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 fine.
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.
I was also thinking of this story around the Backrooms lore (since you can find references that it is infinite or planet-sized repeating). Of course I couldn't remember enough to have it pop up on Google or ChatGPT. Grateful that someone posted it.
Its an almost 45 year-old short story that appeared in a print collection of other short stories. The submitted page kind of loses much of that context - and possibly feels dated or simplistic because of that?
> 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.
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 of declaring something "as big as the cosmos" and two lines later provide an estimate for its diameter that is grossly inconsistent with that assessment. This is the main character contradicting himself, unless they live in a universe that is only 15k years old, which is also possible (but clearly not serving a purpose in the story).
> 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 fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blame!
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_Island
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Rise_(novel)
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?
And House of Leaves
Would voices actually "echo away" in a literally bottomless pit?
Thanks Ballard
> 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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unparalleled_Adventure_of_...