Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: Welcome to Disasters Maybe, a podcast about disasters in contemporary fiction. I'm Jordi Serrano Muñoz and in this show I talk with scholars and writers about what it means to invoke catastrophes to interpret our present and our future. Priorities are a funny thing. The more connected we are, the more dependent we become to technology that allows us to casually and effortlessly send that funny cat meme to someone that we care about and who lives on the other end of the world. That dependency makes us believe that this way of communicating is what matters us the most, that this is how we build and sustain. relationships. However, if you were to wake up tomorrow and discover that the internet is down forever and that there's no way to reach out beyond your immediate community, how would you feel? How would that affect the way you think about yourself and who you consider to be your loved ones? Annette Cepella explores these questions in her latest novel. todos los fines del mundo, translated as all the ends of the world. On the surface, it is a story about climate collapse. But once you start reading it, you discover that Andrea chooses to focus on what connection and this connection really mean when we think about ecological collapse. I talk with her today about all of this, about her writing process, and about also what uncertainty can bring us. Enjoy. André Chapella is a novelist and short story writer based in Mexico City. She studied chemistry at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México before competing and MFA in creative writing in Spanish at the University of Iowa and later held a fellowship at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid. She's currently pursuing a PhD in Latin American Studies, also at UNAM. In 2021, she was selected by Granada Magazine as one of the 22 best young novelists. writing in Spanish. Her books include the essay collection Graduos de Neopia and the short story collection Uncibles, Perfiladoras y otras máquinas de ingenio, which received the Premio Nacional de Literatura, Gilberto Owen. Her most recent novel, Todos los Fines del Mundo, All the Ends of the World, was published in 2025 by Literatura Random House. It follows Angelica, a young Mexican woman studying theater in Madrid, who develops this intense and indefinable relationship with her two flatmates. Before she can resolve what that relationship means, climate collapse cuts global communications and Angelica finds herself stranded in Mexico, unable to reach the people she left behind. The disaster in this novel doesn't end the world despite the title, so much as prevent a conversation from finishing. And that design as we'll discuss today, is anything but accidental. So welcome, Andrea. Thank you for being here.
Andrea Chapela: Thank you for inviting me.
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: So Andrea, as I was saying, the climate collapse in your novel works in a very specific way. There's no description of any spectacular scene of destruction. And it doesn't really put the characters in evident danger, with some exceptions. Instead, I think the catastrophe is felt and it is measured for its capacity to sever communication, to create this sudden and unsurmountable distance between the characters, Angelica can't finish her conversation. She can't resolve the true nature of her relationship with Susanna and with Manu. So I'm wondering how deliberate was that design? What made you want to measure catastrophe, climate catastrophe, in terms of distance rather than just material destruction?
Andrea Chapela: Well, I think it's twofold, at least that's what I've been thinking all these days. On the one hand, When I was thinking about climate collapse, I wanted to write about climate change. And I was thinking how to do it, I started trying to figure out what the scenery or what the stage that I felt was more frightful to me, but I felt that wasn't being written as much. the perspective that things will keep going the same and we'll do everything in our power as a species to change just enough so that everything keeps being the same until everything breaks. I think that's the most fearful event I feel a little better about a huge collapse where everything breaks and then we have to start over or everything is done than this slow death of the species where everyone knows that everything is going bad but there is no way to resolve it. And it's, of course, just a little step forward of what we actually have right now. It started with that idea. But also when I write a speculative novel or a speculative short story, for me it's very important that the heart of the story somehow connects with the novel, with the change I made in the world so that the science fiction can enter. somehow, instinctively, I knew both ideas could coexist, but for a long time, many months, I kept playing them in my head, trying to understand. how they could be attached together and suddenly I realized or like the breakthrough was I realized that such a collapse where communication ends and where there is like this open question of what happened to the other people allows for a kind of regret and a kind of longing that would propel the narrative because
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: Mm.
