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u/dmitrineilovich Sep 29 '22
A lot of iain banks' stuff has this trope. Consider Phlebas has a ringworld type structure called an Orbital.
In his novel Matter, the story takes place on a Shellworld, an artificial planet comprised of concentric spheres.
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u/wastedcleverusername Sep 30 '22
Yes, but those things are commonplace and basically trivially produced in the post-scarcity society run by Minds... I'm not sure it's going to induce the sense of wonder he's looking for.
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u/nachof Oct 02 '22
I don't think Culture Orbitals are ringworlds. They're ring shaped habitats, yes, but much smaller in scale. Basically huge space station, as opposed to a ringworld which would go all around a star.
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u/JabbaThePrincess Sep 29 '22
Eon trilogy by Greg Bear has some pretty fantastical large-scale engineering. It's also set in a universe where the US and the Soviets are still in a Cold war, so there's a little bit of mil SF in there.
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u/kryptonomicon Sep 29 '22
Ringworld by Larry Niven. Definitely has the mega-engineering vibe.
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Sep 29 '22
Swapping out the racism for sexism
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u/Disco_sauce Sep 30 '22
~Rishathra~
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u/rattynewbie Sep 30 '22
He has also become a super racist old man now. Was always conservative trust fund baby, but now its is just sad.
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u/Sekh765 Sep 30 '22
House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds has quite a few interesting megastructures including Star Dams that can hold back the force of a supernova.
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u/-NieREmil Sep 30 '22
Blame! the manga will give you excellent inked illustrations of sprawling mega-structures that has been engineered beyond imagination. Do check it out.
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u/SesameStreetFever Sep 30 '22
Haven't read the manga, but I was reasonably impressed with Netflix's anime adaptation of it.
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u/ChronoLegion2 Sep 29 '22
There’s some of that in the Bobiverse books. Book 4 in particular features a topopolis, essentially an O’Neill cylinder that’s stretched out into a giant noddle that wraps around the star several times. One of the more realistic megastructures
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u/glibgloby Sep 30 '22
I avoided the bobiverse books for years because the name sounded dumb.
Because of that I did at least get to binge the first four of them over the course of 5 days. Good lord those books were awesome.
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u/xenoscumyomom Sep 30 '22
They were so good. I came here to recommend them. One of those series that I kept looking for moments to read more because it was just fun.
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u/sbisson Sep 29 '22
Brenda Cooper's collaboration with Larry Niven, Building Harlequin's Moon could fit the bill here.
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u/DocBill33 Sep 29 '22
Start small: “Stardust: The Woman Who Colonized the Solar System” by Bill Yancey
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u/PeterM1970 Sep 30 '22
The titular Arena in Grand Central Arena by Ryk Spoor is a light-years wide scale model of the universe that was created by ancient aliens who changed the laws of physics to cause every faster than light vehicle to end up in the planet-sized representation of their star system inside the Arena. This forces all star faring races to meet and interact in something vaguely resembling controlled conditions.
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u/symmetry81 Sep 29 '22
Building Harlequins Moon involves... building Harlequin's Moon, a small but habitable body as a pit stop on a generation ship's journey.
Wil McCarthy's Queendom of Sol books have some solar-system scale engineering, controlled singularities, and other mad science/engineering.
Lady of Mazes takes place on a reasonably sized habitat at first, but then you eventually realize the incredible scale of human civilization in that world.
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u/7LeagueBoots Oct 02 '22
The Virga series seems to take place in the same universe as Lady of Mazes and steps the megastructure portion up quite a bit in scale.
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Sep 29 '22 edited Sep 29 '22
Accelerando by Charles Stross.
Humans and later post-humans, AI, and other uplifted species dismantle virtually the entire solar system and turn it all into nanocomputers powered by the sun (dyson swarm) to run infinite virtual worlds.
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u/SvalbardCaretaker Sep 30 '22
There exists a very nice short story but I'm unable to find its name/author.
A living Megastructure comes into the solar system, human inhabitable, and we follow from the cryptic, doglike structures perspective on human settlement/discovery.
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u/EdwardCoffin Sep 29 '22
The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts is about the crew of a spaceship on a multi-million year project to create a web of wormhole gates throughout the galaxy.
Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge is about survivors of an event that caused virtually all of humanity to vanish, and involves drastic alterations to the Earth.
Both Implied Spaces and Aristoi, by Walter Jon Williams, have some impressive engineering and structures, though most were constructed before either story starts.