a 2006 ruling by a UN panel of experts. To avoid stirring up a wasp's nest, National Geographic lists both names on its maps, and the BBC just calls it "the Gulf."

A similar situation exists with the Sea of Japan, which is a name that incenses many Chinese and South Koreans. They insist that the name which should be used in the English Language is "the East Sea." North Korea, in contrast, prefers "the East Sea of Korea." The matter of renaming it has been raised with both the International Hydrographic Institute and the United Nations.

I will note that, when I was learning Geography in school, both "the Persian Gulf" and "the Sea of Japan" were taught as the standard English names for those bodies of water. I don't see any need to change those terms. Let "the Arabian Gulf" (or its equivalent in the Arabian language) remain the standard term for the Persian Gulf in the Arabian language. Let "the East Sea" (or its equivalents in the relevant languages) remain the name of the Sea of Japan in the Chinese or Korean languages. All the fight is over the terms used in English, and that should be something that only English speakers will decide.

For inspiration, look at another potentially politicized name for a body of water which, somehow, has remained beyond any political controversy. Can you imagine a French person referring to the water between France and Britain as "the English Channel"? Never! It is as much French as English! So the name in French is "La Manche" (the Sleeve) and the name in English is "the English Channel," and no one calls foul on the other's choice. London is Londres in French, Moskva is Moscow in English, Germany is Deutschland in German, and so it goes. Surely, that's the civilized solution.

Reducing the Global Temperature in One Swell Foop

When various news items share a brain for a while, they are likely to connect. My brain holds, for example, that the existence of global warming is a consensus among scientists, but that they like to call it "climate change" these days. Those facts share brain space with knowledge that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, contributing to global warming, that greenery takes up carbon from the air and sequesters it, reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, that parts of the Gobi Desert are being reclaimed for greenery and that the Sahara Desert is expanding. I know that sea water can be desalinated, if there is sufficient energy for the job, and that a big enough supply of fresh water can cool and irrigate the fringes of a desert, driving them back. These points, connected, raise the innocent question of whether a large part of the campaign to limit global warming should be devoted to making the Sahara green. Let us investigate whether what I "know" is valid before I make up my mind.

The reality of global warming

Al Gore, a former Vice President and almost, at one time, the President of the United States, is quite convinced that the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which was due to human activity, was leading to hotter climates. In 2006, he expressed his opinions in an Oscar-winning documentary with a wonderful title, An Inconvenient Truth. The film may have helped him to win a Nobel Peace Prize the next year. It did win him a storm of controversy that can be glimpsed on Youtube as well as in print.

On the other hand, his views are widely shared, despite their inconvenience. One study of climate change studies found a 97% consensus that human activities are causing the average temperature of the world to rise. (The inevitable criticism of the study is here.  Shame on you Forbes! The reply to the criticism is here).

Even NASA takes a stand that humans contribute to global warming. It says

Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities, and most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position. The following is a partial list of these organizations, along with links to their published statements and a selection of related resources.

Other respected organizations have released statements along the same line line, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Chemical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. In other words, there is no controversy among the best informed scientists that global warming is real and that humans are contributing to it.

The growth (or not) of the Sahara Desert

The Sahara Desert, according to the appropriate Wikipedia article, covers over 9,400,000 square kilometres (3,600,000 sq mi). It is about the same size as the United States now, but it has been growing at the rate of 30 mi per year. That rate may slow and even reverse as a paradoxical by-product of climate change. However, there are more deserts than the Sahara, so a hotter world will be a drier world, on the whole, and one with more desert.

We Have the Technology (and Some Experience)

The expansion of the deserts could be slowed, and even reversed, by human efforts if enough clean water were available to create a self-sustaining ecology. We have the technology to provide the water and to introduce such ecologies. For example, the Desert Rose concept uses solar energy for desalination, then introduces nitrogen-fixing plants to stabilize the soil. The Seawater Greenhouse distills seawater in, as it says on the tin, greenhouses, but is otherwise similar. Other methods of reclamation focus on stabilizing the soil rather than providing the water.

An interesting and successful experiment in creating a self-sustaining ecology on a burnt-out cinder of land took place on Ascension Island, in the Pacific, thanks to an idea from Charles Darwin and the help of Joseph Hooker and the Royal Navy. I quote from a BBC News article on the experiment.

