There's a fun little game that procedurally generates an infinite IKEA as the world for an indie survival game. I can't find it anymore but it was a funny concept.
I think you mean the game "SCP-3008" [1]. If that's the correct one, there's a stream [2] in the LoadingReadyRun youtube channel of people playing it. Not much happens in the video, but maybe the game has evolved in the last three years?
If you liked the "Library of Babel", let me highly recommend another story by Borges, "The Immortal". It is perhaps an even stronger match for Ballard's story here and has an especially good depiction of the sort of results that you get from procedural generation:
> /This palace is the work of the gods,/ was my first thought. I explored the uninhabited spaces, and I corrected myself: /The gods that built this place have died./ Then I reflected on its peculiarities, and told myself: /The gods that built this place were mad./ I said this, I know, in a tone of incomprehensible reproof that verged upon remorse--with more intellectual horror than sensory fear. The impression of great antiquity was joined by others: the impression of endlessness, the sensation of oppressiveness and horror, the sensation of complex irrationality.
(There's more to it, but I don't want to spoil it. Suffice to say that this one has something of the antithesis of the nice, neat hexagons in "Library".)
I will check that out, thank you. I should read more Borges. His ability to write very short pieces of text that are interesting and thought-provoking is unmatched.
My interpretation of this is: they entered a thing that is generating and expanding the further they travel, like world chunks in Minecraft. They're making it bigger by exploring it.
From the outside they measured a high gravity even though they estimated 500 meters diameter and there's reason to believe there have been past explorers, so it only makes sense to me if it's actually bigger on the inside. The actual mass and inner depths could be expanding as you posit, though.
It might exist in hyperbolic space; the station folds in on itself. Although it appears to be only a few dozen meters large from the outside, once you're in it's space, it appears much larger (500 meters) and the inside, which is endlessly looping in on itself) contains much more mass than the space should allow, squeezing what seems to be endless amounts of space into finite space.
House of Leaves is a great book. ANd in places really creepy and claustraphobic.
I read it on the bus when I used to have to commute for 4 hours a day. Must have looked weird reading this giant book, and at some points reading it upside down, or on its side, or flicking through pages pretty fast (some pages only have 1 or 2 words on them).
I had an opportunity in 2019 to get lost in the Franklin Institute after hours with a couple of friends. Most of the lights were off, not a soul to be found, and some of the normal passageways were locked. The only signs of life was near the event nestled in a small corner at the back of the building, which we had arrived late to and decided not to disturb, choosing to explore instead. Cool experience.
Another take on this idea can be found in the extremely good anime "The Tatami Galaxy".
Being Ballard, it’s an allegorical tale, yes, but not for anything so bland as mortality.
The last line, about worshipping the station, is the reveal. Ballard saw within man a tendency to underestimate the depth of the problems he tackled, and a tendency to end up absolutely enmired within false premises, within artifice - these themes are endemic to many of his dystopias.
My best guess is that this is a parable on exactly those themes.
I think Ballard's thing is not about people's tendency to underestimate the weirdness of the universe, but about the universe being far weirder than we think.
Which is very close to being a distinction without a difference, i know. But i think it's rare that Ballard frames this as a flaw in people; rather, it's a terrifying fact about the universe.
I guess it's about the bias towards one's own world view. (And eventually the worship of beliefs, which are mere constructs of our limited knowledge.)
The space travelers travel from transit station to transit station.
What do they assume when they stumble upon an uninhabited Earth? It's a transit station.
It's not only the bias of the space traveler, but also that of the reader who assumes that the space traveler is familiar with the concept of people living on planets, and therefore since the traveler did not conclude that this was an uninhabited planet, the reader already assumes it cannot be Earth.
I personally like sci-fi for the sci-fi, as long as the story and characters are interesting and well written. It can include commentary on society and politics as a lot of good stories do, but it's not the main reason for reading or watching science fiction for me. It is supposed to be set in a fictional world, after all. One of imagination and exploring possibilities.
And if it's just used as a medium for commenting on contemporary issues, I'm not interested. There's other mediums for that like the news or documentaries.
Teleologically speaking, that's one of its uses... But I think the whole point of sci-fi is more about story-telling through "what-ifs" of varying feasibility driven by vision and imagination. It's easy for that to become ideological commentary, even propaganda because our visions are affected by our worldview. But personally, I still wouldn't say that commentary defines any genre of writing besides commentary.
This is honestly the most hilarious possible misread of J.G. Ballard, perhaps one of the most overtly politically ideological sci-fi authors who ever wrote. Read High-Rise (or watch the surprisingly good movie!). Read Concentration City.
I thought after the second report that this was moving in a very Jean-Paul Sartre direction with the idea of the inhabitants being trapped not just within the station, but in each other's company, infinitely (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Exit).
Was pleasantly surprised by the direction it ended up taking.
