Why I Wrote This Book: Emily Weedon Special Edition

Autokrator and the Feminist Dystopia

I was once challenged: “Why do we need Autokrator, in a world that already had The Handmaid’s Tale?” I knew at the time it was a question I would likely have to regularly field. To get to an answer I have to go back a little, to when I was living in Budapest, where I started writing Autokrator.

On the Buda side, in the tony area that was once home to diplomatic homes, there is a building known locally as The Terror House. Inside, there are opulent meeting rooms and functionary rooms, and down below — for the unfortunates lead into that 18th century building for their political beliefs or perhaps random whisperings — in the basement there is a cunning array of tortures devised to break souls; a room where one can neither stand nor lie down,  an earthen cell where the lightbulb never goes out,  a room where tools and implements of death line the walls. These are rooms where blood has run, many times over. 

Terror House may have pre-existed the 1940s as a headquarters for secret police, but came to its height during WWII, when Axis power, Hungary, swung terrifyingly right. Later, when the Nazis had been subdued, the tide turned to Communism in Hungary. When Budapest was taken over, the Communists resumed all the spying and imprisoning, torturing and killing that had happened in The Terror House before. All that was needed was changing the signs.  

The question Autokrator sets out to answer is: what would a world be like in which the Patriarchy was even worse? The novel examines the process by which power is grasped and kept and wielded like a cudgel, and The Handmaid’s Tale examines many of these same horrors. Regimes change, tortures remain. The stories of the ways people are cruel and subjugate one another are legion. 

 The Handmaid’s Tale delves into issues of a recent, confusing terror, fuelled by a Christian Fundamentalist type patriarchy, and creepingly takes over the regular people of a world just like ours. The terror begins subtly, gradually takes over and all semblance of equality between genders and societal strata are replaced. This story unfolds in a localized area of one (former) country, which we understand fell during a religiously fueled civil war.

 Autokrator draws its name from the Greek word for Emperor. It is the same root word that gives us Tsar, and Caesar. The Autokracy is a world where power has never been other than absolute. Protagonist Cera’s world is nothing like ours in architecture, history and culture. It is a world exactly like ours in that there is corruption through power and subjugation of select people while exalting chosen people at the expense of the downtrodden.  

 This is a world in which Judeo Christianity is non-existent. The Catechisms that gave birth to accepted realities, such as women being the cause of original sin, are absent.  This was a creative choice to unleash my world further from the one we are in, so that I could examine power and gender without getting bogged down. In some ways, The Autokracy resembles ancient Greece where women languished hidden in Gynaecium’s or Ancient Rome, where an enslaved class was the critical piece of bedrock upon which the entire society was predicated. In Autokrator, a mythic king killed his wife and children over an act of infidelity.  This act is the basis for subjugating all women in this world.

The fact that a slave economy is gender based in the world of Autokrator is one of those age-old stories. A dystopia featuring downtrodden women may, in fact, not be a topic, or a subject as much as it is a  major literary theme. We understand literature to focus on Man against Man, Man Against Nature, Man Against Self, Man Against Machine. Female readers will recognize their world of small aggressions and disappointments, of gender-based violence scaled to the proportions of an epic struggle in the Genre of Man Against Woman. We still live in a world where, despite efforts to equalize things, the very furniture of our lives is a result of Man Against Woman.  

Atwood’s work depicts a world which posits a mutated domestic world, pushed for by a monotheistic patriarchal belief system. It is our world in a near future, where many pieces of violence and subjugation happen intimately in a domestic settings between a man and his wife/property. The players in Handmaid’s Tale react to recent changes in their world.  The scars and bruises are fresh. A new world order that requires the subjugation of women is being built and we are invited to shiver and consider it coming to us on the basis of one judge’s seat filled by a pro-choice or anti-abortion judge.  

 Autokrator, by contrast, is an ancient, embedded world ossified with traditions. I drew on elements in Meryn Peake’s Gormenghast, 1984, Dune, The Tale of Genji and even Game of Thrones when I was world-building for Autokrator. The canvas is massive, global. The subjugation of women in Autokrator is woven into every aspect of society, a caste system. No one questions this order. All parts function as ordained. What is more, centuries of erasing women from the face of history has led the leaders of Cera’s world to an even more dire “final solution.” Drawing on the twisted evil of the Nazis, I envisioned a world where women, after centuries of malevolent patriarchy now face a Holocaust — vivisection, study, imprisonment, murder and ultimately, thanks to the machine the Autokrator desires to be built, the mechanical womb, utter erasure.  At the time I started writing Autokrator, artificial wombs were a fiction. Exogenesis is now a fact. 

 The women in Autokrator are not mounting a guerilla style velvet insurrection. Robust actors, they stand up and rally armies and drive a plot thick with shifts.  

 Autokrator differs from Handmaid’s Tale in many important respects. A propulsive story, it rolls forward on the momentum of the two active female characters who buck thousands of years of tradition to disguise themselves as men, and go after what they want, despite imminent death. Offred’s story rolls out with more introspection before the character is moved to act. Where Handmaid remains bleak, Autokrator offers a glimmer of hope — a society is completely overthrown. Even so, there is a cautionary aspect to the ending which suggests that in every overthrow of an autocratic system are planted the future seeds of abuse of power — even if mounted by “the good guys,” who in this case are women. 

Similarly, Autokrator offers something not offered by other novels which explore the theme of Man Against Woman: women can be virgins, or whores in the old dichotomy. They are almost always passive recipients of victimization. Their stories are often of surviving victimization. Tiresius represents a new, delicious anti-hero who transcends gender — who revels in her sharp active mind, who grasps opportunity and reigns of power, who is a shark moving through choppy waters. She relishes her climb. Tiresius is no victim. Tiresius is a villain.

Recent feminist dystopias explore different aspects of living inside the matrix of patriarchy. Vox by Christina Dalcher suggested a world where women are only allowed to speak in short sentences, with a character count, or face consequences. This device, building on the idea of Twitter, is an interesting if gimmicky one that speaks to women not being allowed by the overarching society TO speak. 

Red Clocks by Leni Zumas explores a dystopia where women’s reproductive rights are imperiled for the good of the greater society. This is a meditation on the issue of choice — and a particular lens. Autokrator sets out to explore a broader world, full of the many implications and dangers of subjugating half the population. Of course reproduction is an aspect because of gender. But desire, agency, and the ability to slip into evil are also considered. 

 Just as there is room for both The Call of The Wild and White Fang in Man Against Nature, or an exploration of anti-semitism in The Merchant of Venice or The Diary of Anne Frank, female driven stories told from under the cover of patriarchy will produce endless iterations of anti-female dystopias. 

What is new is that these dystopias were not recognized as such before works like Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale made the mold for what I consider to be an entire genre.