Andrea Chapela: the only other instance where everything breaks and then you cannot do anything about the conversation you didn't have or something you didn't say if the other person dies. But in that case, you know what happens. But in this case, she doesn't understand what happened with the world and she has this completely new life. I'm always trying to understand how the science fiction idea can. exacerbate or make the emotional idea of the novel more poignant. And so for me, was like, yes, that's what the collapse is putting in the forefront is that regret. And that regret is what propels her to be as obsessive as she is in the first part. At least that's how I explain it to myself. I write lot of science fiction and all of my science fiction is about communication. In my short stories, it's always technologies that allow better communication in theory by putting things inside us that allow us to... somehow connect our brains or share memories or things like that. And then here it's like the opposite, like somehow I break communication and that I don't know. I think it's one of the parts of humanity that I'm most interested of. then, I figured out how climate disaster could enter into that obsession.
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: It's interesting, right, because this novel is this... started perhaps as a short story, as an years of Baromeo, right? Which is an earlier version of the whole narrative. But then in Todos los Vienes del Mundo, you make a very interesting decision. And this is going to be a bit of a spoiler, but I think it is very important that we get into it, because as readers, we eventually discover that the collapse that you describe in the novel may not have happened at all. a story that Helica writes to process this sudden separation. For me, that was a very interesting twist because it frames disaster as this act of imagination that mirrors a time of emotional instability, right? And I was wondering, what does that revelation tell us? What maybe were you thinking about implementing with that revelation about how Disaster fiction works more broadly not just to represent crisis, let's say, de-ejectically or mimetically, but also as a way to give shape to experiences that otherwise can resist narration.
Andrea Chapela: Yeah, I think... Disaster. allows for the normal way of life to suddenly collapse on itself. And then I think what is important in life becomes very bare bones. think that's why not only because collapses more and more and everyday occurrence in the world, well, not collapse, like disasters are growing, but also, but we've always written about them, right? Like the fear that everything as it is will suddenly without our complete control just vanished. And I think first of all, I really like the structure. I started writing with structures in mind and there was a short story that like I had the novel, but I needed something to publish in Granta. So I somehow broke the novel and it became something of a short story. so the novel was always first I really like that in books when you have a book where every part contextualizes what you and changes what you just read, but also every part is something inside the next part. I just knew I wanted to write that and see if I could make it work. And so, and this is something I have understood, I think, more and more as I speak about the novel, now that it's done and now that I've been talking about it, that... First of all, this idea of the end of the world and this idea of collapse is in many ways in this big world shattering collapse in the climate sense, but also it mirrors a lot the kind of collapse Angelica is having. Because she ended a relationship she had a lot of stakes in and she doesn't know how to handle that and it's like... Well, maybe to move on, I just have to end everything. Like life as it is has to change so that I can move on. I have because then I will have to, which is how she is in the second part as a way of maybe of jumpstarting the process, right? Like because life makes you move on eventually, but she feels so stuck that I think that's why she writes what we read beforehand. So also the other thing I've come to realize is that how Angelica is in her relationship and how the world she creates are... She's always in this very fragile world. In a world that's about to collapse but it's not there. And a small change could make it break but no one is taking action to make it break. And that's happening in the relationship she's had and this happening in the world she had. And I think this act of... breaking it all is the first time she takes action in some way. She doesn't want to take action for all the first parts of the book. when I kept thinking about this thing of the end of the world and the novel wasn't named like that for a long time. So I didn't know it would become such an important thing as the title. But when I was thinking about this collapse and this ending, I always came back to this idea I was saying before of how we always imagine collapse as like a game over button. someday in 50 years, someone will press that button and everything will be done. And, and I. have always resisted that because I don't think it will be that simple or that happy. I think it will be a very hard process and that there will be humans to experience that downfall. But at the same time, I wanted to think of that downfall in a way that will be...
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: Thank
Andrea Chapela: that will become something. for me, it's very important that somehow, even if I'm writing about disasters and the end of the world, there is something hopeful of how. some things can be remade. And in that sense, I think the collapse and the heartbreak, she's feeling nearer each other because we also went something we had a lot of hope for and something we long for a lot breaks. we have to reshape it. And so I think that's the way she figures it out. But for the longest time, I didn't see that those things mirror each other as much. And as it did, I guess that's just what happens when you're writing.
