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Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)
- anax32 4mo agoThis was a big moment for me, but I now believe it's fictional. Thanks Ballard
- swiftcoder 4mo agoAlways loved this one
- iamjs 4mo agoReminds me of Borges
- internet_points 4mo agoAnd Piranesi And House of Leaves
- an0malous 4mo agoAnd Ted Chiang
- stiiv 4mo agoYes in both theme and style, I agree. While I appreciate pretty much everything by Borges, his dives into the infinite were the most memorable.
- throw310822 4mo agoAnnoying 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.
- swiftcoder 4mo agoPretty sure this is a Tardis bigger-on-the-inside situation
- dtj1123 4mo agoThen where is the 15k lightyears figure supposed to come from?
- Atreiden 4mo agoI 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.
- swiftcoder 4mo agoAlso worth noting that they’ve already crossed their own tracks at least once - thus their estimate is probably extremely suspect
- astrobe_ 4mo agoIf 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_One_Hans_Pfaall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unparalleled_Adventure_of_...
- throw310822 4mo agoBut 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).
- rullelito 4mo agoI didn't get anything out of this. Felt very simple and not very mind-bending. Should I feel something?
- andyjohnson0 4mo agoIts 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?
- arjie 4mo agoClearly a long antecedent and possible spiritual predecessor to SCP-3008 and the Backrooms genre which recently spawned a liminal horror movie called Backrooms. It it feels derivative, that's probably the Seinfeld Isn't Funny effect. If it feels uninteresting, you're probably not into this genre.
- hootz 4mo agoMaking a modern analogy, reading this feels kinda similar to reading about the Backrooms, but with a bigger, existential dread. Amazing.
- mapmeld 4mo agoI 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.
- roxolotl 4mo agoA similar longer story is Walking to Aldebaran by Adrian Tchaikovsky. If you like the vibe of exploring a place which is nothing forever it nails it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_to_Aldebaran?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_to_Aldebaran?wprov=sft...
- taneq 4mo agoI was assuming it was actually all set inside IKEA. :P
- ShadowOfThePit 4mo agoReads 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?
- mapontosevenths 4mo agoIt'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 being aware of his own smallness. I think it does a remarkable job of it.
- throwaway173738 4mo agoThe journey through nihilism to existentialism.
- mapontosevenths 4mo agoExactly. The religious references are there for the same reason they are in real life... That's how some people cope with a vast, cold universe that just doesn't care. You gotta believe something, even if that means making it up youself... right?
- m4rtink 4mo agoIt is a missed opportunity really - they had an exit and and infinite space station. Imagine the economic possibilities - asteroid mining is for loosers, chair mining and bulkhead disassembly is what it is at! Not to mention endless free power as long as you can get low resistance (or best super conductive) cables from all the power sockets and light fixtures. And its already in the form of electricity, no need for steam engines or turbines like when you burn down the Infinite Castle or furniture from Infinite IKEA (SCP-3008)!
- rfarley04 4mo agoTower of Babel by Ted Chiang is another comparison worth mentioning
- Hackbraten 4mo agoI can recommend the excellent novels Concrete Island [0] and High-Rise [1] from the same author. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_Island [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Rise_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Rise_(novel)
- DoneWithAllThat 4mo agoI 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.
- JKCalhoun 4mo agoYeah, "Crash" comes immediately to mind.
- red-iron-pine 4mo agois that really dystopian? is more kink by way of Paul Virilio
- bookofjoe 4mo agoNow there’s a name you don’t see every day on HN
- red-iron-pine 4mo agois one that should show up more, IMO. AI is proving his (mostly half-cocked) theories about speed correct. like a lot of the post-moderns he's 50-75% full of shit, but there are kernels of truth in there.
- JKCalhoun 4mo ago(You're right—I was responding I guess simply to the author's name, not the genre being discussed).
- bb123 4mo agoI 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.
- embedding-shape 4mo agoI 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.
- jibal 4mo agoI expected it to be fiction from the title, and knew it was from the structure, before even reading any text.
- fartfeatures 4mo agoSure but isn't that the definition of clickbait?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- sscaryterry 4mo agoHN is starting to grind my tits with the amount of clickbaity articles of late.
- red-iron-pine 4mo agothere has always been a ton of bait and bots here mon ami. now it's bursting at the seams with them.
- necovek 4mo ago
- cl3misch 4mo ago> Our voices echoed away into a bottomless pit [of the elevator shaft] Would voices actually "echo away" in a literally bottomless pit?
- refsab 4mo agoThe bottom of the bottomless pit is just a regular pit?
