What is the name of this sf story?

September 20, 2006 2:33 PM

I'm looking for the title and author of a science fiction story that someone told me about once about a Borges-like space station.

The basic plot, as described to me, is that some space travelers land or find themselves stranded on an unknown and possibly uninhabited space station, and as they begin to explore it they come to realize it is (practically) infinite in size.

posted by vraxoin to Media & Arts (5 answers total)

Eon by Greg Bear
posted by bshort at 2:35 PM on September 20, 2006

Best answer: "Report on an Unidentified Space Station" by J.G. Ballard. It consists of several log entries by a search party, with each entry revealing that the station is much larger and probably infinite. It was published in the collection War Fever.
posted by infinitewindow at 3:01 PM on September 20, 2006

I'm pretty certain that Infinitewindow's got it--but I'll toss out "Alien Stones," by the very Borgesian Gene Wolfe, just in case. You can find it in The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories.
posted by Iridic at 3:27 PM on September 20, 2006

As long as we're talking Borgesian Space Station SF, why not try Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem? If it's a little thick, you'd probably enjoy Tales of Pirx the Pilot, one of my personal faves!
posted by Aquaman at 6:28 PM on September 20, 2006

Response by poster: infinitewindow gets the prize, but I will definitely check out the others as well. Heck, maybe I'll write my own existential space-station story, as it appears to be its own little subgenre...

Thanks!
posted by vraxoin at 9:11 AM on September 21, 2006