When planning her book Three Guineas (1938), the British writer Virginia Woolf set about reinventing the English language, to renew the way stories are told. She compiled a glossary in which the word “heroism” was replaced by “botulism”.  A hero became “a bottle”, in other words a container. Ursula K. Le Guin evoked this idea in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986) and stated: “I now propose the bottle as hero. Not just the bottle of gin or wine, but bottle in its older sense of container in general, a thing that holds something else.” For Ursula K. Le Guin, “carrier-bag fiction” meant favouring stories about these containers over ones about lethal weapons. Stories that gave voice to other viewpoints. Stories about mutual aid and gathering. Stories which are unspectacular, yet complex, without heroes but with people, not just “stories-that-kill” but also “life-stories”.