Andrea Chapela is a rising star of contemporary Mexican science fiction. In 2018 she won the National Juan José Arreola Short Story Prize, and in 2021 she was named the Best Young Spanish-Language novelist by Granta magazine. In 2021 her collection of science fiction stories Ansibles, perfiladores y otras máquinas de ingenio (Ansibles, Profilers, and Other Ingenious Machines) won the Gilbert Owen National Prize for Literature. The ten stories in this collection take place in a near future Mexico City where people and their perceptions of “reality” are technologically enhanced resulting in a posthuman condition weighted down by histories and cultures of modern Mexico and informed by neoliberal economics. In this paper I will discuss three stories from this collection: “Ahora lo sientes” (“Now you feel it”), premised on memories that can be altered to suit one’s needs; “Perfilada” (“Profiled”), premised on the ability to duplicate oneself in case of an emergency; and “En el pensamiento” (“In thought”) in which two sisters’ brains are connected to be able to perceive each other’s thoughts. In all three stories, what starts off as a utopic possibility – a new kind of immortality – devolves into dystopic disappointment, thus signaling the limits of personal technologized enhancements. In my analysis of these science fiction stories I will reference theories of posthumanism (by Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway) as well as essays on Mexican culture in the neoliberal age (by Nestor García Canclini and Carlos Monsivais).

Authors:
Samuel Manickam, University of North Texas, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Samuel Manickam is currently Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of North Texas (Denton) and is a specialist in modern Mexican narrative. At the present he is doing research on Mexican cinema on drug cartels.

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