As Margaret Atwood has said, all dystopian fiction is “really about now”. No wonder the genre is flourishing. This week Atwood’s bleak vision of a future America as a patriarchal theocracy returned to TV screens with the adaptation of her prize-winning 2019 novel The Testaments, the long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, set in a chillingly recognisable militarised America, swept the Oscars last month.

Back in 1984 when Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, she feared that its central premise – that the US could be transformed from a liberal democracy into Gilead, a theocratic dictatorship after a coup – was too outrageous to convince readers. She need not have worried. By the time the novel was made into the award-winning TV series in 2017, it was all too believable. Arriving just after Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and the rollback of women’s rights, the show felt made for the moment. Atwood was hailed as a prophet. The red-and-white handmaid robes became a symbol of female defiance across the globe. “For a long time we were going away from Gilead and then we turned around and started going back,” Atwood said of her decision to write a follow-up more than 30 years later.

The adaptation of The Testaments is once again uncannily prescient. In the show, girls are groomed as “Plums” for powerful men – an echo of the Epstein scandal. The scenes at female detention centres painfully recall the separation of mothers and children at the US-Mexican border.

Migrant prisons and underground networks are also the grim landscape of One Battle After Another. Loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 countercultural novel Vineland, the film is about a group of former revolutionaries. Like The Handmaid’s Tale, Vineland was born out of anxieties about a repressive government (Ronald Reagan’s), now cleverly repurposed for Trump’s creeping authoritarianism. With ICE-like crackdowns and a secret Christian nationalist cell, Anderson’s America seems less a prophecy than an exaggerated facsimile. Accepting his Oscar, the director said that he wrote the movie for his kids “to say sorry for the housekeeping mess we left in this world”.

Coincidentally, Chase Infiniti stars as the “lost daughter” in both One Battle After Another (Willa) and The Testaments (Agnes). These young women are the radiant hope for the future. For all their political scaffolding, the heart of both these stories is the all-conquering love of a parent for a child. These are not only narratives of resistance against tyrannical regimes, but of humanity over brutality. They are about the subversive power of storytelling.

Here are writers and film-makers making a stand. This is what dystopian fiction can do. It shows us not only where we are but where we are heading. It offers a warning and a wake-up call – urging us to look up from our phones before it is too late, to paraphrase June, the protagonist in the TV version of The Handmaid’s Tale. In allowing us to explore the worst scenarios, these stories ask us to imagine the best. In this they can be optimistic. “It would seem that human beings are not able to describe, nor perhaps to imagine, happiness except in terms of contrast,” Orwell wrote in 1943. They show that we must fight one battle after another – against complacency, bigotry and self-interest – towards a better world.

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