The Great Silence, by Ted Chiang
Read it here in less than 10 minutes.
Thinking about why I love it…
There aren’t nearly enough stories featuring sentient animals, let alone narrated by them; this story is narrated by an unnamed parrot, who speaks eloquently on behalf of the entire parrot collective (‘We’re a nonhuman species capable of communicating with them. Aren’t we exactly what humans are looking for?’). Chiang uses this intelligent creature to make a philosophical and political point about humans pointlessly seeking contact with outer space, while our planet is suffering the destruction of wildlife and habitat at our own hands, and he uses real-world elements to do it.
Real-world elements include mention of Arecibo (an observatory in Puerto Rico); the Río Abajo Forest (a state forest in Puerto Rico), and the endangered parrots that live in small numbers in this rainforest; Alex the African grey and Irene Pepperberg the researcher, both of whom really existed; and the Fermi Paradox, the thought experiment from which the story gets its name, is real, too. The way the idea of the forest and parrots is combined with the idea of the observatory and the Fermi paradox is well done – the extinction of the parrots then becomes an analogy for the Great Silence (‘ the hush of the night sky is the silence of a graveyard’).
The parrots are highly anthropomorphised – as well as having history and language, the narrator parrot says they have myths, and perhaps alludes to having religion, too, as Hinduism is referenced – this puts them on par with humankind, and allows the story to end on an emotive note – the parrots desperately hope to be heard, and the message they send is one of love.
Mina Ma 