Ascension was an arid island, buffeted by dry trade winds from southern Africa. Devoid of trees at the time of Darwin and Hooker's visits, the little rain that did fall quickly evaporated away.

Egged on by Darwin, in 1847 Hooker advised the Royal Navy to set in motion an elaborate plan. With the help of Kew Gardens - where Hooker's father was director - shipments of trees were to be sent to Ascension.

The idea was breathtakingly simple. Trees would capture more rain, reduce evaporation and create rich, loamy soils. The "cinder" would become a garden.

So, beginning in 1850 and continuing year after year, ships started to come. Each deposited a motley assortment of plants from botanical gardens in Europe, South Africa and Argentina.

Soon, on the highest peak at 859m (2,817ft), great changes were afoot. By the late 1870s, eucalyptus, Norfolk Island pine, bamboo, and banana had all run riot.

The Cooling Effects of a Green Sahara

A desert turned green would curb global warming in three ways:

1. by absorbing a major greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, and storing much of its carbon in tree trunks and soil; 
2. by absorbing sunlight in the trees' leaves before it can warm the earth; 
3. and by creating a region of evaporated water, which not only cools the local area but creates clouds, which then travel, cooling more distant areas by reflecting light, creating shadow, and depositing rain.

So much is the theory, but would transformed deserts have enough of an effect to counteract man's contribution to global warming?

How Much of an Effect?

The effect of desert greening depends on how much desert you green and how much cooling effect the greenery produces. Let us start with the question, "How much desert could, potentially, be greened?"

Deserts, defined as areas with "a moisture deficit" make up a substantial portion of the world--33% of the world's land--but that includes Antarctica. However, just three of the biggest hot deserts constitute a large area by any standard. The Sahara has about 9,400,000 square kilometres; the Arabian, 2,333,000; and the Gobi, 1,300,000. I am leaving out the Australian desert because, in the words of Randy Newman, "I don't want to hurt no kangaroo." The Sahara, Arabian, and Gobi deserts together give us 13,033,000 square kilometres.

If I could find a figure for the cooling effect of a single square kilometre of such a forest, we could start to have a very interesting discussion about the economics of greening the deserts. Unfortunately, that information is not available or is not easily found through an internet search. However, an article on biosequestration mentions that "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that the cutting down of forests is now contributing close to 20 per cent of the overall greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere." If reversing the deforestation could cut 20% from the greenhouse gasses, the creation of large new forests would do even more.

Not an Original Idea

This is not a new idea, of course. Two worthy projects are operating now: the  The Great Green Wall and Sahara Forest Project. However, the first is only trying to hold the line so that the Sahara will not expand further and the second is just beginning. The fully operational Sahara Forest Project Pilot Plant was opened in Qatar only in December 2012. China's Three-North Shelter Forest Program is also focused on limiting the Gobi Desert's spread. Despite having created the world's largest artificial forest, this project would have to operate for three hundred years to reclaim the desertified land.

Problems, Political, Economic, and Cultural

There are problems with the idea of taking responsibility for tweaking the Earth's climate. First and foremost is the idea of taking responsibility. There was a time when cities dumped raw sewage into the sea, not knowing or caring where it would travel. "Nature would take care of it." Ask the people who live downcurrent of Victoria, BC about that and they will tell you that nature isn't doing the job. Billion-dollar sewage treatment plants are a painful alternative to blissful ignorance.

Taking responsibility for the climate would be an even longer-term, more international, and more expensive responsibility. The countries covered with desert could not pay for the project that turns bare sand and stone into soil and trees. The money would have to come from more fortunate countries, a difficult trick to manage.

The local problem, putting aside the political instability and corruption of many states near the great deserts, is that people whose cultures grew up in desert would have to change their ways. The Bedouin, for example, know how to live in desert. Though their numbers are not great, their antagonism could make the project impossible. Would they be willing to adapt to a new environment?

I think they might. The desert landscape may be appreciated best by those who live somewhere else. I recall Alec Guinness, playing an Arab leader, lecturing an Englishman in the film Lawrence of Arabia, making this point: "I think you are another of these desert-loving English...," he said, and listed a few of them; "No Arab loves the desert. We love water and green trees, there is nothing in the desert. No man needs nothing."

