I was recently reminded of the golden age of Big Dumb Object stories (hat tip to reviewer Roz Kaveny for coining the phrase). As this is not yet commonly accepted genre shorthand, perhaps a definition is in order.
Contrary to the name, BDOs are not necessarily dumb. In fact, most of them have rather sophisticated infrastructure working away off-stage preventing the story from being a Giant Agglomeration of Useless Scrap story. What they definitely are is large. To be a BDO, the Object needs to be world-sized, at least the volume of a moon and preferably much larger. BDOs are also artificial. Some…well, one that I can think of but probably there are others…skirt the issue by being living artifacts but even there, they exist because some being took steps to bring them into existence.
There may be another characteristic BDOs need to have to be considered a classic BDO: absent creators and a consequently mysterious purpose. At the very least, by the time the story begins, the BDO has been around for a long time1. If there’s an example of a story about the construction of a BDO, I cannot think of it. Have fun pointing out the well-known books I have forgotten in comments!
While there were precursors, the ur-BDO, the one that largely defined how authors approach BDO-stories, was Larry Niven’s 1970 Ringworld (coincidentally the subject of another column on the site last week). In it, Louis Wu and a collection of allies travel to a strange artifact 200 light years from the Solar System2, a solid ring about 2 AU in diameter, clearly artificial and with a habitable surface dwarfing the surface of the Earth. No sooner does the expedition arrive than they are shipwrecked, forced to explore the Ringworld in person.
The general shape of the Ringworld ur-plot shows up in BDO story after BDO story. A mysterious object of immense size! An expedition, hastily dispatched to investigate! Survivors marooned! A dire need for sturdy hiking boots! And occasionally, Answers!
Niven very considerately followed his novel with a 1974 essay called “Bigger Than Worlds” (included in the collection A Hole in Space.). It’s a fairly comprehensive listing of all varieties of Bigger Than Worlds artifacts. About the only variant he seems to have missed was what Iain M. Banks later called an Orbital, the Ringworld’s smaller (but far more stable) cousin. I am not saying a lot of the authors who wrote BDO novels after 1974 necessarily cribbed from Niven’s essay, just that I would not be surprised to find in their libraries well-thumbed copies of A Hole in Space.
Ringworld was followed by Clarke’s 1973 Rendezvous With Rama. Rama fell short on size but compensated with enigma. The Phobos-size artifact’s path through the Solar System allows the human explorers too little time to figure out what questions to ask, much less find the answers. None of their questions would ever be answered, obviously, as the very idea of a Rama sequel is nonsensical (as nonsensical as a Highlander sequel). Always leave the customer wanting more, not glutted on excess.
Bob Shaw’s 1974 Orbitsville featured a Dyson Sphere laid in deep space as a honey trap for unwary explorers. My review is here, but the short version is “Bob Shaw was a rather morose fellow and his take on why someone would go to the trouble of building a Dyson Sphere is appropriately gloomy. Be happy, at least, this isn’t John Brunner’s take on Dyson Spheres. Or, God help us all, Mark Geston’s.”
Fred Pohl and Jack Williamson’s 1973 Doomship begat 1975’s Farthest Star. They did Shaw one better: Cuckoo isn’t just a Dyson sphere. It’s a huge intergalactic spaceship. Pohl and Williamson were also the first authors, to my knowledge, to solve the gravity issue (that the forces within a shell cancel out, so there’s no net attraction between an object on the inner surface of a shell to the shell, only to whatever object—a star, say—is within the shell.) by putting an ecosystem on the surface of the vast ship. It’s a fascinating setting poorly served by the story Pohl and Williamson chose to set on it3.
Tony Rothman’s 1978 The World is Round is set so far in the future that the explorers are humanoid aliens. It otherwise dutifully embraces the standard features of the BDO sub-genre: explorers become aware of an artifact the size of a small gas giant, which they race to explore in the hope of enriching themselves. As so often is the case, the explorers who manage to survive the initial stages of the adventure end up doing rather a lot of walking. There is, at least, a functioning subway. There is an absence of proper documentation that would be shocking were it not a defining feature of the BDO genre4.
John Varley’s 1979 Titan featured a comparatively small BDO, merely the size of a respectable moon. Again, the explorers end up marooned pretty much as soon as they reach Gaea but Varley managed to ring some changes on the standard themes of the genre. The first is that Gaea is a living being, artificial but alive. The second is that it is intelligent, able to answer questions when it feels like it. Sadly, Gaea is as mad as sack of weasels so the answers are not always helpful.
