Comment by astrobe_
5 days ago
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_...
5 days ago
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.
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