Comparing "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood with "If This Goes On..." by Robert Heinlein

The novel The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood has attracted great attention since it was published in 1985. Some of the attention was in the form of awards--the Governor General's Award among them--and some in the form of adaptations, such as a Danish opera. I am sure that the most financially rewarding attention it has received was the film adaptation, released in 1990.

The book's setting is in an indirectly specified near future. Judging from the book's epilogue, the Handmaid wrote her tale at least 150 years before 2195, i.e. before 2045 (pg. 315). The Handmaid was a young woman at the time of the coup, working as a librarian, and she was still in her reproductive years during the story. A defensible estimate is that the Handmaid was born in the late 1990's, that the coup took place about 2020, when she when she was in her early twenties, and that the events of the story transpired around 2030 to 2040, when she was in her thirties.

The story is set in a dystopia instituted by a group called "The Sons of Jacob Think Tanks" which had seized power through a coup and reinvented the United States as the Republic of Gilead. Its repressive policies include a caste system, disempowerment of women to the point of depersonalizing them, deportation of blacks to areas contaminated with radioactivity, and death penalties against Catholics and other dissenting Christians. 

The coup is an unrealistic fantasy. Atwood states that the President and members of Congress were all killed by a massive conspiracy (pg. 318). Some unspecified person then suspended the Constitution, then a mysterious army of "Angels," which is not the US army (which is unaccountably absent from this story) suddenly appeared out of nowhere, "like Martians."
 

The political system of the Republic of Gilead is equally vague. Atwood never mentions whether there is a council of elders or a Supreme Leader or an Inner Party at the helm. Instead, she tells us that the heart of the Republic of Gilead lives within people (pg. 33). It is thus a state of mind, or a system of belief, rather than a place. In that, it resembles the Kingdom of Heaven, which cannot be pointed at because it is in our midst (Luke 17:21, Atwood 204). This vagueness transforms Gilead's leadership from a government as we know it in the real world to a symbol for a mode of thought.

Though Gilead's heart was unchanging, its boundaries had shifted. Originally, the Republic expanded to include Central America (pg. 35). Now, all that territory has been lost, and Radio Free America is based in Cuba (pg. 221). Some of the original United States are not part of the Republic, either. For example, the loss of California and Florida has imperilled the supply of oranges.

Beyond being a dystopia, it is tempting to classify the book as "science fiction" because it takes place in the future. However, in a radio interview, Atwood called it "science fantasy" rather than "science fiction." For what reasons is it not "science fiction"?

To answer that question, I'd like to compare The Handmaid's Tale to a science fiction story called "If This Goes On...," written by Robert Heinlein and published in 1940. In it, the USA has become a theocracy under the control of a Prophet. "If This Goes On..." is not greatly concerned with how the theocracy was established, but an odd essay called "Concerning Stories Never Written"--the postscript to a book called Revolt in 2100--fills in many details. Heinlein was clearly concerned that such a revolution was plausible.

I imagined Nehemiah Scudder as a backwoods evangelist who combined some of the features of John Calvin, Savonarola, Judge Rutherford and Huey Long. His influence was not national until after the death of Mrs. Rachel Biggs, an early convert who had the single virtue of being the widow of an extremely wealthy man who shared none of her religious myopia--she left Brother Scudder several millions of dollars with which to establish a television station. Shortly thereafter he teamed up with an ex-Senator from his home state; they placed their affairs in the hands of a major advertising agency and were on their way to fame and fortune. Presently they needed stormtroopers; they revived the Ku Klux Klan in everything but the name-sheets, passwords, grips and all. It was a "good gimmick" once and still served. Blood at the polls and blood in the streets, but Scudder won the election. The next election was never held. 

Thus, the first Prophet gained power due to television preaching (like that of Serena Joy in The Handmaid's Tale) plus violent support by a paramilitary force (like the army of Angels in The Handmaid's Tale), plus a rigged or, at least, controversial election. These methods are similar to those used by Adolf Hitler in his rise to power, with the exception of television, which could be replaced by other forms of mass communication. Heinlein clearly thought that these methods could work as well in the United States, under the proper circumstances, as they had worked in Germany.

