Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)
Comments
hootz
taneq
I was assuming it was actually all set inside IKEA. :P
roxolotl
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...
mapmeld
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.
drayfield
Some interesting parallels to BLAME!, a manga about an ever-expanding colossal city:
Schlagbohrer
Imagine the cyberspace of this infinite station if all those doors and light bulbs and air conditioners and elevators were networked? Even IPv6 wouldn't be enough. One would certainly need the Net Terminal Gene to log in and get lost in that second layer of reality.
nialv7
Also Yokohama Station SF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yokohama_Station_SF
Which is about a self-replicating subway station :)
sidewndr46
your link is valid but appears to be the wrong destination
necovek
! 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.
Hackbraten
I can recommend the excellent novels Concrete Island [0] and High-Rise [1] from the same author.
DoneWithAllThat
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.
JKCalhoun
Yeah, "Crash" comes immediately to mind.
red-iron-pine
is that really dystopian? is more kink by way of Paul Virilio
JKCalhoun
(You're right—I was responding I guess simply to the author's name, not the genre being discussed).
bookofjoe
Now there’s a name you don’t see every day on HN
bookofjoe
Also “High-Rise” movie
ShadowOfThePit
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?
mapontosevenths
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.
throwaway173738
The journey through nihilism to existentialism.
mapontosevenths
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?
m4rtink
It is a missed opportunity really - they had an exit and and infinite space station.
Imagine the economic possibilities - asteroid mining is for loosers, chair mining and bulkhead disassembly is what it is at!
Not to mention endless free power as long as you can get low resistance (or best super conductive) cables from all the power sockets and light fixtures.
And its already in the form of electricity, no need for steam engines or turbines like when you burn down the Infinite Castle or furniture from Infinite IKEA (SCP-3008)!
iamjs
Reminds me of Borges
internet_points
And Piranesi
And House of Leaves
an0malous
And Ted Chiang
stiiv
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.
Hugsbox
Really enjoyed reading this, but kind of lost on what the deeper meaning might have been, if any.
JKCalhoun
Me as well. But there are obvious hints that the roots of religion are involved—the explorers go from being very fact driven to eventually wandering more on faith than anything else. There is also a kind of recursion within the story that suggests larger ideas as well…
But, yeah, we might just have to ruminate on how a work of fiction like this makes us feel.
After seeing a lot of indie films, I've come to find peace with that idea: that not everything in fiction has to be knowable, have a series of events that build to some succinct conclusion.
(And I probably encountered this first even when in elementary school when a teacher finished reading a book and asked us, "What do you think happened to the boy after the story ends?" Initially frustrating to me, I came to accept that perhaps the author is allowing my own imagination to participate as well.)
Sometimes, you wake up from a semi-lucid dream with a feeling unlike any you have had before. An attempt to describe it with words or visually will, if you are lucky, come close to approximating it. Almost surely though the fiction that results will be inscrutable if held to standards of logic or narrative. And that's just the way some things are within the human mind.
xelxebar
This could possibly be hinting at a hyperbolic geometry. The game HyperRogue[0] gives of similar feels: you'll be walking through a cat invite land and spot a small dot on the horizon, only to discover that it's yet another vast infinite land. The game also kind of goes all in on the different tilings that a hyperbolic plane admits!
andyjohnson0
For context, Ballard wrote this in 1982.
fatbird
For a second I was excited that someone had built a space station in Earth's orbit secretly. Perhaps a military station by a world power, perhaps a minor power's attempt to achieve a continuous presence in space, perhaps a private effort.
How it was built secretly, and hidden from discovery until now, and why would make for a legitimately engrossing topic in the news.
Not a bad story, but not as gratifying as my mistaken first assumption either.
robocat
Similar discussion about 'Backrooms' and the Rise of the Institutional Gothic
rullelito
I didn't get anything out of this. Felt very simple and not very mind-bending. Should I feel something?
andyjohnson0
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?
arjie
Clearly a long antecedent and possible spiritual predecessor to SCP-3008 and the Backrooms genre which recently spawned a liminal horror movie called Backrooms. It it feels derivative, that's probably the Seinfeld Isn't Funny effect. If it feels uninteresting, you're probably not into this genre.
Schlagbohrer
Liminal space vibes indeed. Very of our time, showing that Ballard was once again ahead of his.
tontonius
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 eventually becomes religion.
-" life as a waiting room": the station is an allegory for life or conciousness. we're all solitary voyagers on our infinite journey thru the "waiting rooms" of our existence. the journey is the destination etc
curious to hear other riffs/takes on this
losvedir
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.
Arodex
The station is an artifact that make them mad. Their first exploration party never traced its way back, they cross their own path and yet they don't connect the dots but begin to believe the station is infinitely big, and they begin to venerate it - when in fact it is frying their brains.
No huge meaning here, more something in the vein of Poe and Lovecraft.
anax32
This was a big moment for me, but I now believe it's fictional.
Thanks Ballard
cl3misch
> Our voices echoed away into a bottomless pit [of the elevator shaft]
Would voices actually "echo away" in a literally bottomless pit?
alexthehurst
Yes. Even standing outside a straight-through tunnel, you can get some echo back to you off the walls.
refsab
The bottom of the bottomless pit is just a regular pit?