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: I also was also very interested in how structures of care, especially alternative structures of care, take this big role in your story. Not only in Todos los Fines, but also in other stories that you have written. Some of them do play with the conventions and the normativities of some relationships without needing to be ascribed to a specific label of affection, let's say. And how, for instance, in the novel, There are, of course, the relationship that Angelica has with Susana and Manu, but also the relationship that she develops with the survivors of the second part of the novel, let's say, which is basically this way of developing new connections that need to overcome the fact that they are a replacement of the ones that she lost. after the catastrophe, right? mean, it's like, are they going to be just like, again, a replacement or can I really ascribe new meaning to those relationships? So what do you think that disasters, I mean, imagine ones, allows to see about these dynamics of care that in, let's say, non-disastrous scenarios are perhaps more difficult to represent?
Andrea Chapela: I think disaster has always this idea of survival inside it. Right? Like you are suddenly against something bigger than yourself that's breaking havoc in many places. And then you have somehow to survive it. And then, so I was interested in that idea of surviving and of how if everything broke and this community became isolated, how it would work. But I also use, I always say I use the magic of science fiction because there's a lot of magical thinking going into it So they have everything they need. can, they have energy, like they have machines that don't exist and they have forms of having energy and clean water and cultivating things and so immediate survival like eating and having somewhere to shelter themselves is not a problem. And I also knew I didn't want... to have an outside force, especially a human outside force, I wanted to know if almost everything is... resolved at least for the time being, but these people again are in this fragile situation where any good day now, the environment could change and something could break and that situation could end for them. How would they organize themselves and how would they decide? what's important and how would they deal with the ideas of having lost a world in those people in that world? How would they say how that would shape them? And then try to understand how that community would work. as you said, I'm very interested in other ways of care and other ways of understanding how to be human with each other. These are all the people she has left and they are all very important for her survival. But it's not her bodily survival. It's like her emotional and human survival. And for me that was very important. It was very important also that there was another kind of triangle that didn't work exactly like the one with Susanna and Manu. and that she could be able to in that other place explore another kind of love or the idea that, well, the idea that the happy and sad idea that everything that breaks eventually if you're alive reforms. And also I, but then for the longest time nothing happened. And it was very hard to make it work until I figure out with the short story, this idea of the antenna and that they would be trying to communicate. then again, communication, if they want or not to communicate and what's the price of communication with the outside and finding out what happened. That became a sort of like tiny plot that allowed me to make it work.
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: Hmm.
Andrea Chapela: in this case, disaster allows me to strip the world from many things and just get what I really want to look at. And I think science fiction allows that of me a lot, like with science fiction. And in this case, guess disaster is working in the same way, which is...
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: Ha ha.
Andrea Chapela: It allows me to do something strange happens something changes the world in some way and then I can strip the world from everything that I don't need and just Get at the root of what I want to explore
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: in this conversation that you had with Greta Baca for the journal Iowa Literaria, you talk about how you prefer the word mode over that of genre. And you haven't said the genre of science fiction. You're just talking about science fiction, what it allows you to do, right? And it's very interesting to see in novel how it's moving through all these forms. So maybe more conventional approach to climate fiction, there's also to fiction, but there's essays. There's also this linguistic, a paralinguistic approach to many conversations. And at some point you're reading a theater play.
Andrea Chapela: Yeah.
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: So what demanded that kind of formal diversity? How do you know when to play with form so that it can work?