There is a steady trickle of later examples—Kapp’s 1982 Search for the Sun!, James White’s 1988 Federation World, Banks’ Orbitals and Shellworlds, Baxter’s Ring, Barton and Capobianco’s White Light, Niven and Benford’s Shipworld novels, and of course Charles Stross’ 2006 Missile Gap, which is without question the finest Locus Award-winning story inspired by a post of mine on the USENET newsgroup soc.history.what-if5—but the heyday of the BDO seems to be over. In part this may be because the current zeitgeist does not favour stories set on what are effectively massive infrastructure projects6. Mostly I think it is because the stock plot for BDO stories is rather restrictive and authors have other chimes they want to ring.
One detail about BDOs that has puzzled me for some time is the incredible lack of women writing them. There’s nothing intrinsic to the concept that shouts “dude!” to me and yet, for some reason I’ve either never encountered a BDO book by a woman or I managed to forget its existence. If you know of any examples, please do point them out to me in comments.
1: This is me weasel-wording because I am not sure if Brian M. Stableford’s Tartarus qualifies as a BDO or not. In it, humanity has wrapped the entire Earth in an artificial shell. By the time the story begins, the shell has been in place long enough for the organisms left on the former surface to have been subjected to dramatic natural selection.
I am also not sure if Fritz Leiber’s The Wanderer counts and if not, why not. Or rather, I am convinced it does not but I don’t seem to have a coherent argument for that position.
2: Assuming the Ringworld and the Solar System have an average net relative velocity wrt each other for objects in our part of the Milky Way, the Ringworld (which is populated by the descendants of the Pak) could have begun its existence adjacent to the Solar System (also settled by the descendants of the Pak). I assume that’s a coincidence but it’s a suggestive one.
3: Something I was reminded of while watching the third, most famous movie version of The Maltese Falcon: the works to remake in one’s own image aren’t the classics but the almost-classics, the works whose central conceit was much better than the final product. Singular, perfect works are hard to improve on but there are lots of books and films sabotaged by their creator’s shortcomings and the commercial realities of the day. If anyone wants an essay on “books I wish someone would use as a springboard for executions that are actually good”, just ask.
4: Not that anyone would actually RTFM if one existed.
5: I was inspired in one measure by Fred Hoyle’s October the First is Too Late, in one measure by “Bigger Than Worlds” and in one final measure by my friend John McMullen’s home brew role-playing campaign. Nobody works in a vacuum, at least not longer than it takes them to die of lack of air.
6: I am not crying uncontrollably because the sound of Waterloo Region Light Rail construction has ruined my sleep since August 2014 and nobody can say for sure if Bombardier will ever deliver the trains. You are crying uncontrollably because the sound of Waterloo Region Light Rail project has ruined my sleep since August 2014 and nobody can say for sure if Bombardier will ever deliver the trains.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviewsand Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is surprisingly flammable.
>If anyone wants an essay on “books I wish someone would use as a springboard for executions that are actually good”, just ask.
I am asking! I’d love to see your take on a (half-)dozen or so things that could use a better treatment.
How about the Way from Greg Bear’s Eon? An entire artificial universe that itself is a gateway to other universes.
As in, I emailed this to tor dot com the day before the Ringworld essay went up. Steam engine time, I guess.
Hmm, couldn’t the Death Star be an example of a BDO construction story? Granted it gets blown up a few times, but it seems to me that if it hadn’t been and then you add a few million years to let all those pesky humans die off you’d get a BDO as a result.
As to your other question, Diane Duane used this concept in the third installment of her Young Wizards series (High Wizardry). At the moment I do not remember if the BDO existed before the events of the book or if it is another BDO construction/birthing example.
2: If the Way itself does not count, the converted asteroid ship certainly would.
Sadly, none of the questions would ever be answered, since the idea of a Rama sequel is as nonsensical as a Highlander sequel. Always leave the customer wanting more, not glutted on excess.
Indeed,
Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch novels involve a civilization living in a Dyson sphere, but it remains offstage.
I think the Wanderer isn’t a BDO because, judged by its size and gravitational effects, it’s an actual Earth-sized planet. Surely no-one would go to the trouble of building such a thing – the living space per unit mass is terrible.
If Fritz Leiber’s “Wanderer” counts, then so does the planet He in James Blish’s Okie series.
Maybe that’s a separate category – Big Dumb Mobile Planets.
And a book on actually good executions: “Book of the New Sun”? “Game of Thrones”?
The world in The Wanderer was a shell-world, so its effective surface area was much, much larger than Earth.
Editor’s note: We’ve just updated this article to reflect the most up-to-date version of the draft, including some minor changes of phrase; sorry for any confusion.
