In 1936, as part of the celebration of Harvard's 300th year, then President James B. Conant '14 was asked to give a Sanders Theatre address on the shape of Harvard in the far distant future.

He declined.

Fearing any attempt to play prophet in front of a University "family gathering," Conant publicly changed his assignment. He chose to speak more generally about why private universities like Harvard were still important for the future in the midst of a devastating depression.

But if Conant refused to speculate on the Harvard of a far or drastically different future, at least one graduate has taken up the task.

In her 1985 novel, The Handmaid's Tale, author Margaret E. Atwood envisions a frightening future for Harvard. A feminist poet and writer, Atwood received her master's degree from Radcliffe College in 1962 and spent two stints studying at Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in the early '60s.

The novel depicts a dystopian future in which the United States has been replaced by a theocratic regime called the Republic of Gilead. Envisioned as a Puritan totalitarian state, secret police enforce strict religious observance in Gilead.

The story focuses on a woman named Offred, a handmaid whose only role in life is to conceive children for a man and his wife to raise. No small task in a world in which nuclear waste and pesticides have ensured that many women can no longer bear children. The novel follows Offred as she remembers sorrowfully her pre-Gilead days and struggles with a decision to rebel against her society.

While the setting of the novel is never named, those who live and work in Cambridge will quickly recognize America's oldest university.

There's the river separating Offred's hometown from a larger city. Near the river sit "the old dormitories, used for something else now, with their fairy-tale turrets, painted white and gold and blue."

There's the looming red brick wall that encircles the Yard, dominating Offred's surroundings.

In Atwood's retelling, Harvard Yard is a center of political repression and violence.

The wall surrounds a secret police headquarters, and it regularly features the hanging bodies of political criminals.

"The Wall is hundreds of years old too; or over a hundred at least," Atwood writes. "Now the gates have sentries and there are ugly new floodlights mounted on metal posts above it, and barbed wire along the bottom and broken glass set in concrete along the top."

And then there's the novel's climactic moment, set inside an eerily familiar Harvard Yard. Offred and her fellow handmaids witness a public execution in what appears to be Tercentenary Theatre. It is the only time Offred enters the Yard, and she is ironically summoned there by the same bell that reminds today's students of the end of each class.

"There's a wooden stage erected on the lawn, something like the one they used every spring, for commencement, in the time before," Atwood writes.