Well, it looks like somebody‘s campaign staff figured out that The Hunger Games was going to be a massive hit. Rick Santorum’s campaign dropped an ad over the weekend that borrows heavily from the worn Appalachian iconography that dominates the early scenes of that movie in its efforts to suggest that just two more years of an Obama presidency could produce a dystopian America:

And though the ad doesn’t mention abortion directly, focusing instead on a blown-out candle to represent the loss of freedom of religion, it repeats a quick but ominous image of a baby in a cradle bathed in red light twice. Santorum may, by this point, trust that his pro-life supporters have gotten the message and only feel like he needs to provide indirect reinforcement.

Given the tagline at the end, it looks like the Santorum campaign might run more of these ads like a web TV series. It would be a creative move for a campaign that doesn’t have a ton of money, and is never going to attract the kind of Hollywood support that let President Obama make a 17-minute long campaign documentary narrated by Tom Hanks.

But Santorum might want to think twice before embracing dystopian storytelling in his effort to position himself as the strongest challenger to the sitting president. After all, there’s already a great dystopian story about the logical consequences of his social policies and restrictions on women’s reproductive rights:

The Obama campaign doesn’t even have to worry about cutting new ads if Santorum’s the challenger. They can just take some of their ridiculous campaign war chest and buy time to air The Handmaid’s Tale instead.

The bridge is yours.

-Yo Hollywood, women buy half of movie tickets. You do the math.

-What makes a recap a recap? And what makes a review a review?

-New Margaret Atwood!

-Awkward Must-See TV: Romney on Leno on Tuesday.

-This will be terrible, or great, but either way, I do adore me some Toni Collette:

I interviewed Margaret Atwood about her new book, In Other Worlds, a collection of her writing on science fiction, and we got to talking about science fiction and religion. Or rather, science fiction as a replacement for a literal, completist reading of the Bible:

I think that the religious strand is probably part of human hard-wiring…by religious strand, I don’t mean any particular religion, I mean the part of human beings that feels that the seen world is not the only world, that the world you see is not the only world that there is and that it can become awestruck. If that is the case, religion was selected for in the Pleistocene by many, many millennia of human evolution. That would make sense. If you think there’s an unseen somebody or other helping you out, you’re more likely to feel encouraged. Suppose that the religious thing is kind of a given and you can’t act it out using your old figures and images, because time has moved on and people no longer quite believe, and if you announce that you have seen a bunch of angels sitting in a tree, you’re likely to be locked up in a bin, so instead you put them on planet X, where they’re like to feel quite at home.

I think it says something about the disjunct between people who say they interpret the Bible literally, which nobody does, and people who take a historical view of the Bible…that has made it more difficult to posit a world that is imaginatively complete and identical with the earlier medieval cathedral view of the universe. The imagination likes to deal with imaginatively complete worlds. It’s made it harder to do that than the old arrangement from creative to revelation, that you used to be able to see marching around the ceiling of cathedrals…It was a 3D house of the universe.

I think that’s an interesting idea. Not all the aliens we encounter in science fiction are necessarily more powerful than we are, but even if they’re not, they’re an interesting way to speculate about the divine, or the other as divine.

Seeing that Barack Obama snapped up Daniel Woodrell’s Bayou Trilogy, Brave New World, and Room for himself and Frost for his daughter, here are four alternative recommendations for what the First Family might consider reading on their summer vacation — and what it might mean for the rest of the country.

1. Killing Mister Watson, Peter Matthiessen. Need motivation to defend the idea that government should enforce labor laws, and that the rich and powerful shouldn’t be allowed to run amok, particularly at the expense of their communities? But still want some good, old-fashioned Spanish Moss-draped intrigue? Matthiessen’s brutal, beautiful story about a Florida planter who terrorizes his community in the state’s frontier years and the people who team up to kill him when his abuses go too far is a haunting reminder of the lawlessness of the American past.

2. Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson. So the administration might not have funded that paper about possible first contact — or have much interest in space exploration period. But if you’re going to read slightly dated science fiction, and want to think about the implications of growing corporate power and an aging population that’s going to consume resources a younger generation initially thought would be available to them (see: entitlement reform), you could do worse than to start Kim Stanley Robinson’s seminal trilogy.

3. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood. If you’re looking for creepy domestic tales and could use a little motivation to push back against the conservative war on women (thanks for the free birth control though, we appreciate it!), this dystopian classic hits up all sorts of issues, from sexual freedom to the dangers of a stratified class system.

4. Trickster’s Choice, Tamora Pierce. Want to talk insurgencies and your decision-making process in Afghanistan over the vacation dinner table with Sasha? Hook her up with the first of Tamora Pierce’s duology about what it takes to build a movement that can defeat an established government — she won’t need much of a reminder that there’s a difference between feminist spymasters and the Taliban. And at least she won’t be reading Flowers in the Attic.