I can’t really see anything to distinguish your BDOs from the monolith of 2001 except its actual size. I really don’t think that a BDO needs to be world-sized, just significantly larger than those who discover it.
Wanderer isn’t a BDO precisely because it’s not artificial.
Too bad they have to be abandoned or I would nominate the Skylark of Valeron (1935) as a primordial BDO (and one could argue that its’ pilot/creator Richard Seaton and his arch-nemesis Marc C. “Blackie” DuQuesne might be considered BDOs in a different sense). Perhaps we need a subcategory that would include the Skylark, the free planet of He, the DeathStar, and other “in use” objects…
Another recent-ish example – Robert Reed’s Great Ship universe.
It was pointed out to me on facebook the Deathstar may count as a BDO. If so, it is an example of a BDO we saw being built, thanks to a tie-in novel.
I recently read Alastair Reynolds’ Pushing ice, (2005), which involves an almost unthinkably massive BDO.
Wasn’t there an anthology of short stories about BDOs where the editors only included male authors, so that somebody quipped, “It should be called The Mammoth book of big erections“?
As for Bombardier, my sympathies.
Would Clifford Simak’s “Construction Shack” fit here? IIRC, the story is mostly about the characters discovering that the world they’ve been sent to explore is a BDO, rather than about what they find after that.
“If there’s an example of a story about the construction of a BDO, I cannot think of it.” – the bible.
Robert Reed’s somewhat more recent BDO book “Marrow” might be worth mentioning – as big as Jupiter, artificial, and abandoned (when first discovered by humans, anyway); it’s got enough volume that the immortals running it can discover unexpected planetary scale artifacts inside that have escaped notice for a 10s of millennia.
Oops – I see @15 mentioned this one…
So Gentry Lee’s Rama books were that bad? I never read them, only Rendezvous with Rama.
Well, I can think of one story which contains the construction of a BDO. The Genesis Quest and Second Genesis, by Donald Moffitt, are a two-part story published in 1986, and features a space-grown Dyson Tree, called Yggdrasil, being fitted for human habitation to be used as a space ship. It has to be moon-sized, since it is going to be tied to a Bussard ramjet and carry immortal people, constructed by aliens from data broadcast from Earth, from the Andromeda Galaxy to the Milky Way at sub-light speed.
Granted construction of the BDO is overshadowed by larger things: moral relations between intelligent species, communication and travel across vast distances and time, the evolution of our own species (and of dragonflies), implications of immortality … Moffitt was not a small thinker.
The first TV example I can think of, which is before the novels mentioned, is “The Doomsday Machine” with the planet-munching cigar.
As for a BDO story from a woman, I am surprised you forgot about Kameron Hurley’s The Stars Are Legion, since you reviewed it.
Not only do the individual Worldships seem to qualify, but they are organized into what seems to be a Dyson-sized swarm.
AUGH. I mean, oh yes.
“For the World is Hollow and I have Touched the Sky” predates Ringworld by a good few years, depending on whether you want to date conception/start of script writing or final publication/airing.
For that matter, so does “Doomsday Machine.” “Beyond the Farthest Star” show another BDO just a few years later.
The Death Star would only be a BDO if it were encountered 1000 years from now as a derelict by the descendants of the original Empire and Rebels. (Unlikely since they have a habit of blowing up.)
Didn’t Olaf Stapledon have ring- or sphere-worlds somewhere in Star-Maker? But I’m not sure if they’d count since they were just being mentioned in an aside.
Roger MacBride Allen’s Hunted Earth books (Ring of Charon & Shattered Sphere) featured at least one Dyson sphere — the shattered one in question. (Speaking of series that I wish hadn’t been abandoned.)
Has there ever been any kind of BDO analog in a fantasy setting? I’m pretty sure there is, but can’t think of any examples off-hand.
This is mildly spoilerish, but Timothy Zahn’s (rot13) _Fcvaarerg_ qbrf srngher n OQB haqre vagreehcgrq pbafgehpgvba.
If the Bible counts, Pratchett’s Roundworld should, too. And maybe the Ainulindale.
I read Terry Pratchett’s Strata before I read any of the books you list, which was confusing since Strata is, among other things, a Ringworld parody.
As a tiny, I remember reading Ian McDonald’s ‘Chaga’ and that most certainly has a BDO. It’s lampshaded and actually called ‘The BDO’.
I’d say the Wanderer doesn’t fit, because like the Death Star, it’s largely piloted and not really mysterious to most of the people on it.
Do mysterious alien travel networks fit here? I’m thinking of things like Fred Pohl’s Heechee series or Steven Baxter’s Manifold. I’m sure there are others. At the very least there’s a genetic relation.
