Donald Trump on Wednesday achieved a comeback with his commanding victory over Vice President Kamala Harris.
Dark fantasy books about dystopia, tyranny, and feminism quickly rose to the top of bestseller charts following his victory.
This is because these narratives strike a chord with readers in politically tense times.
Here’s why.
Sales surge for dystopian books after Trump victory
Set in a totalitarian society where women are compelled to produce offspring, Margaret Atwood’s
The Handmaid’s Tale rose more than 400 spots and is now ranked third on the US Amazon Best Sellers list. Sales of The Testaments, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, have also increased. In the theocratic, male-dominated future America depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale, women are compelled to produce children for the ruling class, the US Constitution is suspended, and the media is banned.
Dark futuristic narratives, such as George Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, were in the Amazon top 40 as of Thursday afternoon.
Another best-seller from Trump’s previous time in office, Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, was in the top 10.
After seeing a more than 30,000 per cent rise in sales, Sami Sage and Emily Amick’s book Democracy in Retrograde is near the top of the Movers and Shakers chart, which lists the books with the biggest sales gains over the previous 24 hours, as per The Guardian.
Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit is also one of the top performers, rising almost 40,000 spots in the last day. The feminist essay collection from 2014 is currently in the middle of the 300s on the bestselling list.
Since Trump’s victory, Paola Ramos’ book Defectors, which examines the surge in far-right sentiment among Latinos, has risen in thousands of places. He made big gains with Latino votes, especially men, in the 2024 election.
Pro-Trump books also were selling well. Former first lady Melania Trump’s memoir, Melania, was number one on the Amazon list, and Vice President-elect JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy was at number seven. Donald Trump’s photo book Save America was in the top 30.
The Truths We Hold, Kamala Harris’ memoir, has risen almost 2,000 spots in the last day, landing at number 345 on the Best Sellers list.
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The reason
The dystopian wave has sprung back to life with Trump’s win.
This is because these narratives strike a chord with readers in politically tense times.
Throughout history, dystopian stories have heightened and comforted readers’ anxieties, but people are increasingly using these books for guidance and information rather than as dark fantasy and solace.
Reproductive rights were a major issue in this race. This had kept Trump worried as polls indicated that voters
strongly supported Harris on the subject.
Despite his claims that he would veto a federal abortion ban, it was notable that the 78-year-old took credit for the appointment of three conservative justices that helped tip the US Supreme Court’s balance and overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Former Barack Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett told MSNBC that “women do not want to be in The Handmaid’s Tale” in response to the high turnout of female voters in early voting data.
Before the election results, Atwood posted a political cartoon on X herself that included women in handmaid costumes waiting in line to cast their ballots and changing out of their uniforms for regular clothing as they left the polling place.
— Margaret E Atwood (@MargaretAtwood) November 1, 2024
“Despair is not an option,” Atwood wrote in a post on X following the election result. “It helps no one.”
Despair is not an option. It helps no one. pic.twitter.com/owauYG1XtH
— Margaret E Atwood (@MargaretAtwood) November 7, 2024
The idea that Americans may be living in an Orwellian dystopia became even more compelling in 2017 when Trump denounced the media as “fake news” and his adviser Kellyanne Conway discussed “alternative facts” on national television.
“With our current president, people’s taste in reading has definitely changed,” Molly Ash, the newsstand buyer at Book Soup in LA, told Entertainment Weekly.
In a 2021 interview with Rolling Stone, Atwood talked about Trump’s rise, saying that this isn’t new and looks more like “it’s right out of the playbook.” She cited “the big propaganda lies, the replacement of people in pivotal positions in the judiciary – because every totalitarian regime controls the judiciary.”
She said, “It was either Hitler or Goebbels who said if you tell the big lie often enough, people will believe it. Make the lie big, and make it often. We saw that. And it’s not a question of left or right — so-called left regimes have done the same thing. It’s a question of totalitarianism or not totalitarianism.”
According to Anna DeVries, executive editor at the book imprint Picador, in an interview with The Fader in 2017, explained that “dystopian and science fiction has always been a way for writers to play with reality, stretching some truths into extreme form while creating new ones, all the while highlighting basic truths about humans and society.”
“Ever since the election, we have gone down a rabbit hole, into a world where mothers are handcuffed and led away from their children by immigration officials protecting us against ‘illegals’; laws are proposed that would allow husbands to sue their wife’s doctor after an abortion; and a general atmosphere of hostility and fear has settled over the country. So when readers are buying 1984 and making it a bestseller again, it is clear they are not looking for escapist entertainment, but for information,” she said.
In a column for The Guardian, author Solnit said, “Our mistake was to think that racism and misogyny were not as bad as they are, whether it applied to who was willing to vote for a supremely qualified Black woman or who was willing to vote for an adjudicated rapist and convicted criminal who admires Hitler.”
With inputs from agencies
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