In most instances, creators of these hell-on-earth visions draw on the perversion of science and technology as a major determinant of society's function and control. For example, Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is set in a California dystopia that features a fire department whose sole purpose is book burning. Likewise, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World contains a baby factory capable of manufacturing the prescribed number of people in each of five intellectual levels and indoctrination centers that train the resultant infants to embrace their lot in life. In contrast to the technical wizardry of Capek, Burgess, Bradbury, and Orwell, Rand, in Anthem, evolves a society in which innovation is suppressed and people are forced to live in primitive squalor.
Atwood, whose Handmaid's Tale demonstrates elements inherent in the dystopian genre, echoes numerous motifs and literary devices. Like Huxley's creation of a drug-calmed society, her characters awaiting execution appear tranquilized by shots or pills. Like Huxley's engineered reproduction, Atwood's fictional Gilead depends on the allotment of enslaved babymakers as a means of assuring the birth of white children to repopulate a declining Caucasian nation. A factor that Atwood's novel shares with Rand's Anthem and Orwell's Animal Farm is the subversion of aphorism as a means of indoctrination. Further enforced by overseers, these simplistic precepts are subject to change or reinterpretation, depending on the exigencies of the artificial society that they are meant to bolster and legitimize.