If I remember correctly, the Dumb in the original BDO term referred to the thing being unable to speak or communicate. The challenge was always to figure out what and why it was without being told by a convenient expositor.
Also, there is an excellent page on tvtropes about BDOs.
Female author BDO: Tanya Huff, Better Part of Valor. It’s not bigger-than-a-moon, but it is bigger-than-Sector-General, which is big enough for my purposes.
Robert Silverberg’s “Across a Billion Years” (1969) has a Dyson Sphere. It’s kind of a BDO, because the makers are not there… sort of.
18: If it’s the one I think it is, yes.
You’ve reminded me of Shakespeare’s Planet, which has a feature closely related to the BDO: a vast functional portal network linking a myriad worlds, old enough the phone book has been long lost. There are lots of sensible ways to map out such a network but what they actually do is punch in a random sequences of numbers and set though to see where it takes them. Note that they cannot then return to where they came from without knowing that code, which it seems they generally don’t.
Kameron Hurley’s The Stars are Legion definitely belongs in the BDO category, and it’s very recent.
L. E. Modesitt’s The Eternity Artifact has a BDO to explore. He has a few other science fiction books that come close to being about BDOs, too.
All of Jack McDevitt’s Alex Benedict series ends up at one or another BDO to explore, esp. given that the main characters are mostly artifact hunters.
Tim Pratt’s The Wrong Stars sends people chasing a BDO, also.
Admiral by Sean Danker is another book that has people chasing down one BDO after another.
Scot Sigler’s Generations Trilogy is all about what happens when the BDO has been chased down, and everything falls apart in the process of figuring out what to do with the damn thing.
Also, agreeing with @17 on Pushing Ice as well as other books by Alistar Reynolds.
Thomas Harlan’s series In the Time of the Sixth Sun has multiple BDOs being chased down for various reasons, too.
So there’s at least one book by a female author about a BDO, and it’s a doozy.
My parents let me play in quicksand as a kid so I know all about avoiding and escaping places like tv tropes.
Well if movies count so should computer games. The Citadel in the Mass Effect series.
Mutineers Moon by David Weber. Our moon is one of a fleet of moon sized warships.
In the Warhammer 40K Universe Giant Agglomeration of Useless Scraps are extremely dangerous. See Sandy Mitchell’s ‘The Emperor’s Finest’.
Karl Schroeder’s played with some in recent years, his Virga series is set entirely within a planet-sized sphere of mostly air (with large clumps of solid matter inside providing cities and other attractions, which generally have to be spun to produce gravity or go without), lit by fusion-powered suns. His excellened Lady of Mazes also takes place on a structure much like Banks’ Orbitals (although the internal societal structure rather than the physical structure is what’s really interesting there).
41: Isn’t pretty much everything dangerous in the 40K universe?
Greg Bear’s ‘Eon’ is another example of a BDO. Unfortunately, (IMO) he did not stick the landing….
Rendezvous With Rama has several sequels and answers in the last one.
Pohl & Williamson’s Cuckoo
27. hoopmanjh
Has there ever been any kind of BDO analog in a fantasy setting? I’m pretty sure there is, but can’t think of any examples off-hand.
In the new Brandon Sanderson book, Oathbreaker, the main characters are setting up camp in an old city/tower and they have no idea what is was used for in the past, or how people lived there. It is just a giant artifact.
43, not with my dice-rolling.
From Japanese anime, while the SDF-1 or Macross or whatever it’s name was, is relatively smaller than most, it conveys much of the spirit. Star Trek has at least one generation ship, and whatever that sphere thing that Scotty was trapped on from TNG. There was a fleet of ships in Brin’s Uplift universe, but only got referenced in flashbacks.
I think the titular Ring from Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee books was one of the biggest of them all.
I was going to mention Robert Reed’s Marrow and the rest of the series, as well, but was beat to the punch more than once. Still, it’s one of my all-time favorite BDO stories, so I’m bringing it up anyway.
Excellent post and thread. Thanks!
Not necessarily “big” or ‘dumb” but I have always found the world spanning failing technology of the “Old Ones” in the Dark Tower series, haunting and intriguing.
Huh. I just did a podcast for Tri Tac Games, and this week’s episode we covered BDOs. It is Steam time isn’t it?
Adding anime and manga to the list, a really big big dumb object is the City of Blame!
The characters are not so much outsiders stranded on it as people living inside it, but still… if I remember well, in the anime at least one of the characters is a scientist from an outside civilization…
Iain M Banks had an/the Excession which was a, hmm, sort of star looking thing with very unusual properties? It’s pretty much only described by Minds and they don’t concern themselves much with appearances in the electromagnetic spectrum.
