Reconfiguring Silence: Technological Mediation and Human Finitude in Ted Chiang’s Post-Cyborg Fiction

Ted Chiang’s science fiction short stories Exhalation and The Great Silence formally reconfigure silence as an active, technologically mediated space for confronting fundamental existential conditions within the post-cyborg age. Moving beyond notions of silence as mere absence, the analysis demonstrates how Chiang’s literary strategies—including narrative structure, perspective, imagery, and science fiction tropes—construct silence as a critical site for engaging with human finitude and the limits of knowledge ( Exhalation ) and for issuing an ethical demand to recognize the overlooked non-human other ( The Great Silence ). Drawing critically on Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology of authenticity and finitude, the article contends that Chiang’s work fundamentally subverts Heideggerian ideals of unmediated encounter. Instead, Chiang presents a technologically mediated authenticity emerging from collective confrontation with cosmic entropy and interspecies ethics. Defined through Katherine Hayles’s posthumanism and Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory, the post-cyborg condition is shown to be essential for enabling Chiang’s unique literary exploration. Through close readings, this analysis positions Chiang’s fiction as a significant intervention in literary studies, illustrating how science fiction formally challenges philosophical frameworks and redefines silence as a crucial category for understanding subjectivity, technology, and ethical engagement in the contemporary world.