Postsecularidad y tecnociencia: la redistribución narrativa de la trascendencia en la ciencia ficción contemporánea en español

Abstract

This article proposes a reinterpretation of contemporary Spanish science fiction through the lens of postsecularity, understood not as a return of religion but as its functional redistribution within technoscientific dispositifs. Against dominant readings that frame the genre as inherently secularizing, it argues that works such as Jorge Carrión’s Membrana and Elia Barceló’s El efecto Frankenstein reconfigure traditionally religious functions—memory, creation, and identity—within narrative structures mediated by technology. Combining close reading with conceptual analysis, the article demonstrates that artificial intelligence and the archive operate as instances of cognitive authority; that technical creation reactivates the theological problem of origin in terms of artifice; and that identity emerges as a narrative process dependent on memory and recognition. This shift entails a redefinition of the concept of the “soul,” no longer understood as a metaphysical substance but as a distributed narrative structure. In this sense, contemporary science fiction does not eliminate transcendence but reinscribes it within technoscientific forms that reorganize meaning, subjectivity, and the continuity of the self.