I feel this should have a note that it's fictional in the title. I clicked this expecting to read about some kind of space race development with China or Russia.
Just append it with "J. G. Ballard".
I mean it's pretty obvious from the very first paragraph, isn't it?<p>> By good luck we have been able to make an emergency landing on this uninhabited space station. There have been no casualties. We all count ourselves fortunate to have found safe haven at a moment when the expedition was clearly set on disaster.<p>Lots of short stories on HN have just their original title with nothing like [Novella] or whatever, seems fine.
Sure but isn't that the definition of clickbait?
I expected it to be fiction from the title, and knew it was from the structure, before even reading any text.
Some interesting parallels to BLAME!, a manga about an ever-expanding colossal city:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blame" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blame</a>!
Imagine the cyberspace of this infinite station if all those doors and light bulbs and air conditioners and elevators were networked? Even IPv6 wouldn't be enough. One would certainly need the Net Terminal Gene to log in and get lost in that second layer of reality.
your link is valid but appears to be the wrong destination
Making a modern analogy, reading this feels kinda similar to reading about the Backrooms, but with a bigger, existential dread. Amazing.
I can recommend the excellent novels Concrete Island [0] and High-Rise [1] from the same author.<p>[0]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_Island" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_Island</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Rise_(novel)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Rise_(novel)</a>
I mean that author is JG Ballard, he’s a legend with many classic works. There’s like at least two or three dozen articles, short story collections and novels of his that are worth reading. He’s one of the top dystopian fiction writers of all time.
Reads like an early SCP exploration log.<p>Although, I'm not sure if I get it. They end up making a religion out of it, but does that have a deeper meaning?
It's a metaphor for life, like most fiction. Does life have any deeper meaning, or is life just waking up one day in a seemingly infinite and hostile cosmos long abandoned by it's creator?<p>It's meant to evoke that feeling in an adult man whose long since stopped his own smallness.<p>I think it does a remarkable job of it.
Liminal space vibes indeed. Very of our time, showing that Ballard was once again ahead of his.
Really enjoyed reading this, but kind of lost on what the deeper meaning might have been, if any.
Me as well. But there are obvious hints that the roots of religion are involved—the explorers go from being very fact driven to eventually wandering more on faith than anything else. There is also a kind of recursion within the story that suggests larger ideas as well…<p>But, yeah, we might just have to ruminate on how a work of fiction like this makes us <i>feel</i>.<p>After seeing a lot of indie films, I've come to find peace with that idea: that not <i>everything</i> in fiction has to be knowable, have a series of events that build to some succinct conclusion.<p>(And I probably encountered this first even when in elementary school when a teacher finished reading a book and asked us, "What do you think happened to the boy after the story ends?" Initially frustrating to me, I came to accept that perhaps the author is allowing my own imagination to participate as well.)<p>Sometimes, you wake up from a semi-lucid dream with a feeling unlike any you have had before. An attempt to describe it with words or visually will, if you are lucky, come close to approximating it. Almost surely though the fiction that results will be inscrutable if held to standards of logic or narrative. And that's just the way some things are within the human mind.
just read it and not entirely sure what the allegory was, if any.<p>some ideas off the top of my head:<p>- "humans invent meaning after losing orientation": instead of simply accepting reality (we cant comprhened, our instruments cant measure this, we are lost etc) they turn helplessness into theology<p>- "science-becomes-religion": hypotheses, measurements revise previous findings into increasing absurdity which eventually becomes religion.<p>-" life as a waiting room": the station is an allegory for life or conciousness. we're all solitary voyagers on our infinite journey thru the "waiting rooms" of our existence. the journey is the destination etc<p>curious to hear other riffs/takes on this
The station is an artifact that make them mad. Their first exploration party never traced its way back, they cross their own path and yet they don't connect the dots but begin to believe the station is infinitely big, and they begin to venerate it - when in fact it is frying their brains.<p>No huge meaning here, more something in the vein of Poe and Lovecraft.
Reminds me of Borges
Yes in both theme and style, I agree. While I appreciate pretty much everything by Borges, his dives into the infinite were the most memorable.
And Piranesi<p>And House of Leaves
I didn't get anything out of this. Felt very simple and not very mind-bending. Should I feel something?
This was a big moment for me, but I now believe it's fictional.<p>Thanks Ballard
> Our voices echoed away into a bottomless pit [of the elevator shaft]<p>Would voices actually "echo away" in a literally bottomless pit?
Yes. Even standing outside a straight-through tunnel, you can get some echo back to you off the walls.
The bottom of the bottomless pit is just a regular pit?
For context, Ballard wrote this in 1982.
We all live in Ballard's future now. I encourage you to check out some of his interviews on YT.
Always loved this one
Flagged for misleading title
it's fictional
Tower of Babel by Ted Chiang is another comparison worth mentioning
Annoying nitpick:<p>> Our solar system and its planets, the millions of other solar systems that constitute our galaxy, and the island universes themselves all lie within the boundaries of the station. The station is coeval with the cosmos [...]<p>> Estimated diameter: 15,000 light years.<p>Uhmm..<p>Yes I know, the entire construction is not striving for realism and neither should be taken literally.
If you like nitpicking, Poe's short story *The unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfall" [1] should keep you busy a couple of days ;-)<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unparalleled_Adventure_of_One_Hans_Pfaall" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unparalleled_Adventure_of_...</a>
But here it's not about a generic lack of realism (there's plenty of details you could point to, but it would be of course silly) but simply the internal contradiction in what the main character says: claims that the station is "as big as the cosmos" and two lines later provides an estimate for its diameter that is grossly inconsistent with that same assessment. Unless they live in a universe that is only 15k years old, which is also possible (but clearly not serving a purpose in the story).
Pretty sure this is a Tardis bigger-on-the-inside situation