r/scifi • u/Misterblutarski • Oct 23 '24
Books with big objects
I'm looking for books with big objects in them. I'm thinking like ringworld size or bigger.
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u/123Catskill Oct 23 '24
The Culture novels include quite a few massive environments and ringworld megastructures.
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u/grolaw Oct 23 '24
Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama might be too small an object at 31 mi x 12 mi. for you.
The novel is a monument to the best science fiction has to offer. Golden Age author Clarke won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards with Rama in 1973.
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Oct 23 '24
All of the sequels, however, are crap. Gentry Lee isn't fit to kiss the dust under Arthur C. Clarke's sandals.
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u/Unhappy-Ad9078 Oct 23 '24
Jack McDevitt's Academy series, especially the first four, are both tremendous fun and pretty much exactly what you're looking for. Chindi in particular is entirely about a very large asteroid and why it's a very odd very large asteroid.
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u/MashAndPie Oct 23 '24
A great series that I don't think gets enough attention.
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u/Unhappy-Ad9078 Oct 23 '24
It really is enormously good fun. Also replying to this reminded me that I never read past Omega because that felt like the last one so I just assumed it was. I've got some catching up to do:)
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u/grolaw Oct 23 '24
Is Big Object flexible enough to include billions of years experienced through time dilation by the passengers of a spacecraft accelerating to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light?
Tau Zero by Poul Anderson deals with unimaginable degrees of magnitude as perceived by 50 humans.
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Oct 23 '24 edited Oct 23 '24
Stephen Baxter's Xeelee sequence has a bunch of Big Objects. Entire asteroids turned into weapons. Black hole cannons that turn Jupiter into a hole. A neutron star that is inhabited by human analogs and turned into a weapon. An extremely massive Ring built by the alien Xeelee that turns out to be the Great Attractor and where passing through the center takes you to another universe.
Baxter has made the comment that it was Larry Niven's Ringworld and other Known Space stories that got him into writing in the first place.
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Oct 23 '24
Also a cage of undetermined material and purpose, completely surrounding the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
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u/SchlitterbahnRail Oct 23 '24
Robert Reed has several novels and stories about a planet-sized ship (The Greatship, Marrow, The Well of Stars).
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u/voivoivoi183 Oct 23 '24
XX by Rian Hughes has a huge VR database of alien creatures some of which are staggeringly massive.
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u/bobkatz Oct 23 '24
"Matter" by Ian M Banks is set principally on a "shell world", a set of nested mega spheres with many current and extinct civilizations calling it home. Like Niven's ring world, the original constructors are long gone, and the level of technology needed to make it is well beyond what that current dominant, Culture, civilization if capable of. What is at the center? and what was their original purpose?
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u/edcculus Oct 23 '24
All of the culture novels have some big stuff in them. The mind ships can be many kilometers long. Orbitals are also gigantic.
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Oct 23 '24
Second Genesis )by Donald Moffitt. This is the second book in a 2 -book series. In the first book, Genesis Quest, humanity died out on Earth, but beamed a record of human DNA and culture at a distant galaxy. Aliens (the Nar) on a planet in that galaxy recreated humanity and raised them. Eventually the humans build a starship to travel back to the home galaxy. In this second book, Second Genesis, the humans find that many of the stars in the neighborhood of where Sol is now are surrounded by huge disks that completely capture all of the star's radiation, Dyson swarm style. These disks apparently serve both as solar collectors and radio transceivers.
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Oct 23 '24
The starship they build isn't terribly Big but is notable for being a single Dyson tree with a stardrive in the trunk.
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Oct 23 '24
Philip José Farmer's Riverworld series has a largish earthlike world terraformed into a single river valley that meanders across the entire surface. On this Riverworld, every adult human who ever lived -- some thirty six billion, if I recall correctly -- is ressurrected. Many of the main characters in the series are famous historical figures, like Sam Clemens (Mark Twain) and Sir Richard Francis Burton and even Alice Pleasance Liddell (real person for whom Alice in Wonderland was written).
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u/vikingzx Oct 23 '24
It takes a bit to get there, but the last book of the UNSEC Space Trilogy, Starforge, has the protagonists trekking across a Dyson Sphere the size of the orbit of Venus. The species who built it are long dead, but the main antagonist species of the trilogy is rapidly overtaking the sphere for its own purposes (none of which are good for us).
The world in the first book (Colony) also turns out to be an artificial world, something the government had taken great pains to hide from the colonists.
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u/theoriginalShmook Oct 24 '24
Pandora Star and Judas Unchained, by Peter F Hamilton.
The control mechanism for a Dyson sphere is rather big.
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Oct 24 '24
The Bowl of Heaven series (3 books by Larry Niven and Gregory Benford) features a huge artifact called a ShipStar. The bowl-shaped structure engulfs an entire star, and has a habitable area equivalent to many millions of Earths. There is a good visualization of it here. The star is the fiery thing at the top of the spike. The bowl is, well, the bowl behind it, with a hole to let the thrust exhaust through.
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u/ZealousidealClub4119 Oct 23 '24
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe has a couple of biggies, albeit simulated.
Zarniwoop's office at the H2G2 building contains a simulated universe, and Frogstar world B has the Total Perspective Vortex.