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Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)

sseh.uchicago.edu

41–50 of 87 posts

Re: Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)

#41

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.

Re: Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)

#43

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.

Re: Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)

#44
post #22

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…

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.

Re: Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)

#45

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 being aware of his own smallness.

I think it does a remarkable job of it.

Re: Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)

#46

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 eventuall…

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.

Re: Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)

#48

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 being aware of his own smallness. I think it does a remarkable job of it.

The journey through nihilism to existentialism.

Re: Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)

#49

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.

The whole thing was already stretching realism, when the initially assumed 500 metre object "covered by a fine vapour obscuring the rest" suddenly became estimated at 500 miles across. When they were approaching to land, by the time they were a few miles out, they'd surely have wondered how a 500 metre structure was obscuring their entire field of view.
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