The society in "If This Goes On..." shares many details with that in The Handmaid's Tale. Soldiers are called "Angels of the Lord." The "Virgins of the Prophet" are kept for sexual services, and are thus holy prostitutes, like Handmaids. In the Heinlein story, the principal enemy of the regime is a group called the Cabal, established by the Freemasons. Its natural allies include Mormons and Catholics, whose faiths had been suppressed, and a group called Pariahs, who might be Jews, although this is unspecified. In The Handmaid's Tale, the internal enemies of the regime include Baptists, Catholics, Quakers, and gays. 


Both books state how some groups are persecuted. In Atwood's book, blacks are exiled to Homelands, Jews are sent to Israel or death, and Baptists, abortionists, Catholics, and gays are killed in "Salvagings" (= savagings) or sent to the Colonies, which are war zones, ghettos, toxic dumps, or radiation spills (pg. 260). Also there went old women, sterile women, incorrigible women, and gay men. Similarly, Heinlein's book has this news report: "The Minnesota ghettos have been closed and all local pariahs will be relocated in the reservations in Wyoming and Montana in order to prevent future outbreaks."

In both books, parts of the old United States had become independent of the central government. I have already discussed the mentions of civil war in Atwood's book. Heinlein's mentions that a Republic of Hawaii exists.  

In both books, places are renamed to reflect the new regime. Atwood's theocracy has renamed the United States as the "Republic of Gilead" while Heinlein's has renamed the capital city, "New Jerusalem."

Another similarity between the two stories is that the theocratic faith is not Christian. Even the Wikipedia article on The Handmaid's Tale states that it is, but there is no evidence to that effect. The Handmaid's Tale has no references to Christ except, a couple of times, in swearing (pp. 168, 228). Its only references to a cross are as part of the female symbol (pg. 130) and the upside-down cross on executed Catholics (pg. 210). Even the graveyard has no crosses. The symbol of the faith, instead, is the winged eye.

The Handmaid's Tale has quotations from the Bible, of course, even though the Bible itself is kept locked away (pg. 98) where it cannot be consulted. As a result, many of the references to biblical passages are misquoted. Those references are, in addition, almost all from the Old Testament (pg. 99), though some are from St. Paul (72, 233), the most misogynistic source in the New Testament. The only quotation from Jesus, the beatitudes, is expurgated and altered. Accordingly, the Handmaid's prayer, though in Latin, is hardly Christian: "Nolite te bastardes carborundam" (pg. 101), means "Don't let the bastards grind you down."

Like the Bible itself, certain hymns are forbidden (pg. 64) as being too dangerous. Other hymns are deemed innocuous enough to be used (pp. 92, 94).

The Heinlein story, similarly, makes no reference to Jesus or to Christianity, even though people quote the bible often and correctly. However, the official interpretations of the biblical passages distort their meaning in order to justify the non-Christian practices of the official faith, such as the keeping of women for the sexual use of the Prophet. As a result, the only explicitly Christian groups in the story, Catholics and Mormons, largely oppose the state religion.

Despite their many similarities in setting, The Handmaid's Tale and "If This Goes On..." have some clear differences, of course. For one thing, the point of view characters are different (a man in the Heinlein story, a woman in the Atwood; a soldier, a handmaid), so only Atwood's book has the position of women in society as a major theme. It is a minor theme in the Heinlein book because two important characters are women: Sister Judith, a naive Virgin assigned to the Prophet's service, and Sister Magdalene, a strong, decisive member of the revolutionary Cabal. The protagonist is led to revolution because the misuse of Judith revolts him, but his own patriarchal views of a woman's role are challenged by Magdalene. 

The initial question set for this post was whether Atwood's book is science fiction. It is hard to argue that it is not, given its substantial similarities to Heinlein's story, which is clearly science fiction. However, it is better to avoid that argument and say that both works are twentieth century dystopias. We can save the larger argument about whether dystopias are a subset of science fiction for another time.

I have always wondered if the setting of Heinlein's dystopia directly influenced the very similar setting of Atwood's. In fact, I once wrote to Margaret Atwood, care of her publisher, to ask her whether she had read Heinlein's story before she wrote hers, but I received no reply. If Atwood had been influenced by Heinlein, it would be no surprise and no shame. He is a widely influential writer and "If This Goes On..." is a part of his largest literary project, the Future History.