[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.

[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.

[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.

[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