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.�.
