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

[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.