There’s also the Airspheres, and the species that live in them like the dirigible behemothaurs, although they’re only a minor plot point, despite being the sort of thing another author could probably set a whole novel in.
Which reminds me, there’s the Shellworlds, which he did end up writing a whole book about (Matter)
Hmm, Banks really did like his BDOs didn’t he?
*edit, while searching to remind myself of some names, I found a quote from Banks about Orbitals: “Perhaps the easiest way to envisage an Orbital is to compare it to the idea that inspired it (this sounds better than saying; Here’s where I stole it from). If you know what a Ringworld is – invented by Larry Niven[…]”, and also a refference that the designers of Halo explicitly based their halo on Banksian orbitals, so there’s a whole lineage right there :)
The Troy Rising series by John Ringo shows the building of the Troy class which, as 10km diameter battle-stations made from asteroids, probably qualify as BDOs.
I have always considered Lem’s Solaris to be the archetype BDO novel, even though the “object” is not a manufactured item but a peculiar planetary ecosphere.
“The Doomsday Machine” seems like a poor fit in the category, because the Big Alien Object is not just sitting there passively waiting to be explored; like Saberhagen’s Berserkers that probably inspired it, the Cornucopia of Death is active and dangerous.
Many “forgotten generation ship” stories are BDOs from the inside-out.
For constructed BDOs, can we count The Earth from Hitchhiker’s Guide and whatever it was they were making at the start of Pratchett’s Strata with the dinosaur holding the placard saying End Nuclear Testing Now?
If I commissioned a generation ship, one detail I would insist on is large signs through the ship, signs reading “YOU ARE LIVING IN A GENERATION STAR SHIP.”
I really don’t think that a BDO needs to be world-sized
Oh, definitely not. Rama is tiny – if I remember it’s only about fifty miles long.
Hmm, Banks really did like his BDOs didn’t he?
He really did. I had a long conversation with him about them 20 or so years ago, and his glee at inventing massive engineering projects was outdone only by his glee in devising ways to blow them up.
@43, Yes, pretty much everything is dangerous in 40k, it is a ridiculously Grimdark setting – and oddly enough a lot of fun.
@58, it won’t do any good after a couple generations when the descendants have forgotten what the words “star” and “ship” mean, having no use for those terms in daily life.
The Expanse has the gateway thingy. John Ringo is close to a book about making BDOs in the Troy Rising series, he at least shows you how you could make one by making some deathstar type orbittals.
Fantasy setting BDO – The entire Deathgate cycle series would be a good example. The Kicksey-winsey is a huge machine that even it’s caretakers don’t understand what it is for, and all of the worlds are ‘supposed’ to work together but don’t…..
Wheel of Time has the Ways, or possibly the Tower of Ghenjei as potential examples too.
An interesting discovery I made while writing this: Tony Rothman wrote an SF novel in 2015, his first since 1978. It appears to be about competing fusion projects. A long, historical discourse about Tony Rothman’s dad Milton and the short story “Fusion” goes here.
@Cygnwulf — Yes, now that you mention it, the Deathgate books would probably count.
Actually, as I think about it, the Deathgate books are kind of the fantasy equivalent of Universe or one of those other SF stories about a generation starship where everybody’s forgotten that they’re actually living in a ship. Which, as discussed earlier, is kind of a BDO variant.
“Memory” by Linda Nagata is set on a BDO though the explorers are locals not external observers come to check it out.
At the risk of sounding self-serving, NOUMENON (my debut from Harper Voyager last year), is a love-letter to Big Dumb Objects.
I have looked and have no idea what this line means. Please, someone, help a girl out.
>Be happy, at least, this isn’t John Brunner’s take on Dyson Spheres. Or, God help us all, Mark Geston’s.”
What would their takes on Dyson Spheres be?
Also, wouldn’t Charles Sheffield’s Heritage Series be a massive trove of BDO’s? There are, after all, thousands of them, including entire planets. And the Halo universe has multiple BDO’s beyond just the Halos themselves, including Shield Worlds and the Arks.
The world in Zelazny’s Jack of Shadows must be artificial, for reasons revealed near the end.
In Endymion Rising there is an organic dyson sphere being made by the Templars and Ousters.
Philip Jose Farmer’s ghost is turning in its grave at the exclusion of Riverworld!!!!
And Gregory Benford’s COSM addressed the creation of multiple universes in a science lab!