IAmBroom
If true, then it would still take a looooong time for the first echo from it.
But the walls will echo almost instantly.
nickdothutton
We all live in Ballard's future now. I encourage you to check out some of his interviews on YT.
atombender
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.
atombender
(1982)
ReyX
Start reading first
swiftcoder
Always loved this one
lupire
Flagged for misleading title
Jtsummers
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.
andyjohnson0
I suspect that Ballard would have approved of this.
t23414321
it's fictional
rfarley04
Tower of Babel by Ted Chiang is another comparison worth mentioning
bb123
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.
JKCalhoun
Just append it with "J. G. Ballard".
embedding-shape
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
Sure but isn't that the definition of clickbait?
necovek
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.
maxerickson
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.
sscaryterry
HN is starting to grind my tits with the amount of clickbaity articles of late.
red-iron-pine
there has always been a ton of bait and bots here mon ami. now it's bursting at the seams with them.
mcphage
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.
jibal
I expected it to be fiction from the title, and knew it was from the structure, before even reading any text.
aaron695
[dead]
thatguy0900
I was confused on how someone might even launch a covert space station. Would there be a way to do so unnoticed?
imglorp
Not a chance. Everything larger than 10cm is cataloged and there are multiple catalogs from different sources.
aaron695
[dead]
audreysweeney
[dead]
throw310822
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.
astrobe_
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_...
throw310822
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 old, which is also possible (but clearly not serving a purpose in the story).
mcphage
> 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.
throw310822
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.
Jtsummers
The report writer also failed to realize they'd looped back to their starting location until much after they had done so. They're clearly unreliable, an inconsistency like that doesn't need to be explained by anything other than that the author is losing their grip on reality. The other explanation is that their instruments are indicating a diameter of 15,000 light years and that that is all they are recording (as they were recording in previous reports, the numbers came from instruments), and the report writer has failed to recognize the inconsistency between their belief and the facts available to them.
mcphage
> 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."
The main character is in the midst of a religious fervor. The station does not constitute the cosmos.
> "estimated diameter: 15k ly" feel like a writer's oversight.
Every time the instruments were checked, the instruments jumped in estimated diameter. Are you confused because the speaker got to the conclusion that the station is the universe before the instruments did? No doubt if there were more reports, it would be reported as being larger. Probably it wouldn't stop at the size of the universe, either.
In any event: neither the speaker, nor their instruments, were correct. Both are deeply confused about what the station is.
throw310822
The size estimates provided are not instrumental readings- there's no information in the text that supports this interpretation. They are- as it makes sense and as clearly stated- estimates based on the best knowledge and understanding of the reporter at that particular moment. They change with the physical exploration of the base. So when the reporter says that the base is the size of the cosmos, his size estimate should match the size of the cosmos. It's pretty clear that here Ballard just chose a number that seemed both immense and a big enough jump from the previous estimate, but at a second look makes his character incoherent because he's contradicting what he just wrote.
mcphage
> instrumental readings- there's no information in the text that supports this interpretation.
From the story: “A curious feature of the station is its powerful gravitational field, far stronger than would be suggested by its small mass. However, this probably represents a faulty reading by our instruments.”
And then the next paragraph is the estimated size.
> but at a second look makes his character incoherent because he's contradicting what he just wrote.
His character was incoherent from the first look, too.
throw310822
Yes, they have instruments and they ignore their readings when they appear to diverge wildly from their assumptions. (Here the mention of gravity is confusing because that's one thing you don't need an instrument to measure and that directly translates to mass- but I interpret the sentence you quoted as meaning: "our instruments read a powerful gravitational field that doesn't match with the mass reasonable for a 500 metres station, so it's probably a faulty reading").
In any case, the following report clarifies:
"To our surprise we find that the station is far larger than we guessed. [...] This fine vapour obscured the substantial bulk of the station and led us to assume that it was no more than a few hundred metres in diameter."
So the reporter refers to his previous estimate as a guess, not a measurement, and specifies that the assumption was based on what they could see. The following estimates are similarly guesses based on their current understanding and explorations, not the output of some specific instrument.
ralferoo
The whole thing was already stretching realism, when the initially assumed 500 metre object "covered by a fine vapour obscuring the rest" suddenly became estimated at 500 miles across. When they were approaching to land, by the time they were a few miles out, they'd surely have wondered how a 500 metre structure was obscuring their entire field of view.
swiftcoder
Pretty sure this is a Tardis bigger-on-the-inside situation
dtj1123
Then where is the 15k lightyears figure supposed to come from?
Atreiden
I took those distance estimates to mean "as measured by the instruments".
The longer they're in it, the larger the estimate, and they've hypothesized that it will approach the size of the universe itself.
swiftcoder
Also worth noting that they’ve already crossed their own tracks at least once - thus their estimate is probably extremely suspect
Making a modern analogy, reading this feels kinda similar to reading about the Backrooms, but with a bigger, existential dread. Amazing.