The handmaid's tale - Margaret Atwood

Every time I read this novel I am stunned by how brilliantly possible it all is; the progressive motion towards controlling the population and taking away all of their rights and freedoms in a gradual series of logical-seeming moves, some of which are taking place even today, in real life. Does this mean that we're progressing to a world without reading, without sex for purposes other than procreation, without blood-family? A world where one in four babies is born massively deformed and you can be killed for talking to the wrong person about something other than the weather? A world where even the people at the top are quite miserable and just pass the misery on down? We appear to be just a few fragile steps away from the world of the handmaid's tale. Hopefully we heed the warning.