There was a super-BDO off-screen in “Illegal Aliens” by Nick Pollotta and Phil Foglio, mentioned in passing. Explorers discovered a Dyson Sphere and eventually found a way in. They got three metres down and found themselves standing on the outer surface of a slightly smaller Dyson Sphere. Step and repeat about fifty times before they gave up and went home.
The biggest BDO I know of in fiction is a giant battle mecha in Japanese anime: “Super Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is 12.8 billion light years tall, according to the official guide book from GAINAX“. Oh, and it gets bigger later.
I’m genuinely surprised to be making the first reference to the Tar-Aiym Krang in the novel of the same name by Alan Dean Foster, especially as it’s the debut of his long-running Flinx series. It fits the description perfectly: a rag-tag expedition explores an enormous relic of a lost alien species. It’s a fun read published way back in 1972.
p.s. I would also like to express my objection to including the word “dumb“ in the description of these objects. How about Big Mysterious Object instead? The current description seems to be and attack/dismissal of the entire sub-genre.
hoopmanjh points this out as well, but Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker features some BDO’s way back in 1937, including the very first description of what came to be known as a Dyson sphere, and the concepts of entire planets being used as spacecraft. They aren’t the centerpiece of the book, but I really wish he’d get more attention since the book is positively mindblowing in scope.
48. LordVorless…
Brin also had a take on the Dyson Sphere in the Crissss…Criswell thing.
That was in fact a Dyson sphere.
Also no one got marooned on/in them, but I don’t think that’s an essential part of the BDO definition. That’s just a convenient plot device that raises the stakes, forcing the protagonists to explore the object under a time limit without having lots of resources to draw on.
Similarly. many time travel stories also feature someone getting trapped (in the past or future) but it’s clearly a plot device, neither part of the definition of time travel, nor of time travel stories.
I agree. The problem is, BDO is funny and memorable. I don’t think this topic would be receiving much attention by any other name.
BAAAO “Big Ancient Artificial Alien Object” ?
BMO “Big Mysterious Object” ?
Etc.
I think we should ditch the idea that a protagonist needs to be stuck on it. That’s a plot device, not a requirement. If it’s actually important it should be added to the acronym. For that matter we could also require that it be in space.
BMAASFP “Big Mysterious Ancient Alien Space Fly Paper”
It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue..
Actually, Ringworld was not construction by the Pak, but by human Pak hybrids. When they discover that the center of the galaxy is exploding, they create the Ringworld to protect their offspring and fly them away from the explosion…
Someone beat me to the punch on Eon, and a couple people on Marrow. Not sure how Eon didn’t stick the landing. I thought it worked extremely well. Marrow was a really magnificent concept, I thought. I just wish the important characters weren’t actually immortal. Their immortality made it harder to be engaged with them. But the concept is mind-boggling.
I wonder if Macroscope by Piers Anthony, notwithstanding the truly dreadful ending, qualifies as a BDO novel.
BTW, seems to me that the “dumb” doesn’t ever really mean “stupid” in this context. Maybe more like “unforthcoming,” or “mute”?
I’m pretty sure you could have gravity inside a shell due to the shell’s mass, although it wouldn’t be uniform.
Taking a simple situation as an example, imagine the shell was spherical and of uniform thickness. If the shell had a uniform density, there would be no internal gravity. But if the shell’s density was not uniform, for example, if one half of the shell was much more massive than the other half, then there would be a gravitational field inside the shell, with the field’s strength and direction being different at different locations with in the sphere.
This isn’t to be confused with Faraday cages where you don’t get electric fields inside conducting shells. The key here is that the shells are electrically conducting, so the charges within the shell walls are free to move around in response to any internal field, redistributing themselves until the field disappears.
The difference between the electrical and gravitational situations is that in the gravitational case, the mass isn’t free to move around (unless the shell is a fluid) in response to any internal gravitational field.
Wouldn’t Greg Bear’s Eon fit into the BDO category?
C.J. Cherryh — Voyager in the Night
“Golden the Ship Was – Oh! Oh! Oh!”
@84,
That ship wasn’t mysterious, although it was very big. The Instrumentality knew all about it ;)
There are a lot of abandoned megastructures in SF, though
76, oh, right, I forgot about that thing, yeah, it was pretty interesting.
77, I wasn’t sure of the precise details, but yeah, looking at the screenshots, it was large enough to qualify.
83, that was one of my favorite novels with the way the various entities were depicted in the text. Would like to see it in some multi-media version though.
Actually, I just thought of something, and MAYBE somebody here can help. I’m trying to think of a book where one of these “objects” was explored, and it turned out that only one person on the exploration crew could get past a certain point since there was a genetically induced compulsion mechanism and only people descended from the nobles in the Empire didn’t have that gene complex.
