A graduate of Wesleyan University, Melissa Pace is a former editor and writer for Elle, as well as a past finalist for the Humanitas New Voices Fellowship for emerging film and television writers. The mother of three amazing children, Pace lives with her husband in Los Angeles, and when not writing she likes to lace up her cleats and get all her ya-yas out on the soccer field.
The Once and Future Me is her first novel.
At CrimeReads Pace tagged five favorite speculative fiction novels with feminist themes, including:
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s TaleRead about another title on Pace's list.
A cornerstone of feminist speculative fiction, this book is even more chilling to me now, in these times we find ourselves living in, than it was the day it was published. It takes place in a dystopian future where a totalitarian regime called Gilead has overthrown the United States in response to a global fertility crisisand fertile women called Handmaids are forced to bear children for the ruling class.
Told through the eyes of Offred, a Handmaid, the novel explores the themes of female oppression, loss of individual freedom, and resistance against a religious extremist government, and is a warning about the fragility of democracy.
When I first heard about this book way back in the fall of 1985, I had to have it, but I was earning verrrry little as an editorial assistant at Elle, so I put it on my Christmas list. Yes, I still gave my mother a Christmas list at age twenty-three. Shut up! Mom came through and I still have that first edition with its incredible cover!
This book did not disappoint. It grabbed me by the throat and literally changed how I saw the world, got me to listen for the signs and sounds of the patriarchal power structure still quietly humming away behind the scenes of my 1980s world, pulling the levers and running our society.
Most of all The Handmaid’s Tale made me realize how easily the rights I took for granted could slip away, step by step, if we don’t stay vigilant and loud. Though I read it long before I ever imagined writing a book of my own, it deposited itself in my brain and waited….
The Handmaid's Tale made Megan Cummins's list of seven novels that prove writers can make the best protagonists, Max Barry's list of five top books that are secretly science fiction, Louisa Treger's top ten list of great boundary-breaking women of fiction, Claire McGlasson's top ten list of books about cults, Siobhan Adcock's list of five top books about motherhood and dystopia, a list of four books that changed Meg Keneally, A.J. Hartley's list of five favorite books about the making of a dystopia, Lidia Yuknavitch's 6 favorite books list, Elisa Albert's list of nine revelatory books about motherhood, Michael W. Clune's top five list of books about imaginary religions, Jeff Somers's top six list of often misunderstood SF/F novels, Jason Sizemore's top five list of books that will entertain and drop you into the depths of despair, S.J. Watson's list of four books that changed him, Shaun Byron Fitzpatrick's list of eight of the most badass ladies in all of banned literature, Guy Lodge's list of ten of the best dystopias in fiction, art, film, and television, Bethan Roberts's top ten list of novels about childbirth, Rachel Cantor's list of the ten worst jobs in books, Charlie Jane Anders and Kelly Faircloth's list of the best and worst childbirth scenes in science fiction and fantasy, Lisa Tuttle's critic's chart of the top Arthur C. Clarke Award winners, and PopCrunch's list of the sixteen best dystopian books of all time.
--Marshal Zeringue
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