Comment by throw310822
5 days ago
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.
> 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.
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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.