Nehemiah Scudder is a character only named and never seen from Robert Heinlein's Future History cycle, a series of novels and short stories that cover space travel, eugenics and hypothetical engineering. First appearing in a short story called "If This Goes On..." published in 1940, Scudder is a backwoods preacher turned politician who wins the United States presidential election of 2012. There would not be an election after that date. The US is made into a theocracy, with Scudder as its First Prophet. The regime would later be toppled in 2100. Many see the story as Heinlein's belief in the despotic potential of evangelical Christianity, and as a prediction of the rise of American fundamentalism that occurred in the late 20th century.
For the purposes of my mod, Scudder's regime is actually a combination of two near-future religious dystopias: Heinlein's Prophets, and Gilead, a theocracy where low birth rates force the farming of fertile women, from Margaret Atwood's classic feminist novel The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood's work was itself a reaction against rising social conservatism in the 1980s.
For the purposes of my mod, Scudder's regime is actually a combination of two near-future religious dystopias: Heinlein's Prophets, and Gilead, a theocracy where low birth rates force the farming of fertile women, from Margaret Atwood's classic feminist novel The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood's work was itself a reaction against rising social conservatism in the 1980s.
