Vision

What we are trying to write, how we treat history, and why this archive lives on a site of its own.

Why women's stories

We spent a long time wanting to read stories in which women are genuinely the subject. In a great deal of fiction they are still the background, the reward, the symbol of suffering, the emotional instrument, or simply the thing being looked at.

The Song of Inanna is an attempt to write women as the ones who act, who tell, and who carry the weight of what happens.

History and invention

We do two things.

The first is to dig out the women's stories that history found interesting enough to record and then set aside — grounded in real sources, real people and real periods.

The second is to invent: the stories about women we wanted to read and could not find. Some are set in real periods of history; others in invented worlds, the far future, or a present-day city with something uncanny about it, from the American West in 1875 and the arena of ancient Rome to a city run by an AI in the year 3018 and a starship bound for the Silent Sea. This half is fiction, and it is where we try to imagine a different way of telling.

Women with each other

In these stories women are never a single role. They are closest friends and childhood friends, mothers and daughters, sisters, kin, enemies, lovers, allies, rivals, narrators and agents of their own lives.

AI and the writing

AI is a tool here. It widens what we can put on screen and makes ambitious visual work possible at a cost we can actually afford.

But productivity does not change storytelling on its own. What changes a story is still a human choice, a human experience and a human judgement.

Why an independent site

On platforms, work sinks under timelines, recommendation systems and the logic of reach.

This site exists to hold the original texts, the project records, the research behind them, and an index that will still make sense years from now.

Reading the work itself

The novels are written in Chinese, and the Chinese text is the definitive one. Every finished novel can be read in English, and new ones go up in English as they are released. The Chinese vision page carries this same text in the original.