Andrea Chapela: Yeah, I think as a writer for me, Moth is more useful because genre... It gets at so many commercial conventions and critical and academic conventions that are not exactly what I need when I'm trying to write. For me, mode, because somehow it's like, this is the genre of science fiction and then this is how your novel should look like. But if I say I'm writing in the mode of science fiction to myself, then it allows me to change modes as I'm moving through the novel. It didn't work always. Like, as you said, for example, there there's like an S-I-E-C voice in the novel. And it was way more important and more in the forefront in one of the versions of the book. And eventually it was like, no, this is too, it's making the book too busy and it's not serving the book. So it changed a little. So it became what it's now, which I think meshes better with the idea of fiction. And so for me, it's like there is a mode of fiction, there is a mode of nonfiction or essay stick voice, and there's a mode of fiction when I go in and out of, I guess, myself. All of those for me always start with science fiction. I think a novel like this, and I've spoken about this with another writer, Elisa de Gortari, who also writes these kinds of books. And I think I've always told her that think we get to the same place from very different paths. She starts in realism, in mimetic fiction and literary fiction. She's interested in literary fiction. And her teams move her closer to sci-fi. she uses those elements beautifully, but she starts with Pinchon, for example, that's one of her. But then, but I started science fiction. For me, the science fiction is very important and then I go into literary as a second fold. that, I like the estrangement that it allows. And also, are... I have the book here because I can't say the name, but this book is very useful for me. It's called Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sheep by So-Yong Hsu. And she proposes that science fiction is mimetic, but it's mimetic to metaphoric language and metaphoric ideas and things that are not... clearly realist, but are very important to us in how we understand the world. And I like that in the sense that I've always thought about science fiction as something that opens a space, that creates a new world and creates new conditions. And in the difference between our conditions and the new ones, in that difference, is the estrangement and there is the interesting thing that is happening. And for example, going into the theater mode in the third part, the novel allowed it because it is what Angelica is studying, but also... I became aware of how theater also opens that space. It's a form or a mode that opens a space where things that normally don't happen can happen. Where because of how everything is set up, characters can say to each other things that won't be said in real life, but that feel meaningful and real. for me, was a lot the same. It's like I have science fiction in the first two parts, but then theater becomes this part of still
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: Hmm.
Andrea Chapela: of estrangement, of where you don't know where realism is. the novel is about Klamish, but it also is a novel about what I think science fiction can be. And for me, science fiction is also about pushing the boundaries of what's.
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: You
Andrea Chapela: yeah, of boundaries on what's real, not what's fiction and what isn't. And in those senses, that also is what's out of fiction does is like pushing those boundaries. But I've always found that when you put science fiction and other fiction together, the bounds are pushed even more because of course the world is in real. Of course, while I'm talking about feels fanciful. So I like how speculative fiction like getting away from the constraint of having to mimic reality exacerbates everything just stretches everything so much that you have to get to the point of it. And so in that sense, those modes for me are always, I'm always looking for that, for the way of stretching the idea more so that I can look at it more closely. Because I find reality has too many distractions and then trying to emulate reality has a lot of distractions, but. speculative allows me that that mode of going into it deeper somehow.
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: I wanted to ask you a more broader question because in an interview that you gave to Al-Pais, the Mexican edition last year, you mentioned Yasnaya Aguilar's point. that for indigenous peoples in Mexico and beyond Mexico, the world has already ended. It's funny when they say, no, all the potential futures of the world, right? And Yesenia says that, well, the world ended for them at the conquest, at the hands of the Spanish conquistadors, basically. do you think of that history? Do you, when you're climate disaster fictions from Mexico or from Latin America more broadly, how do you think that writing the apocalypse changes when you come from a place that has already survived one?
Andrea Chapela: I heard Jasna just say that very early in the process of the novel and it just struck me because... And I don't know if I could have talked to why it struck me so much like I think just thinking it already happened but also now that I've been reading a lot about climate fiction and about that idea of how climate fiction could be different in Latin America or have its own spin one of the things that comes up a lot is about how Latin America because of this first ending and having to reconstruct itself. something, a new future had to be reconstructed, right? And imagined. it's, I don't know how successful mixture of two very different ideas. And for me, What I think I gathered from Jasnaya was like, it's been hundreds of years and we are still here. So the ending is not this again, it's not final. I have this class in the doctoral degree right now, and they were saying that a lot of Latin American narratives, social Latin American narratives usually end with a big disaster, something breaks. it's always like a deoxyxmachina thing where, yeah, now the human condition cannot be resolved, so now the flood. And then we start over. And I find it interesting to start from disaster, right?
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: you
Andrea Chapela: or hundreds of years after, or to see the aftermath of it and how after something else ends, something has to be rebuilt or that we tend to do that to rebuild in some way. there is a possibility of building from scratch and rebuilding and remaking that I think is, I think it's needed. and I think the point is talking about how what we do now help us rebuild if disaster happens and that the present is very important and the decisions of the present are very important. to whatever happens in that rebuilding stage. Even if I like hope a lot, I'm not very optimistic about disaster not striking us as a species. I think we are walking into it very willingly. But I do believe that something can. be on the other side. And I like to write from that. And in that sense, Yasnaya's idea that, the conquest was a horrible thing that happened. But somehow they as a... as people are still there and somehow we are also here. And that's, I think that's one of the ideas that I continue to move along in my fiction and that continues to give me some kind of route of how to write it.
