Ted Chiang is one of the most lauded of contemporary SF writers, perhaps best known for ‘The Story of Your Life’, the novella on which the film Arrival was based; his short stories and novellas, collected in two slim volumes, are rigorous and lucid thought experiments, leavened with a profound humanity. This one, written to provide the textual element for a video installation by the visual artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, explores the theory which provides various explanations for Fermi’s paradox: the question of why, given the age and of the Universe and its uncountable number of stars and potentially habitable planets, we have not yet detected any trace of intelligent alien life. In brief, meditative paragraphs it outlines a contact call from a member of a species of parrot native to Puerto Rica (where the Arecibo radio telescope was located until its collapse), pointing out, with poignant humour, that while searching the sky for like-minded intelligence, humans have overlooked the intelligence of parrots, which “are more similar to humans than any extraterrestrial species will be,” and are now threatened with extinction and their own Great Silence. Like all of the best SF, it delivers a fresh perspective on humanity, from our blundering carelessness that stamps out other species to the vaulting ambition that drives the construction of radio telescopes. In its psittancine mirror we see ourselves slant.
First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May-June 2016. Collected in Exhalation, Knopf, 2019. It can also be read here
A Personal Anthology 