The economy of controlling women
The making of a story: 'Initiation'
Hello, fellow voyagers🖖. In today’s edition we’ll dive into the inspiration and research behind ‘Initiation’, a four-part, coming-of-age biopunk sci-fi mini-series I published here.
Initiation: Episode 1 | Episode 2 | Episode 3 | Episode 4
In 2012, I jumped on a bus in the city of Guilin, China, excited to visit the famous Longji Rice Terraces. It was a foggy, two-day journey up steep, hand-carved mountains. As I climbed, trying to keep up with a nimble, middle-aged Yao woman carrying my luggage in a hand-woven basket on her back, a milky mist enveloped us. Although I couldn’t see much of the landscape during my stay in the Yao village, I had time to observe its people. A handful of cedar-wood houses dotted the mountain paths, and Yao women were everywhere—guiding tourists, making and selling crafts, hosting shows, and managing their homestay businesses.
From time to time, I noticed men swiping dust, washing laundry by hand in a cauldron, or working at construction sites, occasionally making brief eye contact and then smiling shyly. I found this odd at first, and then intriguing. My host’s husband would shyly withdraw to shadowy corners every time I passed, children clinging to his pants. Why did men in this village behave like shy teenage girls? It turns out that the Yao minority is matriarchal.
This experience stayed with me. Every time I share this story with men, they laugh and cringe, slightly shrinking into themselves. Since then, I’ve been fascinated by the ways society shapes women’s roles—a theme I set out to explore in Initiation.
The power of storytelling
Stories help us make sense of the world, and this is as true for authors as it is for readers. When I write, I’m often telling myself a story to understand or reframe an aspect of reality. With unique perspectives on life, existence, and the future, storytelling allows us to shape, question, and explore our visions of the world.
To craft captivating stories, I need to start with an essential ingredient: fascination. Whether it’s an idea, a concept, a theme, or a vision of the future, fascination lies at the intersection of observing nature, technology, science, society, history, and the universe, and using imagination to weave them into new realities through fiction.
To write fascinating stories, we first must be fascinated ourselves.
Initiation is part of a larger worldbuilding project I’ve been developing for nearly a decade with each story adding to this intricate secondary world. Below, I’ll share some of the inspiration and thought processes that shaped this story.
Themes and inspiration
Societies have continuously reshaped women’s roles, from matriarchal and shamanic leadership to those of constraints and subordination. Throughout history, practices like purdah, the Victorian cult of womanhood or China’s infamous footbinding served as tools to control women’s visibility and mobility. Historically, footbinding was viewed as an aesthetic practice, but recent studies suggest a strong economic component: young girls with bound feet became skilled thread spinners and cloth weavers, often serving as the main breadwinners of their families, despite being labeled as burdens. Footbinding became economically obsolete once the textile industry penetrated rural China, replacing handmade textiles, and this is when the thousand-year-old practice was finally abolished.
Today’s landscape contains equally complex forces shaping women’s roles. We face economic instability, climate crises, lingering pandemic impacts, and a resurgence in traditional gender roles, often driven by perceived demographic and economic pressures. This has revived practices like restricting reproductive rights or promoting traditional family roles, that echo the past. This context led me to the core question behind Initiation.
What new forms of control might societies impose on women in the future?
Transhumanism and mindbinding
Another theme driving Initiation is transhumanism, which I believe will one day rival artificial intelligence in shaping our world. We already see glimpses of human-tech integration in sci-fi, from Dune to The Broken Earth trilogy, but it’s often overlooked in public discourse. I foresee a future where human minds, especially those more emotionally attuned, become integral to running powerful AI systems. Thus, the concept of mindbinding emerged—a vision where human minds act as living interfaces for complex tech systems, blending human intuition with machine efficiency. In Initiation, this future form of control becomes both a survival tool and a powerful mechanism of societal control, with a strong economic component. The virtual habitats created by the Vesper women are the main income source of the powerful Vesper family.
Building the world of Initiation
I explored many of Initiation’s themes during my screenwriting studies, where I had the chance to develop stories around sensory enhancement through technology. One early story involved a character that could communicate with animals, inspired by the real-world cyborg dancer attuned to earthquakes. Researching ancient hunter-gatherers, I was fascinated by their profound knowledge of ecosystems—something modern society has sadly lost. I wondered if technology might one day help restore our environmental awareness.
In Initiation, explore this idea with the influential Vesper women, who communicate with the whales guarding their domain. Amiie, the story’s protagonist, has a strong bond with her sister whale, Alva, which serves both as a rite of passage and a survival tool, reflecting a rekindled connection with the natural world in this future society. The virtual whale environment that Amiie creates after she’s initiated in the practice of mindbinding serves as a form of protection for the natural world which is as integral to her society as technology. I find the idea that empathy and intuition could one day become powerful technological tools profoundly compelling.
Looking ahead
Initiation is just one facet of a larger secondary world I’m excited to explore, one story at a time, through this newsletter. This narrative world will continue to unfold, eventually culminating in a novel. Initiation is also connected to my cli-fi series There Is Hope, with hints of this larger world appearing in its fifth story.
Thank you for joining me on this deep dive into Initiation. Let me know if you enjoyed this exploration.
Initiation: Episode 1 | Episode 2 | Episode 3 | Episode 4
A humpback mother whale with her baby-calf
While writing Initiation I listened to a lot of humpback whale singing. This video featuring a humpback whale singing with her baby-calf is my favorite and it inspired the last scene in the story.
Further reflections on my research for this story can be found in these notes.
Further reading
Textiles inspired by nature
Structural colour and iridescence in plants: the poorly studied relations of pigment colour
Buckling as an origin of ordered cuticular patterns in flower petals
Plants employ chemical engineering to manufacture bee-luring optical devices
Whales
Footbinding
Brain-machine interfaces
Initiation: Episode 1 | Episode 2 | Episode 3 | Episode 4
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This is fascinating, and I loved getting a behind the scenes look at your research. And I’ve been thinking a lot about the economy of controlling women today and the forces that are sparking a resurgence. I’m excited to read this series to process it!
This is awesome. It's exactly this kind of organic interweaving of subject matter that makes this genre so powerful. And yes, the fuel is fascination.