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: Part of disaster imagination is also involving ourselves in imagining inhabiting better futures. you've talked about science fiction. There's also, for instance, in solar punk. narratives, there's also this interest in trying to imagine a more sustainable future, right? Or talking about other parts of the world for whom the world also ended in Afrofuturism, there's also this interest in trying to imagine hopeful alternative versions that don't end with the bank of the collapse, but try to actually use that as a springboard.
Andrea Chapela: Yeah.
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: to imagine different configurations that are a dialogue for our present. It's just to trust that the future is going to be great. It's imagining a better future to start acting on the present.
Andrea Chapela: Yeah, yeah, I think that that is the key for me in why I'm so interested in the genre.
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: fantastic this has been great Andrea thank you very much for the conversation and looking forward to reading your next novel or short story
Andrea Chapela: Thank you, Jordi. Thank you for the questions.
Andrea Chapela: Thank you for inviting me.
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: So Andrea, as I was saying, the climate collapse in your novel works in a very specific way. There's no description of any spectacular scene of destruction. And it doesn't really put the characters in evident danger, with some exceptions. Instead, I think the catastrophe is felt and it is measured for its capacity to sever communication, to create this sudden and unsurmountable distance between the characters, Angelica can't finish her conversation. She can't resolve the true nature of her relationship with Susanna and with Manu. So I'm wondering how deliberate was that design? What made you want to measure catastrophe, climate catastrophe, in terms of distance rather than just material destruction?
Andrea Chapela: Well, I think it's twofold, at least that's what I've been thinking all these days. On the one hand, When I was thinking about climate collapse, I wanted to write about climate change. And I was thinking how to do it, I started trying to figure out what the scenery or what the stage that I felt was more frightful to me, but I felt that wasn't being written as much. the perspective that things will keep going the same and we'll do everything in our power as a species to change just enough so that everything keeps being the same until everything breaks. I think that's the most fearful event I feel a little better about a huge collapse where everything breaks and then we have to start over or everything is done than this slow death of the species where everyone knows that everything is going bad but there is no way to resolve it. And it's, of course, just a little step forward of what we actually have right now. It started with that idea. But also when I write a speculative novel or a speculative short story, for me it's very important that the heart of the story somehow connects with the novel, with the change I made in the world so that the science fiction can enter. somehow, instinctively, I knew both ideas could coexist, but for a long time, many months, I kept playing them in my head, trying to understand. how they could be attached together and suddenly I realized or like the breakthrough was I realized that such a collapse where communication ends and where there is like this open question of what happened to the other people allows for a kind of regret and a kind of longing that would propel the narrative because
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: Mm.
Andrea Chapela: the only other instance where everything breaks and then you cannot do anything about the conversation you didn't have or something you didn't say if the other person dies. But in that case, you know what happens. But in this case, she doesn't understand what happened with the world and she has this completely new life. I'm always trying to understand how the science fiction idea can. exacerbate or make the emotional idea of the novel more poignant. And so for me, was like, yes, that's what the collapse is putting in the forefront is that regret. And that regret is what propels her to be as obsessive as she is in the first part. At least that's how I explain it to myself. I write lot of science fiction and all of my science fiction is about communication. In my short stories, it's always technologies that allow better communication in theory by putting things inside us that allow us to... somehow connect our brains or share memories or things like that. And then here it's like the opposite, like somehow I break communication and that I don't know. I think it's one of the parts of humanity that I'm most interested of. then, I figured out how climate disaster could enter into that obsession.
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: It's interesting, right, because this novel is this... started perhaps as a short story, as an years of Baromeo, right? Which is an earlier version of the whole narrative. But then in Todos los Vienes del Mundo, you make a very interesting decision. And this is going to be a bit of a spoiler, but I think it is very important that we get into it, because as readers, we eventually discover that the collapse that you describe in the novel may not have happened at all. a story that Helica writes to process this sudden separation. For me, that was a very interesting twist because it frames disaster as this act of imagination that mirrors a time of emotional instability, right? And I was wondering, what does that revelation tell us? What maybe were you thinking about implementing with that revelation about how Disaster fiction works more broadly not just to represent crisis, let's say, de-ejectically or mimetically, but also as a way to give shape to experiences that otherwise can resist narration.
