Big Dumb Objects

[matgb]

Random coincidences can be cool. I recently reread Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama for the first time since I was a kid, and read Niven's Ringworld for the first time ever. Today, I started to read Eric Brown's Helix. Then I twigged the common theme.

I don't normally go for BDO/megastructure themed stories, but have really enjoyed the first two; both are flawed and dated in some social attitudes, although Rama was surprisingly progressive in some areas. But apart from Orbitsville, which I reread a decade ago and decided not to do so again (always a risk when you re-encounter something you loved as a kid, Thundercats and Star Cops suffered really badly with this), I'm not aware of any other books/series specifically about BDOs, and while TVtropes mentions the Culture novels, they're not about the BDOs, they merely contain lots of them (and I think I've now read them all anyway).

So, given a) I'm a lazy git and b) it's a nice subject to talk about, what else should I be ordering from the library in order to read?

Comments

[davegodfrey]

Have you read any Alastair Reynolds? I recommend them. I also really enjoy Ken MacLeod- if you like the anarcho-communism of the Culture, you'll probably like him too.

If you haven't read the new Laundry novel you need to NOW.

[matgb]

Yes, I do, and I have.

Specifically, I think the only Reynolds I haven't read is short stories not yet in his collections, and I own most of his books (bot not the recent stuff, which the library has).

And I was the first person to read the new library copy of the new laundry book, they ordered it for me before it was published. I like my library staff.

[andrewducker]

I believe that Baxter's Xeelee books have some megastructure stuff in them (but they're on my reading list at the moment, so I can't confirm).

[matgb]

Aye, they're listed on Tropes, and while I've not read them, I did enjoy what Baxter I have read, so will order them when I catch up.

Normally, orders at the library can take between a week and 6 months to come through. A few weeks back I ordered a bunch of Stevenson stuff, including Anathem and the historical trilogy. They all arrived at once, bit busy at the moment...

[andrewducker]

Oooh. Anathem didn't do it for me, but the Baroque Cycle really did. I'd love to know what you think of them.

[andrewducker]

I've just remembered that Broken Angels (the sequel to Altered Carbon) has a medium-sized Dumb Object.

[matgb]

Heh. I've only read the third Kovacs book, didn't know it was part three until part way through but had picked up the details anyway. Had planned on getting the first two at some point, so that's cool.

[83_tauri]

I assume you've come across 'Century Rain' and 'Pushing Ice'? If not, then both of those have BDOs in them.

There are BDO-ish things in some of Peter F Hamilton's books too, although I have to confess that I'm a lot less struck on the more recent ones. (Still haven't finished The Temporal Void, despite buying it, umm, ages ago).

And they're not exactly BDOs, but there are megastructure-type things in a few Jack McDevitt books too, I think.

And I can't think of any others, oddly enough...

[matgb]

Of course they have, yes, I'd actually forgotten that (And enjoyed both). I've never got on with Hamilton, but that might just be picking the wrong books on days I wasn't in the mood, will give it another go sometime.

[birguslatro]

This made me wonder how the L5 Society was getting on. It seems it isn't...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L5_Society

[perlmonger]

Greg Bear's Eon (and sequels) is pretty much the definitive BDO novel. Paul McCauley's come up with a few too - Eternal Light IIRC, and the Confluence books. Ian McDonald came up with one in Kirinya too.

[matgb]

I keep seein Eon in the library, but never get around to picking it up, I've not heard of the others (Well, I can't recall hearing of them, not quite the same thing).

Cool.

[purple-pen.livejournal.com]

Hi Mat! Sorry for the total off-topicness, but I thought the most recent public post on your DW blog would probably be a good place to check out what has happened to my OpenID presence here now that I've changed my LJ username. That way, you'll see the results of my experiments instantly!

So far, I haven't done anything at all - just navigated directly to Dreamwidth, where I am apparently still logged in as purple_pen, and come here to leave this comment. As far as I can tell from the comment box stage, it looks like it is going to work normally, as though nothing has changed.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

OK, so now I have logged out as purple_pen, and logged back in as strange_complex. Fairly unsurprisingly, OpenID doesn't know that they're the same person, so I now effectively have two separate presences here, each with a different userid number. That's obviously a bit annoying, as the new ID does not have any of the access permissions or subscriptions that the old one did. So, for example, this new account won't yet be able to see and comment on protected entries on miss_s_b's journal, and I assume that any future LJ posts which I make now won't automatically appear in her DW reading page, either. I guess that means that either I have to go round asking people to re-establish those links with the new account manually, or I just have to carry on using the old ID and the old LJ name here.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

And, finally, I have just tried logging out as strange_complex and back in as purple_pen, in order to check whether the purple_pen identity was really still working, or was just a left-over artefact of the fact that I hadn't yet logged out of it since changing my LJ username. The answer to that one is that although I wrote "purple-pen.livejournal.com" in the login box, the system has logged me in as "strange-complex.livejournal.com" (as you can see). So, as I suspected might happen, I have lost control of the old purple-pen.livejournal.com OpenID. It's still there, all the old comments which I made under that name still seem to be present and correct, and nobody else can take it over as far as I know. But I also can't log in to it or do anything with it now.

That's not particularly disastrous for me, as I did not have very many access permissions or subscriptions on the old identity, so I can just go round asking the same people to grant me access under the new one. But I can well see that for some people who move regularly between the two platforms and have developed profiles on both, it would be an absolute disaster - and definitely something that they ought to be warned about before undertaking a name change on LJ.

So, there it goes! And if you would be so kind as to grant me access to your journal under my new ID, I'd be really grateful. :-/