“Are there any questions?”

So reads the celebrated final line of the novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Margaret Atwood’s work of dystopian speculative fiction, in which the United States has been transformed into the theocratic, misogynistic Republic of Gilead. The speaker is Professor James Darcy Pieixoto, the director of the Twentieth- and Twenty-first-Century Archives at Cambridge University; and the occasion for his words is an academic conference, the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, held at the University of Denay, Nunavit, on June 25, 2195. Professor Pieixoto has just presented a paper, titled “Problems of Authentication in Reference to the Handmaid’s Tale,” which explains the provenance of the Handmaid’s story: it’s a transcript of recordings made on a series of cassette tapes, found in a taped-up footlocker unearthed in what was once Bangor, Maine.

“The Handmaid’s Tale,” which was first published in Canada in 1985, is back: as I discussed with Atwood for a Profile of her that appears in this week’s magazine, the novel has reappeared on best-seller lists since Donald Trump’s victory in the Presidential election, its themes striking many as queasily prescient. On Trump’s very first day as President, he signed an executive order defunding overseas organizations that provide abortion services and information. The widely publicized revelation that Vice-President Mike Pence avoids dining alone with women other than his wife is an instance of neo-Puritanism that would not seem at all out of place in the Republic of Gilead.

And Professor Pieixoto is back, too. Audible has issued an “enhanced edition” of the audiobook of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which was first released in 2012 and is read by Claire Danes. Among the enhancements: several of those questions that the professor invited in the last line of the book, drafted by the Audible team, with some answers, newly written for the purpose by Atwood.

Characteristically, it’s a grimly playful project. One questioner—a reporter played by Atwood herself, who also supplied a new introductory essay for the audiobook—asks the professor to elaborate on the circumstances of the footlocker’s discovery. Dismissing with a chuckle the news imperative for drama—“Newspapers and magazines do so love their stories of adventure and discovery!”—Professor Pieixoto recounts that the cache of tapes were found during the building of “Gilead Village,” a museum reconstruction for the purposes of education and entertainment. “The results are not always accurate—who can hope for total accuracy after so many years,” the professor remarks. “But they are certainly picturesque.” The suggestion is of a Colonial Williamsburg for the era of Handmaids: a darkly plausible phenomenon.

Atwood wrote the new text in early January, and among the questions are several that give her an opportunity for contemporary allusion. When asked whether the Handmaid might, even in her confessional narrative, be concealing her own political activities against the regime, Atwood’s professor makes some observations about the repressive habits of authoritarian governments: shooting or otherwise silencing members of the resistance, shuttering news organizations, and the like. Another technique of authoritarian regimes, Professor Pieixoto notes, is the use of propaganda: “If there is no true news, false news can be made very plausible.” When asked what circumstances might cause a turning back of the clock to Gilead-era practices, Pieixoto enumerates a potential “perfect storm” of conditions: “environmental stresses that lead to food shortages, economic factors such as unrest due to unemployment, a social structure that is top-heavy, with too much wealth being concentrated among too few.” Under such circumstances, he warns, “there is pressure to trade what we think of as ‘liberty’ for what we think of as ‘safety.’ ”

In one of many conversations for the Profile, Atwood told me that, back in the mid-eighties, when she was writing the epilogue to “The Handmaid’s Tale” in the form of invented historical notes, she was solving a structural problem—how does the reader get access to the Handmaid’s thoughts?—and also making a literary allusion. George Orwell’s “1984,” a book that was much on Atwood’s mind when she began writing her novel while living in West Berlin, also ends with a fictional appendix: an essay on the Principles of Newspeak, the official language of Oceania, Orwell’s imagined authoritarian superstate. Newspeak is the successor of Oldspeak, or Standard English. By limiting the number of words in use, and circumscribing their meanings, the intended effect of Newspeak, the appendix explains, was to render thoughts or ideas that were in opposition to the regime literally unthinkable.

One of the purposes of Orwell’s appendix is to indicate to the reader that the regime imagined in the foregoing pages does not persist indefinitely into the fictional future. It does not succeed in its project: the appendix is written in sure-handed, rigorous Oldspeak. Similarly, Atwood’s “Historical Notes” reveal that Gilead itself eventually passes into history: the regime founders and becomes fodder for historians, as did the American Puritan era that so informed Atwood’s novelistic invention in “The Handmaid’s Tale.” But, as the novel’s resurgence reminds us—and as Atwood’s new text emphasizes—those who cannot imagine the speculative future may be condemned to enact it.