- IAmBroom 4mo agoIf true, then it would still take a looooong time for the first echo from it. But the walls will echo almost instantly.
- alexthehurst 4mo agoYes. Even standing outside a straight-through tunnel, you can get some echo back to you off the walls.
- nickdothutton 4mo agoWe all live in Ballard's future now. I encourage you to check out some of his interviews on YT.
- andyjohnson0 4mo agoFor context, Ballard wrote this in 1982.
- lupire 4mo agoFlagged for misleading title
- andyjohnson0 4mo agoI suspect that Ballard would have approved of this.
- Jtsummers 4mo agoIt's the short story title and HN guidelines say to use the original title. The submitter ought to have included (by convention) the year. There was no reason to flag this submission.
- Hugsbox 4mo agoReally enjoyed reading this, but kind of lost on what the deeper meaning might have been, if any.
- JKCalhoun 4mo agoMe 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… But, yeah, we might just have to ruminate on how a work of fiction like this 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 knowable, have a series of events that build to some succinct conclusion. (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.) 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.
- t23414321 4mo agoit's fictional
- drayfield 4mo agoSome interesting parallels to BLAME!, a manga about an ever-expanding colossal city: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blame https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blame!
- Schlagbohrer 4mo agoImagine 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.
- sidewndr46 4mo agoyour link is valid but appears to be the wrong destination
- necovek 4mo ago! is not included in the automatic link by HN: it's rare for a URL to end with !, so it'd be hard to fix HN to do the right thing every time.
- mkl 4mo agoWorking link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blame%21 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blame%21
- nialv7 4mo agoAlso Yokohama Station SF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yokohama_Station_SF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yokohama_Station_SF Which is about a self-replicating subway station :)
- tontonius 4mo agojust 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
- Arodex 4mo agoThe 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.
- losvedir 4mo agoI think maybe "finding themselves on the space station" could be like humans finding themselves on Earth? You're born onto the planet and are simply grateful to be here. But the more you learn about it and existence generally, the larger and more grand you find it to be. Ancient peoples looking up at the vastness of the stars is probably how all religions began.
- Schlagbohrer 4mo agoLiminal space vibes indeed. Very of our time, showing that Ballard was once again ahead of his.
- atombender 4mo ago(1982)
- atombender 4mo agoThis is one of my favorite short stories. Ballard is best known for his novels, but he also wrote a number of exceptional stories — some favourites include "The Drowned Giant", "A Question of Re-Entry", "The Terminal Beach", "The Garden of Time", "Dream Cargo", and some of his earlier stories like "Billennium", "Chronopolis", "The Concentration City" (also published as "Build-Up"). There's a two-volume collection of all his short stories, although it honestly contains more misses than hits. The individual collections "The Terminal Beach" and "Vermillion Sands" are great. Ballard had several "niches" he operated in. One thread running through much of his work is a preoccupation with physical spaces and architecture, inhabited by alienated characters with some repressed, dark psychological traits (obsessiveness, violence, narcissism) that's held in check by modern society. He keeps going back to the theme of men (they're almost always men) regressing to a "natural" violent state: High Rise, Running Wild, Crash, Super-Cannes, Cocaine Nights, and so on are all about this. His later books are a little tiring because of this; too many books about rich people using violence as a means of psychological release, with a smattering of pop psychology stuff that frankly hasn't aged super well. Personally, I find his earlier, wilder, more abstract fiction a little bit more interesting the later stuff. I would recommend starting with The Crystal World, which is fantastic.
- ReyX 4mo agoStart reading first
- fatbird 4mo agoFor a second I was excited that someone had built a space station in Earth's orbit secretly. Perhaps a military station by a world power, perhaps a minor power's attempt to achieve a continuous presence in space, perhaps a private effort. How it was built secretly, and hidden from discovery until now, and why would make for a legitimately engrossing topic in the news. Not a bad story, but not as gratifying as my mistaken first assumption either.
- xelxebar 4mo agoThis could possibly be hinting at a hyperbolic geometry. The game HyperRogue[0] gives of similar feels: you'll be walking through a cat invite land and spot a small dot on the horizon, only to discover that it's yet another vast infinite land. The game also kind of goes all in on the different tilings that a hyperbolic plane admits! [0]:https://zenorogue.itch.io/hyperrogue https://zenorogue.itch.io/hyperrogue
- robocat 4mo agoSimilar discussion about 'Backrooms' and the Rise of the Institutional Gothic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47614100 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47614100
- audreysweeney 4mo ago[dead]