`LIFE OUTSTRIPPING ART'
Emily A. Weedon's Autokrator explores a dystopian future in which women lose all rights
Autokrator
Emily A. Weedon
Cormorant
It's a world in which women have been stripped of their rights. They have been reduced to the status of “unmales” — their only value to serve men. Some function as unpaid labour. Others are assigned “breeding” duties, fulfilling a patriarchal tyranny's need for a steady supply of male offspring to ensure the continuing purity of future generations.
Such is the society conjured up by award-winning Canadian screenwriter Emily A. Weedon in her debut novel, Autokrator. So the inevitable question arises: what drew her to this deadly dystopian vision?
Weedon responds with her own question. “If you think of women only in terms of their ability to give birth to children, what becomes of women?”
The issues raised in this book have been on Weedon's mind for more than a decade, but lately it's seemed increasingly evident to her that Autokrator can't easily dismissed as total fantasy.
“We talk about life imitating art but in several cases I've been shocked by how life was outstripping art,” she says by phone from her Toronto home. She sees an actual world in which women's rights are imperilled — and the proof extends beyond such obvious examples as Afghanistan and the U.S. Supreme Court's crushing of abortion rights. But that's not all.
“I read a recent article in the National Post about artificial wombs,” she says. “They're coming — yet this was something I'd already been working toward in my novel.” So this seemed to make her own fictional scenario more ominous — a scenario in which the novel's Supreme Ruler is a power-crazed autocrat obsessed with utilizing science to eliminate women from the breeding process altogether and, in effect, to ensure that society no longer needs them.
Weedon acknowledges Mary Shelley 's 19th century novel Frankenstein was an early inspiration with its chilling account of the consequences of creating a man-made monster.
“And now, 14 years after I started this book, we're at the cusp of having artificial wombs — and where on earth is that going to take us?”
Her novel provides a hopeful answer to this question by craftily tossing two unusual women — both despised “unmales” — into the mix to defy orthodoxy and send events careening out of control.
Cera is a lowly female domestic determined to be reunited with the son who was taken from her at birth under the state's cruel misogynistic rules. But he's no ordinary child: he's to be groomed for elevation to the full power of the autocracy.
The second woman, Tiresias is the novel's audacious wild card — a gender criminal. Posing as a male and driven by ruthless, calculating ambition, she has risen high in the ranks of the Autocracy and sees further power within her grasp. But if her subterfuge is discovered, she faces death because, in this world, gender crime is the most heinous of offences.
Autokrator is a venture far removed from Weedon's recent online success with Chateau Laurier, the period series set in one of Canada's most fabled hotels.
Last year, Weedon and co-writer Kent Staines were awarded top honours for best writing in a web series at the Canadian Screen Awards.
Their velvet-lined evocation of a vanished society was also a huge success internationally, winning more awards in 2023 than any other web series.
Weedon's eclecticism reaches into many corners of her life. She has also worked as an office receptionist, cherry picker, set designer, legislative page, film producer, composer, bandleader and Fringe playwright. A fan of horror movies, she even laughingly confesses to a small role in The Bride of Chucky, part of the cult film series about an infernal doll.
She figures that anything is possible in life if you've been raised by hippie parents on a subsistence farm where electricity and running water weren't always a given.
“I'm lucky that my mother, who recently passed away, was a voracious reader with a knowledge of the world that was truly encyclopedic. She astonished people with what she knew, and that opened the portals for me into other worlds. At the same time I was grounded in digging potatoes up, learning about canning and living with seeing your own livestock raised and slaughtered. That was my life as a person and it's stayed with me. It's all about what you do with what you have. You look at the world differently when you have to carry buckets of water instead of just turning on the tap.”
There's buoyancy in Weedon's voice when she talks about these times, but there have also been darker, emotionally draining moments in her life — moments that help explain why the novel that would become Autokrator began stirring so insistently in her mind. She was living in Budapest at the time, trapped in a marriage that was nearing its end. She talks about being a “trailing spouse” marooned in a place where she didn't know the language and where her partner was working 70 hours a day.
“I was in Hungary about a year, and we separated soon afterward. It's hard living in another culture, another country, especially if there's a language barrier.”
But out of this unhappiness, the idea for this book was taking shape. “I've often joked that being alone with a two-and-a-half-yearold was a little bit like being in a prison — but a lot of books come from people making good use of their time as `prisoners.' I'm not one to idle so, even when getting depressed, something of utility would come out of it.”
Because Weedon has worked on other projects over the years, the novel's progress was slow. She took her time in creating her richly detailed canvas, and enjoyed every moment. “It was sheer delight. The material would just roll out for me — it was like I was watching a great epic novel.”
Furthermore, despite the subject matter, she was determined to deliver a good read. “I hope I've told a story that people read and connect with and keeps them turning the pages past their bedtime.”
But the darkness is still there. Indeed, Weedon keeps seeing present-day concerns mirrored in her narrative.
“Many generation X women like myself grew up thinking that everything was cool and that were just going to go out and grab our destiny. And then when we arrived at being adults with children and tried to have careers along with that, we discovered we were bearing these multiple burdens. I felt as well that the world was on a slide into hypocrisy in many quarters and that women's rights were being suppressed.”
Meanwhile, despite the fact that a principal character disguises herself as a male it was not Weedon's attention to wade into the gender-identity debate with this novel.
“I don't feel that this is a book about trans-genderism,” she says firmly. Her “getting-off point” was Shakespearean comedy where characters frequently disguise themselves as the opposite sex. From there she came up with the character of Tiresias “who navigates the world pretending to be a different gender. But I think it important to underline that she is not `half gender.' Neither is she really interested in sex and sexuality. She's interested in power.”
... 14 years after I started this book, we're at the cusp of having artificial wombs — and where on earth is that going to take us? Author Emily A. Weedon