“It’s all one,” Osden said. “One big green thought.”
Vaster than Empires is an annual Writer’s Workshop hosted by the Berggruen Institute. The project takes its name from writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1971 story in which a human crew encounters an alien, more-than-human, planetary intelligence. Each year we choose a different theme from Le Guin’s story that directs our research, talks, and collaborative work.
The project is driven by the ethos that storytelling creates and continues communal mythos. In sci-fi and speculative fiction, we fabulate about worlds beyond our present, beings athwart to our immediate perception, and non-human temporalities that boggle our brains — staging a plurality of possible futures to pursue, technologies to tinker with, and epistemologies to engineer.
In Year 1, we invited twelve writers to explore Le Guin’s hypothesis that “Collective Intelligence” extends far beyond the human mind. We immersed ourselves in Los Angeles science fiction cinemascape to inspire our writing.
In Year 2, we plumbed the theme “The Eternal and the Ephemeral” in Rome, Italy. In the Eternal City, we steeped ourselves in the ancient past through art and architecture with an eye toward various experiences of time.
Vaster than Empires Editorial Team
The Editorial Team of Vaster than Empires is composed of Claire Isabel Webb, Ken Liu, Qiufan Chen 陈楸帆, and Theo Downes-Le Guin.
Dr. Webb directs the Future Humans Theme at the Berggruen Institute.
A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, Liu is an American author of speculative fiction. As a futurist, Liu has helped numerous organizations with articulating visions of the future. His most characteristic work is the four-volume epic fantasy series, The Dandelion Dynasty, in which engineers, not wizards, are the heroes of a silkpunk world on the verge of modernity.
Chen is an award-winning Chinese speculative fiction author. His works include the debut novel Waste Tide which set is in the near-future China, haunted by electronic waste and the ghost of Extractionism, as well as AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future, co-authored with Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, that innovatively blends science fiction with tech analysis, exploring the chances and risks in an AI-Human coevolving era.
Downes-Le Guin is the literary executor for author Ursula K. Le Guin and heads the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation. Through programs such as an annual prize for fiction, the Foundation continues Le Guin’s legacy of supporting writers and readers of science fiction, fantasy, literary fiction, and poetry. He also consults on adaptations of Le Guin’s work for screen and stage.