Andrea Chapela: Yeah, I think... Disaster. allows for the normal way of life to suddenly collapse on itself. And then I think what is important in life becomes very bare bones. think that's why not only because collapses more and more and everyday occurrence in the world, well, not collapse, like disasters are growing, but also, but we've always written about them, right? Like the fear that everything as it is will suddenly without our complete control just vanished. And I think first of all, I really like the structure. I started writing with structures in mind and there was a short story that like I had the novel, but I needed something to publish in Granta. So I somehow broke the novel and it became something of a short story. so the novel was always first I really like that in books when you have a book where every part contextualizes what you and changes what you just read, but also every part is something inside the next part. I just knew I wanted to write that and see if I could make it work. And so, and this is something I have understood, I think, more and more as I speak about the novel, now that it's done and now that I've been talking about it, that... First of all, this idea of the end of the world and this idea of collapse is in many ways in this big world shattering collapse in the climate sense, but also it mirrors a lot the kind of collapse Angelica is having. Because she ended a relationship she had a lot of stakes in and she doesn't know how to handle that and it's like... Well, maybe to move on, I just have to end everything. Like life as it is has to change so that I can move on. I have because then I will have to, which is how she is in the second part as a way of maybe of jumpstarting the process, right? Like because life makes you move on eventually, but she feels so stuck that I think that's why she writes what we read beforehand. So also the other thing I've come to realize is that how Angelica is in her relationship and how the world she creates are... She's always in this very fragile world. In a world that's about to collapse but it's not there. And a small change could make it break but no one is taking action to make it break. And that's happening in the relationship she's had and this happening in the world she had. And I think this act of... breaking it all is the first time she takes action in some way. She doesn't want to take action for all the first parts of the book. when I kept thinking about this thing of the end of the world and the novel wasn't named like that for a long time. So I didn't know it would become such an important thing as the title. But when I was thinking about this collapse and this ending, I always came back to this idea I was saying before of how we always imagine collapse as like a game over button. someday in 50 years, someone will press that button and everything will be done. And, and I. have always resisted that because I don't think it will be that simple or that happy. I think it will be a very hard process and that there will be humans to experience that downfall. But at the same time, I wanted to think of that downfall in a way that will be...
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: Thank
Andrea Chapela: that will become something. for me, it's very important that somehow, even if I'm writing about disasters and the end of the world, there is something hopeful of how. some things can be remade. And in that sense, I think the collapse and the heartbreak, she's feeling nearer each other because we also went something we had a lot of hope for and something we long for a lot breaks. we have to reshape it. And so I think that's the way she figures it out. But for the longest time, I didn't see that those things mirror each other as much. And as it did, I guess that's just what happens when you're writing.
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: I also was also very interested in how structures of care, especially alternative structures of care, take this big role in your story. Not only in Todos los Fines, but also in other stories that you have written. Some of them do play with the conventions and the normativities of some relationships without needing to be ascribed to a specific label of affection, let's say. And how, for instance, in the novel, There are, of course, the relationship that Angelica has with Susana and Manu, but also the relationship that she develops with the survivors of the second part of the novel, let's say, which is basically this way of developing new connections that need to overcome the fact that they are a replacement of the ones that she lost. after the catastrophe, right? mean, it's like, are they going to be just like, again, a replacement or can I really ascribe new meaning to those relationships? So what do you think that disasters, I mean, imagine ones, allows to see about these dynamics of care that in, let's say, non-disastrous scenarios are perhaps more difficult to represent?
