Some interesting parallels to BLAME!, a manga about an ever-expanding colossal city: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blame !
Working link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blame%21
Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)
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Re: Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Exactly. 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?
Re: Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)
#63Re: Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
is that really dystopian? is more kink by way of Paul Virilio
Re: Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)
#65I 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?
Not a chance. Everything larger than 10cm is cataloged and there are multiple catalogs from different sources.
Re: Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)
#66Earlier 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?
You could write a tale in response, about how you spent seconds, minutes, hours, days, years...a lifetime identifying that the several hundred words at the link were fictional.
Re: Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)
#67Flagged for misleading title
It'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.
Re: Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)
#68> 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?
If true, then it would still take a looooong time for the first echo from it.
But the walls will echo almost instantly.
Re: Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)
#69Re: Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
No, the main character isn't confused at all in his last message, he's very confident in saying that the station "is coeval with the cosmos, and constitutes the cosmos." That's why the "estimated diameter: 15k ly" feel like a writer's oversight. Unless it's intentional, but then I'd like to understand why.