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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)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Sure but isn't that the definition of clickbait?
Making a modern analogy, reading this feels kinda similar to reading about the Backrooms, but with a bigger, existential dread. Amazing.
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_...
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…
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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty sure this is a Tardis bigger-on-the-inside situation
Then where is the 15k lightyears figure supposed to come from?
The longer they're in it, the larger the estimate, and they've hypothesized that it will approach the size of the universe itself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.