Andrea Chapela: I think disaster has always this idea of survival inside it. Right? Like you are suddenly against something bigger than yourself that's breaking havoc in many places. And then you have somehow to survive it. And then, so I was interested in that idea of surviving and of how if everything broke and this community became isolated, how it would work. But I also use, I always say I use the magic of science fiction because there's a lot of magical thinking going into it So they have everything they need. can, they have energy, like they have machines that don't exist and they have forms of having energy and clean water and cultivating things and so immediate survival like eating and having somewhere to shelter themselves is not a problem. And I also knew I didn't want... to have an outside force, especially a human outside force, I wanted to know if almost everything is... resolved at least for the time being, but these people again are in this fragile situation where any good day now, the environment could change and something could break and that situation could end for them. How would they organize themselves and how would they decide? what's important and how would they deal with the ideas of having lost a world in those people in that world? How would they say how that would shape them? And then try to understand how that community would work. as you said, I'm very interested in other ways of care and other ways of understanding how to be human with each other. These are all the people she has left and they are all very important for her survival. But it's not her bodily survival. It's like her emotional and human survival. And for me that was very important. It was very important also that there was another kind of triangle that didn't work exactly like the one with Susanna and Manu. and that she could be able to in that other place explore another kind of love or the idea that, well, the idea that the happy and sad idea that everything that breaks eventually if you're alive reforms. And also I, but then for the longest time nothing happened. And it was very hard to make it work until I figure out with the short story, this idea of the antenna and that they would be trying to communicate. then again, communication, if they want or not to communicate and what's the price of communication with the outside and finding out what happened. That became a sort of like tiny plot that allowed me to make it work.
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: Hmm.
Andrea Chapela: in this case, disaster allows me to strip the world from many things and just get what I really want to look at. And I think science fiction allows that of me a lot, like with science fiction. And in this case, guess disaster is working in the same way, which is...
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: Ha ha.
Andrea Chapela: It allows me to do something strange happens something changes the world in some way and then I can strip the world from everything that I don't need and just Get at the root of what I want to explore
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: in this conversation that you had with Greta Baca for the journal Iowa Literaria, you talk about how you prefer the word mode over that of genre. And you haven't said the genre of science fiction. You're just talking about science fiction, what it allows you to do, right? And it's very interesting to see in novel how it's moving through all these forms. So maybe more conventional approach to climate fiction, there's also to fiction, but there's essays. There's also this linguistic, a paralinguistic approach to many conversations. And at some point you're reading a theater play.
Andrea Chapela: Yeah.
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: So what demanded that kind of formal diversity? How do you know when to play with form so that it can work?
Andrea Chapela: Yeah, I think as a writer for me, Moth is more useful because genre... It gets at so many commercial conventions and critical and academic conventions that are not exactly what I need when I'm trying to write. For me, mode, because somehow it's like, this is the genre of science fiction and then this is how your novel should look like. But if I say I'm writing in the mode of science fiction to myself, then it allows me to change modes as I'm moving through the novel. It didn't work always. Like, as you said, for example, there there's like an S-I-E-C voice in the novel. And it was way more important and more in the forefront in one of the versions of the book. And eventually it was like, no, this is too, it's making the book too busy and it's not serving the book. So it changed a little. So it became what it's now, which I think meshes better with the idea of fiction. And so for me, it's like there is a mode of fiction, there is a mode of nonfiction or essay stick voice, and there's a mode of fiction when I go in and out of, I guess, myself. All of those for me always start with science fiction. I think a novel like this, and I've spoken about this with another writer, Elisa de Gortari, who also writes these kinds of books. And I think I've always told her that think we get to the same place from very different paths. She starts in realism, in mimetic fiction and literary fiction. She's interested in literary fiction. And her teams move her closer to sci-fi. she uses those elements beautifully, but she starts with Pinchon, for example, that's one of her. But then, but I started science fiction. For me, the science fiction is very important and then I go into literary as a second fold. that, I like the estrangement that it allows. And also, are... I have the book here because I can't say the name, but this book is very useful for me. It's called Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sheep by So-Yong Hsu. And she proposes that science fiction is mimetic, but it's mimetic to metaphoric language and metaphoric ideas and things that are not... clearly realist, but are very important to us in how we understand the world. And I like that in the sense that I've always thought about science fiction as something that opens a space, that creates a new world and creates new conditions. And in the difference between our conditions and the new ones, in that difference, is the estrangement and there is the interesting thing that is happening. And for example, going into the theater mode in the third part, the novel allowed it because it is what Angelica is studying, but also... I became aware of how theater also opens that space. It's a form or a mode that opens a space where things that normally don't happen can happen. Where because of how everything is set up, characters can say to each other things that won't be said in real life, but that feel meaningful and real. for me, was a lot the same. It's like I have science fiction in the first two parts, but then theater becomes this part of still
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: Hmm.
