Big Dumb Objects

We humans love things we can’t explain. Witness the vast array of outlandish claims made about Stonehenge, from ancient calendar to alien stargate, when in all likelihood it was just a big clock or an early marketplace, a neolithic branch of Tesco.

When the unknown is also alien, the mystery only grows more magnetic. Think of that iconic opening to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey: a family of apes wake one morning to find a black monolith looming over them; that had its origins in Arthur C Clarke’s short story The Sentinel. Did some super-advanced civilisation intercede in the early evolution of intelligent life on earth? Or was the monolith just filming a very special edition of Life on Earth?

We don’t know, and never find out. But this shiny, looming thing is just one of many Big Dumb Objects that have turned up in science fiction over the decades.

A term coined by critic Roz Kaveney and later popularised by the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, the Big Dumb Object (BDO) is a unique selling point of the sci-fi genre. It can be a broad term – usually, they’re alien architectures, ranging from the man-sized to the planetary. BDOs either look extreme or unusual, and can often do extreme or unusual things: everything from lurking on a horizon to creating worlds. Usually, BDOs are plonked into plots to awe us with their majesty and mystery – really, they’re science fiction’s equivalent of a MacGuffin.

No other kind of storytelling goes in for spectacle quite so big, or quite so dumb as science fiction. But which is the biggest, dumbest object of them all?

No self-respecting galactic civilisation can call itself advanced until it can build its own worlds, right? Pick a convenient star system, select a goldilocks zone at the right distance for your species of life, and construct a ribbon of land in a ring around the whole system: boom, you have the mother of all BDOs – a ringworld.

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Full Article on The Guardian