In what some critics have considered a throwback to Atwood's own days in Cambridge when at least some libraries excluded women, in the world of Gilead, women are forbidden from reading.

Atwood has warned against reading too much into the setting of various parts of her novel. Once asked to identify a particular scene of the novel, she responded instead with a joke.

"Somebody who went to graduate school with me, at Harvard, said, `Hasn't anybody figured out that this whole book is about the Harvard English Department?'" she quipped.

Yet in other interviews, Atwood has explained that she chose to set The Handmaid's Maid at Harvard because of its connection to early Puritan America. Harvard was originally founded to train Puritan ministers.

"We think often of the Puritans in Massachusetts and the Massachusetts Bay Colony as the sort of founding moment of Euro-American culture," says Rebecca B. Faery, lecturer on history and literature, who teaches the book in her Expository Writing class. "This is the cradle of the theocracy, of the Puritan incorporation of church and state."

In the 1960s, Atwood studied the Puritans under former Cabot Professor of American Literature Perry Miller--to whom she dedicated the novel.

"The roots of totalitarianism in America are found, I discovered, in the theocracy of the 17th Century," Atwood once told a reporter.

As a literary device, Faery says the Harvard setting works to Atwood's advantage, providing a secret symbolic treat for those readers who recognize it, but allowing the book to remain vital to those who don't.

But despite Cambridge's religious past, filmmaker Volker Schlondorff, who helped adapt the story for the screen in 1990, says the city's more recent decidedly left-of-center leanings also make it appropriate for the novel.

"[The] most daring part of Margaret's book is that, instead of a small town in the Bible Belt, she sets it in the most liberal area in the country, an Eastern campus," he said in an interview.

Released one year after 1984 had come and gone peacefully, despite George Orwell's frightening predictions, Atwood created a cautionary tale for the future.

And while Big Brother may not yet be watching us, as the millennium approaches experts say we should still fear Atwood's vision.

"Though a little too extreme to be realistic," advises one Australian critic, "The Handmaid's Tale still offers a dire warning to humankind, predicting the worst for society is yet to come."