Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian thriller in which a Christian theocracy overthrows the US government and forces fertile women to bear children for high-ranking government officials. It’s a premise that, reviewer Beth Elderkin notes, men find imaginative or improbable and women see as chillingly real.

“We’re afraid of our power being taken away,” Elderkin says in Episode 263 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “That’s something that’s happened over and over again for thousands of years—women’s power has been taken away, largely by men, who don’t understand, or don’t want to understand, what we’re capable of.”

Writer Sara Lynn Michener agrees that the show hits close to home. She says that’s no coincidence, since Atwood based everything in the story on real historical events.

“It is not irrational for us to fear this, given that these are things that you can find in other cultures, or in our culture in different periods, or in our culture in the present,” she says.

Michener, who was raised by conservative Christians, wishes more people from that community would watch The Handmaid’s Tale, which she thinks might cause them to question some of their more extreme views.

“If anything can slip through it’s going to be the art,” she says. “Because the rhetoric is already so divisive the stories are the thing that really have the power to penetrate those ideologies.”

Reviewer Charley Locke agrees that The Handmaid’s Tale can help change people’s minds, which is why protesters have started dressing up in red robes like the ones in the show.

“If you’re a kid in a sheltered household and you saw that on the news, that is a really visually striking thing to prompt conversation, and make you ask your parents, ‘What is this? Why are they dressed like that? Why is this like that TV show?'” she says.

Listen to our complete interview with Beth Elderkin, Sara Lynn Michener, and Charley Locke in Episode 263 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Sara Lynn Michener on religious communities:

“I went to a Christian high school, and they would never have us read [The Handmaid’s Tale], because it’s too political. … The Commander and Serena Joy feel so much more real, because I know people who are exactly those people. They may not be plotting to overthrow the government, but in terms of the repression that Serena Joy has, and expressing it in really unhealthy ways, that’s something that I’ve witnessed in a lot of Christian circles. Thankfully I got out, and I was able to rebel and completely remove myself from that environment, but when you’re raised that way, you see so many similarities, and you’re like, ‘Oh, I know that guy.’ I have so many stories growing up of people who were like that.”

Beth Elderkin on The Handmaid’s Tale and race:

“The reason that they chose to remove [race] as a factor is because they wanted to be able to cast actors of color without them being cast for their race, which I completely understand. But the problem I have with it is that Christianity and eugenics have a complex relationship. There is a history of similarities between religion and white supremacy, and discrimination against people of color on the basis of religion. I mean, the Bible was cited to justify segregation in the 1950s. So completely removing race entirely felt really weird to me, because it created this weird post-racial world that we in no way live in, and we’re not going to live in by the time Gilead’s around. So I just really didn’t care for it.”

Charley Locke on interviewing Margaret Atwood:

“There have been all these different adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale since Margaret Atwood wrote the book in the ’80s, and it was really interesting to talk to her about how she thinks the adaptations really become relevant in a way that suits their time. There was the movie, which came out right around the fall of the Berlin Wall in ’89, and she wrote [the book] in Berlin, so that really affected how she wrote about it, and there was an opera of The Handmaid’s Tale that really tried to be modern. It had all these apocalyptic images, including an image of the Twin Towers falling, and they had to change it later, when the opera came back.”

Beth Elderkin on The Handmaid’s Tale audiobook:

“There’s an audiobook that was released on Audible recently of The Handmaid’s Tale. Claire Danes reads it. I’m not a big audiobook person, but this one was really impactful, because it’s supposed to be a series of tapes that were discovered, so listening to it as opposed to reading it is a very different experience, and a very welcome one. But one thing it did is that Margaret Atwood actually wrote an expansion to that way-distant-future ending. Normally in the book it ends with the professor saying, ‘Are there any questions?’ Well, obviously a lot of people have a lot of questions, so it actually continues beyond that for about five to 10 minutes of just further embellishing the world and saying where things are going.”