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

sseh.uchicago.edu

51–60 of 87 posts

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

#51
This 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.

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

#53
post #7

Making a modern analogy, reading this feels kinda similar to reading about the Backrooms, but with a bigger, existential dread. Amazing.

A 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=sft...

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

#54

Some interesting parallels to BLAME!, a manga about an ever-expanding colossal city: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blame !

your link is valid but appears to be the wrong destination

! 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.

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

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> but simply the internal contradiction in what the main character says

Yes, the entire story has the main character confused about the reality he is presented with.

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

#56

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?

The definition of clickbait includes intention.

If anything, the poster here likely followed a rule to use the original, non-editorialized page title, and certainly the original page has not had the title set with intent to attract clicks by misrepresenting what it is.

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

#57

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?

I guess it could be. Wikipedia says the term "computer mouse" first showed up in print in 1965, but this wasn't printed until 1982.

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

#58
post #12

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 was confused on how someone might even launch a covert space station. Would there be a way to do so unnoticed?

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

#59

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…

I 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.

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

#60
post #12

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…

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