Joyce Carol Oates at The New Yorker reviewing Ted Chiang’s latest collection of stories, Exhalation, which looks absolutely fascinating while proposing a refreshing view.
Even as humans search for extraterrestrial intelligence, the narrator observes, they can’t hear the messages being sent by an imperilled species on their own planet. […]
Chiang’s vision of the future turns out to be unexpectedly optimistic. After all, the narrator observes, writing itself is a technology, and we became “cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers.”