Big Dumb Object - Selected Examples

Selected Examples

• Ringworld
• Apparently inert yet powerful alien artifacts, such as the monolith in Arthur C. Clarke's Odyssey series, the object from the film Epoch, and the Excession from Iain M. Banks' novel of that name.
• Any ghost ship, in the sense of a vessel found drifting without a crew, for example the Event Horizon from the film of that name, and the Rama from Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama.
• The Continuum Transfunctioner from the film Dude, Where's My Car? is a parody of the Big Dumb Object, "a very mysterious and powerful device", alternately described as an object whose "mystery is only exceeded by its power" and whose "power is only exceeded by its mystery".
• V'ger from Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
• The alien array from Contact.
• The giant black hole known as the Unicron singularity in Transformers: Cybertron.
• The halos of the Halo series
• The Void ship in Doctor Who
• The planet Solaris in Stanislaw Lem's eponymous novel and film versions by Andrey Tarkovsky and Steven Soderbergh.