https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_to_Aldebaran?wprov=sft...
Which is about a self-replicating subway station :)
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 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.
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.
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
No huge meaning here, more something in the vein of Poe and Lovecraft.
Would voices actually "echo away" in a literally bottomless pit?
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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_...
Yes, the entire story has the main character confused about the reality he is presented with.
The longer they're in it, the larger the estimate, and they've hypothesized that it will approach the size of the universe itself.