Andrea Chapela: of estrangement, of where you don't know where realism is. the novel is about Klamish, but it also is a novel about what I think science fiction can be. And for me, science fiction is also about pushing the boundaries of what's.
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: You
Andrea Chapela: yeah, of boundaries on what's real, not what's fiction and what isn't. And in those senses, that also is what's out of fiction does is like pushing those boundaries. But I've always found that when you put science fiction and other fiction together, the bounds are pushed even more because of course the world is in real. Of course, while I'm talking about feels fanciful. So I like how speculative fiction like getting away from the constraint of having to mimic reality exacerbates everything just stretches everything so much that you have to get to the point of it. And so in that sense, those modes for me are always, I'm always looking for that, for the way of stretching the idea more so that I can look at it more closely. Because I find reality has too many distractions and then trying to emulate reality has a lot of distractions, but. speculative allows me that that mode of going into it deeper somehow.
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: I wanted to ask you a more broader question because in an interview that you gave to Al-Pais, the Mexican edition last year, you mentioned Yasnaya Aguilar's point. that for indigenous peoples in Mexico and beyond Mexico, the world has already ended. It's funny when they say, no, all the potential futures of the world, right? And Yesenia says that, well, the world ended for them at the conquest, at the hands of the Spanish conquistadors, basically. do you think of that history? Do you, when you're climate disaster fictions from Mexico or from Latin America more broadly, how do you think that writing the apocalypse changes when you come from a place that has already survived one?
Andrea Chapela: I heard Jasna just say that very early in the process of the novel and it just struck me because... And I don't know if I could have talked to why it struck me so much like I think just thinking it already happened but also now that I've been reading a lot about climate fiction and about that idea of how climate fiction could be different in Latin America or have its own spin one of the things that comes up a lot is about how Latin America because of this first ending and having to reconstruct itself. something, a new future had to be reconstructed, right? And imagined. it's, I don't know how successful mixture of two very different ideas. And for me, What I think I gathered from Jasnaya was like, it's been hundreds of years and we are still here. So the ending is not this again, it's not final. I have this class in the doctoral degree right now, and they were saying that a lot of Latin American narratives, social Latin American narratives usually end with a big disaster, something breaks. it's always like a deoxyxmachina thing where, yeah, now the human condition cannot be resolved, so now the flood. And then we start over. And I find it interesting to start from disaster, right?
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: you
Andrea Chapela: or hundreds of years after, or to see the aftermath of it and how after something else ends, something has to be rebuilt or that we tend to do that to rebuild in some way. there is a possibility of building from scratch and rebuilding and remaking that I think is, I think it's needed. and I think the point is talking about how what we do now help us rebuild if disaster happens and that the present is very important and the decisions of the present are very important. to whatever happens in that rebuilding stage. Even if I like hope a lot, I'm not very optimistic about disaster not striking us as a species. I think we are walking into it very willingly. But I do believe that something can. be on the other side. And I like to write from that. And in that sense, Yasnaya's idea that, the conquest was a horrible thing that happened. But somehow they as a... as people are still there and somehow we are also here. And that's, I think that's one of the ideas that I continue to move along in my fiction and that continues to give me some kind of route of how to write it.
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: Part of disaster imagination is also involving ourselves in imagining inhabiting better futures. you've talked about science fiction. There's also, for instance, in solar punk. narratives, there's also this interest in trying to imagine a more sustainable future, right? Or talking about other parts of the world for whom the world also ended in Afrofuturism, there's also this interest in trying to imagine hopeful alternative versions that don't end with the bank of the collapse, but try to actually use that as a springboard.
Andrea Chapela: Yeah.
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: to imagine different configurations that are a dialogue for our present. It's just to trust that the future is going to be great. It's imagining a better future to start acting on the present.
Andrea Chapela: Yeah, yeah, I think that that is the key for me in why I'm so interested in the genre.
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz: fantastic this has been great Andrea thank you very much for the conversation and looking forward to reading your next novel or short story
Andrea Chapela: Thank you, Jordi. Thank you for the questions.
