It's hard to write futuristic science fiction...

... because it's hard to get even near-future technological advances right. For example in this story people are flying around the galaxy on spaceships... and still using CRT displays.

In this story, that isn't a trivial point, either. A big point of the story is to ask the question: How can we understand an alien species? What can we have in common with them as a basis for understanding? And the answer the story gives us seems to be: we will have science and technology in common with them and we can use that to understand them. So of course the aliens will use CRT displays too! But in just a few short decades since Wolfe wrote the story, our own technology has moved beyond CRT's and made them all but obsolete. How much more different from ours would an alien civilization's technologies be... having evolved independently from ours from the beginning?!