Comment by the_af

> I thought it was satirising faux-intellectual SF short stories that try to seem deeper than they are. If it’s just an actual faux-intellectual SF short story, that’s much less interesting.

I think it's neither. It's a humorous scifi story. Bisson had a sense of humor (much like, say, Asimov also had one and wrote many humorous stories that you'd best not overanalyze!).

> So the notion that any advanced spacefaring civilisation would be astonished by any form of creature or communication method given how much variety there is on this one planet is hard to entertain, even as satire.

It may be hard to entertain, but the trope this is riffing on was very well established in scifi. Many people still think in terms of mankind exploring and conquering new frontiers, space included.

You're overanalyzing this. It's satire, a joke story.