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.
I mean it's pretty obvious from the very first paragraph, isn't it?
> 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.
Lots of short stories on HN have just their original title with nothing like [Novella] or whatever, seems fine.
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.
I was also thinking of this story around the Backrooms lore (since you can find references that it is infinite or planet-sized repeating). Of course I couldn't remember enough to have it pop up on Google or ChatGPT. Grateful that someone posted it.
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.
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?
It's meant to evoke that feeling in an adult man whose long since stopped his own smallness.
Me as well. But there are obvious hints that the roots of religion are involved. There is also a kind of recursion within the story that suggests a larger ideas as well…
But, yeah, we might just have to ruminate on how it makes us feel.
After seeing a lot of indie films, I've come to find peace with that idea: that not everything in fiction has to be knoweable.
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.
some ideas off the top of my head:
- "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
- "science-becomes-religion": hypotheses, measurements revise previous findings into increasing absurdity which eventually becomes religion.
-" 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
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.
No huge meaning here, more something in the vein of Poe and Lovecraft.
Its an almost 45 year-old short story that appeared in a print collection of other short stories. The submitted page kind of loses much of that context - and possibly feels dated or simplistic because of that?
> 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 [...]
> Estimated diameter: 15,000 light years.
Uhmm..
Yes I know, the entire construction is not striving for realism and neither should be taken literally.
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).
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?
> 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.
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?
HN is starting to grind my tits with the amount of clickbaity articles of late.
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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blame!
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.
Making a modern analogy, reading this feels kinda similar to reading about the Backrooms, but with a bigger, existential dread. Amazing.
I was also thinking of this story around the Backrooms lore (since you can find references that it is infinite or planet-sized repeating). Of course I couldn't remember enough to have it pop up on Google or ChatGPT. Grateful that someone posted it.
Liminal space vibes indeed. Very of our time, showing that Ballard was once again ahead of his.
I can recommend the excellent novels Concrete Island [0] and High-Rise [1] from the same author.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_Island
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Rise_(novel)
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.
Yeah, "Crash" comes immediately to mind.
Reads like an early SCP exploration log.
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?
It's meant to evoke that feeling in an adult man whose long since stopped his own smallness.
I think it does a remarkable job of it.
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. There is also a kind of recursion within the story that suggests a larger ideas as well…
But, yeah, we might just have to ruminate on how it makes us feel.
After seeing a lot of indie films, I've come to find peace with that idea: that not everything in fiction has to be knoweable.
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.
some ideas off the top of my head:
- "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
- "science-becomes-religion": hypotheses, measurements revise previous findings into increasing absurdity which eventually becomes religion.
-" 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
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.
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
And House of Leaves
And Ted Chiang
I didn't get anything out of this. Felt very simple and not very mind-bending. Should I feel something?
Its an almost 45 year-old short story that appeared in a print collection of other short stories. The submitted page kind of loses much of that context - and possibly feels dated or simplistic because of that?
This was a big moment for me, but I now believe it's fictional.
Thanks Ballard
> Our voices echoed away into a bottomless pit [of the elevator shaft]
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.
Flagged for misleading title
I suspect that Ballard would have approved of this.
Always loved this one
it's fictional
Tower of Babel by Ted Chiang is another comparison worth mentioning
Annoying nitpick:
> 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 [...]
> Estimated diameter: 15,000 light years.
Uhmm..
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 ;-)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unparalleled_Adventure_of_...
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
Then where is the 15k lightyears figure supposed to come from?
I took those distance estimates to mean "as measured by the instruments".
The longer they're in it, the larger the estimate, and they've hypothesized that it will approach the size of the universe itself.
Also worth noting that they’ve already crossed their own tracks at least once - thus their estimate is probably extremely suspect