Unrelenting grim for the first 80%, after which they would take a sharp turn into pessimistic catastrophe where “kill them, kill them ALL,” is the happy ending.
Good article, thanks for compiling so many examples for us!
Ian McDonald’s book Evolutions Shore involves a BDO heading for Earth.
88, so what you’re saying is never let them collaborate on a project with Yoshiyuki Tomino, lest somehow they manage to kill off characters not even appearing in the work?
(Sadly, I don’t think the O’Neill Cylinders count, since they’re known products of contemporary engineering. Except maybe in that one Gundam…)
Two things:
The Monolith from 2001 A Space Odyssey. The 2km long one orbiting Jupiter is, granted, not that big, but it certainly makes up for it in terms of mysteriousness, and it has powers and properties of mass and matter manipulation that certainly earn it a place in the list.
And, wait for it…the Earth! At least in Douglas Adams’s mind. It’s more or less planet-sized (citations, you ask?) and it was created as an experiment, though those origins and purpose have been lost in the billions of years since.
Howard Taylor’s web comic “Schlock Mercenary” has an entire story arc about a BDO, which was collected into a book appropriately titled “Big Dumb Objects”. If you are interested, it is Book 17, which starts on 3-30-2015.
Peter F Hamilton uses BDU’s, to good effect, in both Night’s Dawn (The ruin ring) and Pandora’s Star, and to a lesser extent in the Void trilogy (Both the sphere and the city on the planet within it), and I’m quite surprised he’s not been mentioned yet.
As for BDU’s in fantasy; Steven Erikson uses a lot of Medium Dumb Objects (The Azat houses, the time-devices build by Icarium, and a lot of remnants from bygone civilizations) as plot devices in most of his Malazan books.
There’s arguably a few BDO’s in the Schlock Mercenary webcomic series. At least one of them has an AI that’s been driven mad by isolation…
+1 to the Citadel (and the associated network mass relay network) of the Mass Effect games. Particularly discovering the reason for their existence…
@@@@@ 74 – EdTheRed – I know what you mean. Took me a while to realise that “Dumb” was used in the “refusing / unable to speak” meaning, rather than “stupid”. The double meaning does make it appear more derogatory than perhaps the sub-genre definers meant.
The “sturdy hiking boots” snark made me giggle.
@93 – beat me to it. I opened the tab this morning, and it only refreshed to show your post *after* I posted mine. <sigh>.
Would the ring surrounding Earth in Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves count as a BDO? Granted, it was constructed by humans. Though we skip ahead 5000 years to when it’s completed and get bits about the construction. I loved that book for how realistically it portrayed all the advances in technology.
Greg Bear’s “Eon” series has an unusual take on the BDO. From the outside the BDO looks like a large hollowed out asteroid, but the builders have constructed some kind of device that bends space into a tube, of infinite length, which exists inside the asteroid. The asteroid is just the gateway to this infinitely long cylinder. So it’s bigger (much, much bigger) on the inside.
Although they do find the makers rather early in the book, living way down the tube somewhere.
I would argue that all of Peter Hamilton’s Commonwealth/Void novels are modern novels downright littered with BDO’s. The very first scene of the first novel *Minor Spoiler* is the simultaneous completion of what the observers believe are two Dyson Spheres. Then he compounds this with myriad other BDO’s from planet-sized warships and arks to enigmatic pseudo-black-hole phenomena, none of which have been constructed by humans, nor are they certain of their origins. So I’d argue that the BDO isn’t dead, just taking a backseat to dramatic storylines.
Ack, @94, sorry, I looked for it, but missed that you’d beaten me there. Good call, but I maintain that the Void itself is perhaps the largest BDO in mainstream SF.
101, don’t mind yourself for missing things, repetition is not necessarily a bad thing, inadvertent is even excusable.
But how does it compare to say, Ryk E. Spoor’s Arena, which is a pocket simulacrum of the galaxy (or perhaps the universe)? Or Chalker’s WellWorld? Actually, Chalker has a fair number of them, including maybe the Earth itself, depending on how you count the Rings of the Masters.
102, I’m not sure how well the two compare. In Void the entire galactic core; essentially where current (RL) astrophysicists posit super massive black holes, is instead a constructed BDO. So “pocket galaxy” vs. “Galactic Core” is perhaps a toss up. But I forgot one that, by physics at least, is arguably the largest possible BDO. *Spoiler Coming* At the end of Joe Haldeman’s Forever War series, we find that the entire universe and all of physics is a constructed simulation thus, in my mind at least, a clear winner.
