That doesn't sound quite right. The Iranian revolution was recent and a direct influence on Atwood's writing.
My comment could have been about 60% shorter if I just observed that, like Orwell's commentary about how the repressive undercurrents of Soviet Communism could portend things about authoritarianism in the west, The Handmaid's Tale is a pretty obvious device suggesting that the Iranian Revolution "can happen here".
Which, of course, is an observation banal apparently high school kids get assigned essays on it. Go me, for not noticing.
My two points are simple:
1. The claimed timeliness of THT refers not to the prospect of American theocracy but to the currency of discussions about misogyny.
2. The dystopia imagined by THT is no less rooted in reality than 1984; in fact, THT's dystopia is more relevant today than Orwell's was or is.
That's all.
Given the increasingly secular nature of the US, and given that we literally have televisions (see recent revelations about IoT fuckups/overreaches) watching us and people editing mainstream history...
...yeah, sorry dude, one of these is more relevant than the other.
If you want to generalize THT to be general misogyny, maybe, but if you do that then you need to treat 1984 with the same generality.
EDIT: Okay HN, clearly we are living on the precipice of a collapse of western civilization into militant theocracies. Clearly this co-opting of economics and politics by religious whackos is somehow more likely than a ubiquitous surveillance state kept in perpetual war to benefit a small elite .
Obviously, this is the more realistic dystopia, and my internalized bigotry is somehow preventing me from seeing the truth.
Or, you know, you're wrong.
We could have both if you don't work hard enough to prevent that happening.