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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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)!
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Making a modern analogy, reading this feels kinda similar to reading about the Backrooms, but with a bigger, existential dread. Amazing.
I was assuming it was actually all set inside IKEA. :P
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...
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.
Some interesting parallels to BLAME!, a manga about an ever-expanding colossal city:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blame!
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.
Also Yokohama Station SF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yokohama_Station_SF
Which is about a self-replicating subway station :)
Working link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blame%21
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.
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)
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
(You're right—I was responding I guess simply to the author's name, not the genre being discussed).
Now there’s a name you don’t see every day on HN
Also “High-Rise” movie
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?
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?
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)!
Reminds me of Borges
And Piranesi
And House of Leaves
And Ted Chiang
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.
Really enjoyed reading this, but kind of lost on what the deeper meaning might have been, if any.
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.
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!
[0]:https://zenorogue.itch.io/hyperrogue
For context, Ballard wrote this in 1982.
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.
Similar discussion about 'Backrooms' and the Rise of the Institutional Gothic
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47614100
I didn't get anything out of this. Felt very simple and not very mind-bending. Should I feel something?
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?
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.
Liminal space vibes indeed. Very of our time, showing that Ballard was once again ahead of his.
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
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.
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.
This was a big moment for me, but I now believe it's fictional.
Thanks Ballard
> Our voices echoed away into a bottomless pit [of the elevator shaft]
Would voices actually "echo away" in a literally bottomless pit?
Yes. Even standing outside a straight-through tunnel, you can get some echo back to you off the walls.
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.
We all live in Ballard's future now. I encourage you to check out some of his interviews on YT.
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.
(1982)
Start reading first
Always loved this one
Flagged 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.
I suspect that Ballard would have approved of this.
it's fictional
Tower of Babel by Ted Chiang is another comparison worth mentioning
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.
Just append it with "J. G. Ballard".
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.
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.
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.
HN is starting to grind my tits with the amount of clickbaity articles of late.
there has always been a ton of bait and bots here mon ami. now it's bursting at the seams with them.
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.
I expected it to be fiction from the title, and knew it was from the structure, before even reading any text.
[dead]
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.
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5258
https://planet4589.org/space/gcat/
[dead]
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.
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 old, which is also possible (but clearly not serving a purpose in the story).
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Pretty sure this is a Tardis bigger-on-the-inside situation
Then where is the 15k lightyears figure supposed to come from?
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.
Also worth noting that they’ve already crossed their own tracks at least once - thus their estimate is probably extremely suspect