Though anyone making such a statement is well prone to being decried and disproved (though I wouldn’t mind that in the least).
103, well, there is the idea of Nakor, in Raymond Feist’s series, who posited that multiple reality were the creation of a baby universe or something akin to that.
That might be more than the Forever War’s version.
Or see Kado: The Right Answer where multiple dimensional realities were created in pursuit of some similar outcome.
At least, I’d say it’s a tie for first place with Infinity and Beyond.
“3: Something I was reminded of while watching the third, most famous movie version of The Maltese Falcon: the works to remake in one’s own image aren’t the classics but the almost-classics, the works whose central conceit was much better than the final product. Singular, perfect works are hard to improve on but there are lots of books and films sabotaged by their creator’s shortcomings and the commercial realities of the day. If anyone wants an essay on “books I wish someone would use as a springboard for executions that are actually good”, just ask.”
The Collected Works of Kilgore Trout?
Apart from the above-mentioned (several times) “Star Maker” by Olaf Stapledon, doesn’t Fred Hoyle’s “The Black Cloud” count as a BDO (even if, like other BDOs, it is in fact intelligent)?
As to the building of a BDO (or similar), isn’t Charles Stross’s “Accelerando” sequence of stories in Asimov’s (novelised later on) basically the story of the building of a Matrioshka Brain–a fractal-shaped, hyper-intelligent version of a Dyson Sphere?
Apart from Alastair Reynold’s “Pushing Ice” (also mentioned above), I do really like his novella “Diamond Dogs”, whose BDO–the Blood Spire–seems like a weird mix of a test and a trap.
“None of their questions would ever be answered, obviously, as the very idea of a Rama sequel is nonsensical (as nonsensical as a Highlander sequel).”
A man after my own heart. The notion that anyone would try to write sequels to RWR is ridiculous!
We need a related category like BTO (Big Talkative Object) or whatever: a BDO that is only a mystery to the explorers, but not to the beings running it, who are still extant. Example: John E. Stith’s MANHATTAN TRANSFER. (There’s enough in the book description that IMHO it’s not a spoiler to say there’s a Big Object in the book.)
BTW great post and comments. I’ve written down several books to follow-up, as I like BDO stories. I’m still embarrassed I haven’t read Clarke’s Rama book[s] or Varley’s Titan trilogy, which I know are classics. ::updating my TBR list::
If there’s an example of a story about the construction of a BDO, I cannot think of it.
In Levanthan Awakes, the Protomolcule creates the Sol Stargate, does that count?
@110, I’m sure there’s some books/comics about the construction of the Death Star if that counts. Banks also mentions on-going construction of orbitals. I’m sure if I have a think I’ll remember some more.
I can’t think of a book that’s primarily about the creation of a BDO though.
Actually, have I read a book about the construction of a generation ship perhaps?
For a contemporary example of a female writer featuring a BDO as a main point in the story, see Laurence Suhner’s QuanTika trilogy: Vestiges, L’ouvreu des chemins, Origines. Suhner is Swiss, so her books are in French.
I’m not sure you can have a story about the building of a BDO. Their very nature requires the to be an enigma (at least at first). While plot devices like the Death Star(s) meet the criteria for being big and being objects, there’s very little mystery about their purpose.
I guess you could have a story about a worker on a big construction project who doesn’t understand what they are helping build (at least to begin with). Their enlightenment could be part of their character arc. I can’t think of any examples, though…
As Fizz mentions above, Tsutomu Nihei’s BLAME! manga takes place in “The City” which is basically the result of autonomous civil habitat building machines on Earth deciding to not stop. Grey-Goo scenario, but instead of Goo, it is urban sprawl and infrastructure. The builders keep building, and eventually come up with means to twist space-time so tightly they can use it for more building material, effectively cantilevering gravity against itself. By the time the main story takes place “The City” is roughly solid out to 30 AU, with a lattice-like troposphere out at 200 AU. There is a room in the structure where Jupiter “used” to be.
Any truly cohesive form of networked control authority has long since broken down, and the result is billions of earths worth of empty but marginally habitable volume, and isolated tribes of human, post-human, and “other” survivors trying to get by.
There is also what is basically a broken anti-virus system that has decided everyone without a long-lost set of genes are “illegal residents”.
Seconding (thirding?) any number of Reynolds’ stories. But also, perhaps the B’est BDO of them all appears in Paul McAuley’s “Eternal Light”–literally light years across.
Marina herself beat me to it, and I am like two years late to the party, but Noumenon by Marina Lostetter is super fabulous. I am halfway through the follow-up, Noumenon Infinity, right now, and both books are some of the best scifi I have read in the past two years.