A progressive conservative MP has suggested that Canadians start with renewed vigour over the holidays to increase the country’s population. Dave Nickerson, Western Arctic, based his proposal in the House of Commons on Statistic Canada figures that show Canada’s fertility rate dropping to an all-time low. ‘It ought to be public policy to encourage families to have more children,’ said Nickerson, ‘in that the process involved is not unduly distasteful. Might I suggest that we could all start with renewed vigour this Christmas.’” Which leads nicely into this one, I think: ‘Artificial birth methods are attacked by some feminists fearing male control. There is concern that we are moving toward methods that are not always in the best interests of individual women,’ says a sociologist. No kidding.

‘The smart card: how to make a plastic payment,’ ‘Electronic debit cards met with resistance,’ ‘Germans computerize identity cards.’ Aha! Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Q: Yes, what is it with you and debit cards? You seem to have a thing about them.

MA: Whenever you put your card into a machine, that machine knows where you are. It’s a tracker. And the other thing of course is that if you wanted to single out a particular group, you could very easily just cut off their cash. Which is what happens to women at the start of Gilead. Nowadays there are a lot more ways of tracking people, through the GPS on their phone and so on, and it’s not just cash that can be stopped. Now you can cut off access to the whole of the Internet, as India has just done in Kashmir. In China, Facebook and other social media sites are blocked and the Communist Party have their own internal network they can monitor. Like any human technology, there’s a plus side, a minus side, and a stupid side you didn’t anticipate. Pick out any technology, it’s true of them all.

Q: Have you noticed how if you talk about something, then all of a sudden it’s being advertised on your phone and computer?

MA: I know. It’s watching you. But the algorithm doesn’t seem to understand ‘I already bought that’ – stop bugging me about something I already bought, I don’t want another one.

We should probably get back to the boxes, shouldn’t we? Friends of the Earth. Already started in 1985. Toxic chemicals poisoning babies. A lot on toxic chemicals and waste. Greenpeace. Arctic preservation. Quotes about the US. One from Carlos Fuentes: ‘What the US does best is to understand itself; what it does worst is to understand others.’ Still going as topics. How long ago all of this was, and how current it still is.

Q: What’s that? Is it another piece of a manuscript?

MA: It’s a handwritten piece about The Handmaid’s Tale which I must have sent to somebody or other. Who knows. It looks like it was in 1986.

Q: Would you like to read from it?

MA: When I first began thinking about The Handmaid’s Tale way back in 1981’ – that’s interesting: apparently I was thinking about it as early as 1981 – ‘I thought it was a very strange sort of book for me to be writing. Also I was afraid people would think it was merely paranoid. Like many books, The Handmaid’s Tale began with the question, What if? I guess I was tired of having people say, ‘It can’t happen here.’ They were right only if you accepted their definition of ‘it.’ ‘It’ could mean Russian-style communism or Germany under Hitler, but what if we were looking at the wrong ‘it’; what if while we were busily staring down the wolf at the door, another one was creeping over the back fence? Once any democracy starts curtailing freedom in the name of freedom, it may land us in trouble. What if you wanted to take over the US today? What flag could you wave successfully? The Handmaid’s Tale is one answer to these ‘What ifs?’ And it goes on from there.

Q: Have your views on this changed? Do you think we are still worried about the wrong “it”?

MA: What I said then is what I’d say now. It hasn’t changed.

Q: Do you have a similar set of clippings for The Testaments?

MA: A lot of the things I was looking at for The Testaments were online. I’ve kept some of those things, but today I would probably be referencing the URLs rather than cutting things out. If I wanted a box I could easily run off those pieces; it’s a form of job creation for the future.

Box or no box, the same rule applied: nothing goes in that there isn’t backup for.