> Our voices echoed away into a bottomless pit [of the elevator shaft] Would voices actually "echo away" in a literally bottomless pit?
The bottom of the bottomless pit is just a regular pit?
Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)
21–30 of 87 posts
Re: Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)
#22Really enjoyed reading this, but kind of lost on what the deeper meaning might have been, if any.
Re: Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)
#23it's fictional
Re: Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)
#24Annoying 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.
Pretty sure this is a Tardis bigger-on-the-inside situation
Then where is the 15k lightyears figure supposed to come from?
Re: Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)
#25Flagged for misleading title
I suspect that Ballard would have approved of this.
Re: Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)
#26> 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.
Re: Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)
#27Reminds 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.
Re: Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)
#28Annoying 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_...
Re: Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)
#29Earlier 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?
[deleted]
Re: Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)
#30Some interesting parallels to BLAME!, a manga about an ever-expanding colossal city: