"Freeforall" is a
1986
The year 1986 was designated as the International Year of Peace by the United Nations.
Events January
* January 1
**Aruba gains increased autonomy from the Netherlands by separating from the Netherlands Antilles.
**Spain and Portugal enter ...
dystopian
short story
A short story is a piece of prose fiction that typically can be read in one sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood. The short story is one of the oldest ...
by
Margaret Atwood, often described as a
gender flip
{{wiktionary, gender-flip
A gender flip is when a fictional character is created to have a different sex in another setting or in an adaptation of a work. The Internet meme Rule 63 predicts the prevalence of this.
Notable examples
* Sherlock H ...
ped version of her novel ''
The Handmaid's Tale
''The Handmaid's Tale'' is a futuristic dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood and published in 1985. It is set in a near-future New England in a patriarchal, totalitarian theonomic state known as the Republic of Gilead, which ...
''.
Background
Atwood envisioned "Freeforall" as a
companion piece to ''The Handmaid's Tale'', published a year prior. Like ''The Handmaid's Tale'', "Freeforall" is set in an dystopian society. Atwood intended this dystopia to evoke responses to the then-widespread
AIDS epidemic: "The solution that society has come up with is that you would have to have arranged marriages, and you would have to have sexually pure participants, otherwise everyone would just die."
"Freeforall" was first published on Sept 20, 1986 in the ''
Toronto Star
The ''Toronto Star'' is a Canadian English-language broadsheet daily newspaper. The newspaper is the country's largest daily newspaper by circulation. It is owned by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary of Torstar Corporation and pa ...
s Life section, as part of a series called "The Family Into 2001."
A year later, the story ran in the Canadian anthology series ''Tesseracts''.
Atwood originally intended "Freeforall" to appear in her 1994 collection ''
Good Bones and Simple Murders'' but ultimately decided it did not fit the theme.
At her editors' request, she included a new version of "Freeforall," abridged and slightly rewritten, in a 2023 anthology of stories ''Old Babes in the Wood''.
Summary
The story is set in the year 2026, a time of widespread and rampant
sexually transmitted disease
Sexually transmitted infections (STIs), also referred to as sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and the older term venereal diseases, are infections that are spread by sexual activity, especially vaginal intercourse, anal sex, and oral ...
s in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Society is extremely limited, with freedoms tightly regulated by a totalitarian state in the name of saving society from these illnesses.
The world's population is tightly segregated with the infected living somewhere on the "outside," presumably in deplorable conditions and left to their own devices. These "freeforalls," areas of sexual freedom, are tacitly encouraged, with the intent that the presumed anarchy and privation will lead to the natural elimination of disease when all the human carriers are dead. The infected are condemned and are left to perish, with no assistance offered from the "inside". Moral value has been placed on disease with the infected being treated as having brought the trouble onto themselves.
Minimal detail is supplied about the "outside" world, and it is referred to only indirectly and reflected in the fears of the healthy inside population. This presumably healthy population lives under extreme duress, and gender roles appear to be breaking down. A group of "Mothers" has arranged young and boys to be married off and to live celibate lives, using a "turkey baster" rather than sexual intercourse to procreate.
Publication history
* ''The Toronto Star'' (1986)
* ''Tesseracts'' (1987)
* ''Northern Suns: The New Anthology of Canadian Science Fiction'' (1999)
* ''Old Babes in the Wood'' (2023)
References
1986 short stories
Dystopian literature
Short stories by Margaret Atwood
Toronto in fiction
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