Atwood understands that the fascist crimes of Gilead speak for themselves — they do not need to be italicized, just as their relevance to our own times does not need to be put in boldface. Many American readers and viewers of “The Handmaid’s Tale” are already heavily invested in the story of Gilead because we’ve come to identify with the Handmaids’ hopes that the nightmare will end and the United States — with its democratic norms and constitutional guarantees — will soon be restored. We identify because the events in Atwood’s novel — which not so long ago felt like something that could only happen in the distant past or in distant parts of the globe — now feel frighteningly real. Because news segments on television in 2019 are filled with images of children being torn from their parents’ arms, a president using racist language to sow fear and hatred and reports of accelerating climate change jeopardizing life as we know it on the planet. This also explains why the scenes in “The Handmaid’s Tale” that feel most haunting today are the flashbacks in which Offred remembers her former life in America, when she and her friends took for granted the rights and freedoms they enjoyed, when people reassured one another that whatever emergency measures taken by the new government (in the name of protecting against Islamic terrorism) were temporary and that normalcy would soon return.

Enduring dystopian novels look backward and forward at the same time. Orwell’s “1984” was at once a savage satire of the Soviet Union under Stalin — from its rewriting of history to its cult of personality to its use of torture and propaganda — and a shrewd anatomy of totalitarianism that foretold the rise of the surveillance state and the fire hose of falsehood spewed forth daily by Putin’s Kremlin and Trump’s White House in attempts to redefine reality. Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” reflected its author’s worries in the 1930s that individual freedom was threatened by both communism and assembly-line capitalism, and it anticipated a technology-driven future in which people would be narcotized and distracted to death by trivia and entertainment.

Atwood, who began “The Handmaid’s Tale” in the Orwellian year of 1984, decided that she would include nothing in the novel “that had not already happened” somewhere, some time in history, or any technology “not already available.” She extrapolated some of the trends she saw in the 1970s and early ’80s, like the rising fundamentalist movement in America. She imagined what she called “the heavy-handed theocracy of 17th-century Puritan New England — with its marked bias against women” — reasserting itself during a period of social chaos. And she drew upon historical horrors like the Nazis’ Lebensborn program and public executions in countries like North Korea and Saudi Arabia to delineate the malign machinery of the Gilead regime.

Atwood’s creation of Gilead, like her creation of the futuristic wasteland that serves as a backdrop to “Oryx and Crake” and “The Year of the Flood,” was informed by her wide-ranging reading in dystopian literature and related genres, lending these novels a faintly postmodernist density and gloss. The stories of Nicole and Agnes in “The Testaments” similarly reflect Atwood’s easy familiarity with Victorian literature, which she studied in graduate school at Harvard in the 1960s.

The sisters’ quests to discover their family roots, for instance, mirror the efforts made by so many of the orphans in 19th-century literature, like Dickens’s Pip and Oliver Twist. Much the way that Offred struggled in “The Handmaid’s Tale” to come to terms with the expectations of her radical feminist mother, in “The Testaments” Nicole and Agnes find their search for self-definition tied up in questions about their real mother’s identity. Nicole is shocked to learn that the life she’s been leading in Canada — as Daisy, the daughter of owners of a used-clothing store — is “a forgery.” Agnes realizes that much of what she grew up believing about Gilead has been a lie — that the regime’s corrupt leaders have been rewriting the Bible in a Big Brother-like endeavor to market and justify their dictatorial rule.