What might a future look like in which cryonics outsmarts death, cities take root upon the ocean, artificial intelligences script cinematic blockbusters, and lives can be saved, rewound and overwritten like digital files?

In collaboration with MaroVerlag and Kapsel magazine, we warmly invite you to a conversation with and about Chinese science fiction author Gu Shi. On the occasion of a new anthology curated by Kapsel editors Felix Meyer zu Venne and Lukas Dubro, this event offers a rare insight into the work of one of the most compelling voices in contemporary Chinese speculative fiction.

A trained urban planner as well as a writer, Gu Shi crafts stories that seamlessly fuse visionary futures with deeply human concerns. Her protagonists navigate worlds shaped by technological breakthrough—yet these advances often come at a price: the loss of fantasy, autonomy, or even our shared sense of humanity. Four of her stories—among them the Hugo Award-nominated “Overture 2181”—will now appear for the first time in German translation. With the anthology “Im Ozean ein Mutterschiff” (MaroVerlag 2025) a new chapter will be opened for Chinese short-form SF in the German-speaking world.

Together with the editors, we will speak with Gu Shi about writing between two disciplines—planning and fiction—about urban imagination, digital immortality, and how science fiction enables us to think the unthinkable.

Moderation: Dr. Petra Thiel

Event in cooperation with MaroVerlag and the Confucius Institute at Heidelberg University.

More information on the new book: https://www.maroverlag.de/kapsel/306-im-ozean-ein-mutterschiff-9783875128611.html