Report on an Unidentified Space Station

(sseh.uchicago.edu)

56 points | by paulmooreparks 3 hours ago

16 comments

  • bb123 38 minutes ago
    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.
    • embedding-shape 36 minutes ago
      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.

      • fartfeatures 20 minutes ago
        Sure but isn't that the definition of clickbait?
  • Hackbraten 39 minutes ago
    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)

  • hootz 57 minutes ago
    Making a modern analogy, reading this feels kinda similar to reading about the Backrooms, but with a bigger, existential dread. Amazing.
  • ShadowOfThePit 50 minutes ago
    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?

  • Hugsbox 16 minutes ago
    Really enjoyed reading this, but kind of lost on what the deeper meaning might have been, if any.
  • iamjs 1 hour ago
    Reminds me of Borges
    • stiiv 3 minutes ago
      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.
    • internet_points 1 hour ago
      And Piranesi

      And House of Leaves

  • rullelito 57 minutes ago
    I didn't get anything out of this. Felt very simple and not very mind-bending. Should I feel something?
    • andyjohnson0 29 minutes ago
      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?
  • cl3misch 35 minutes ago
    > Our voices echoed away into a bottomless pit [of the elevator shaft]

    Would voices actually "echo away" in a literally bottomless pit?

    • alexthehurst 4 minutes ago
      Yes. Even standing outside a straight-through tunnel, you can get some echo back to you off the walls.
    • refsab 16 minutes ago
      The bottom of the bottomless pit is just a regular pit?
  • andyjohnson0 34 minutes ago
    For context, Ballard wrote this in 1982.
  • nickdothutton 34 minutes ago
    We all live in Ballard's future now. I encourage you to check out some of his interviews on YT.
  • anax32 51 minutes ago
    This was a big moment for me, but I now believe it's fictional.

    Thanks Ballard

  • lupire 20 minutes ago
    Flagged for misleading title
    • andyjohnson0 9 minutes ago
      I suspect that Ballard would have approved of this.
  • t23414321 16 minutes ago
    it's fictional
  • swiftcoder 1 hour ago
    Always loved this one
  • rfarley04 48 minutes ago
    Tower of Babel by Ted Chiang is another comparison worth mentioning
  • throw310822 57 minutes ago
    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.

    • swiftcoder 29 minutes ago
      Pretty sure this is a Tardis bigger-on-the-inside situation
      • dtj1123 13 minutes ago
        Then where is the 15k lightyears figure supposed to come from?