Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" sold more than 10 million copies and spawned an Emmy-winning Hulu series , but the Canadian author dismissed the notion that the dystopian novel is her magnum opus.

The 85-year-old author said she believes that if not for the ongoing rollback of reproductive rights and the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, the 1985 novel would probably just "be sitting on a shelf somewhere." Instead, the scarlet costume made famous by the wildly popular book has become a uniform of real-life protest and resistance.

"It's not due to me or the excellence of the book," she said. "It's partly in the twists and turns of history."

The strict rule behind Atwood's fiction

Atwood has written 64 books — and counting. Her fiction tells of future worlds plagued

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