The Bag of Stars: Storytelling and Technology

How can we use storytelling as a tool to interrogate and expand our understanding of ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’? Ursula K. Le Guin’s reimagination of the humble bag or container as the first human invention hacked heroic, patriarchal narratives to tell a different story of our relationship with technology. 

Sophia Al-Maria, Irenosen Okojie,Tai Shani and chair Victoria Sin discuss how Le Guin’s notion of the story as a device for telling strangely realistic fictions informs their own approaches to challenging dominant myths of linear progress and apocalypse. Through their writing they explore post-patriarchal futures, time travel and cyborgian myth, and look at monstrosity and political selfhood with a cast of characters including medieval mystics Hildegard of Bingen and Theresa de Avila, shape-shifting goddesses and Britney Spears.