“With this collection, Andrea Chapela demonstrates her handle on science fiction by creating a series of protagonists that interact with different technological devices: pings, ansibles, lenses, profilers, or sensory curtains. These “machines of ingenuity” shape human feelings and their most intimate experiences: love, guilt, death, loss. They also reveal an everyday experience that is increasingly alienating. A future that very eloquently speaks about the present.”

“We still aren’t sure of the depth or transcendence of the changes that have taken place throughout these months when it comes to the way we relate to each other affectively and erotically. The only thing that’s for sure is that we won’t ever be the same. On this foggy stage, Chapela’s stories are like small fireflies—they don’t shine a light on the future, but rather delineate some of the shapes in our present. Questions about the permanence of our digital affections, the emotional consequences of filtering a photograph on social media, or the risk of depositing all our trust into digital apps are some of the questions that take on the form of a story more than the form of a dogmatic and clarifying solution. Because, as we seem to take away from the complete reading, the only thing we won’t ever lose (not even with the most advanced ping) is the ability to tell stories and identify with them…
Science fiction in the hands and heart of Chapela is closer to the torments and hopes in stories by Ted Chiang or novels by David Mitchell and Samantha Schweblin than it is to the cross-linked and obtuse universes of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ann Leckie. It isn’t about futuristic tricks that are merely speculative or anticipatory, as the most dogmatic in the genre would argue. Instead, with Ansibles we find ourselves before an impassioned succession of immersions into the ways of eroticism and affection: corporeal, emotional.”

“Readers will be able to blend into these stories immediately, because they will have lived many of these scenarios in real life. Stories like “Perfilada” and “90% Real” show the contemporary world, where social media registers our entire lives and turns them into a simple database that is stored in order to be looked at in the future, whether to torment or sadden us…Ansibles, perfiladores y otras máquinas de ingenio poses a challenge, as it isn’t only a trip through the fantastical. In this story collection, we realize that we are perhaps “desperate for a real existence.” (…) There’s nothing like reflecting on our present to ask ourselves, is this fiction or reality? Where do we break that barrier? Andrea Chapela creates these scenarios, the reader is the one who must decipher and answer the questions.”

“The worlds where the author transports her readers taste a little like the future, but they also remind us of the past. They have the aura of melancholy and novelty of stories that float without sinking into the ocean of time. ”