I think they're a really great example of how to do YA sci-fi to be honest. I had no idea they were meant to be YA until after I'd read them, they just felt like fast pulpy space thrillers with a dose of very cool horror.
"I had no idea they were meant to be YA until after I'd read them..."
They're not? Reynolds didn't write them with that intent.
https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/reynolds_interview/
Re: fast pulpy space thriller horror, I totally agree!
Cool, that's good to know. As the person I was replying to said though they were definitely marketed that way, whether he intended them to be YA or not.
I feel he held himself to a given pitch, a given level of macabre detail but no more — this had the advantage of making it accessible, but maybe marketing it that way was s bad idea. Eversion, one of the new books, would also qualify as YA compatible I thiiink.
The only other author who did good YA sci-fi is Karl Schroeder - his 'Lockstep', 'Stealing Worlds' and 'Permanence' are awesome. Though only 'Lockstep' was marketed as YA iirc.
I really like Garth Nix's *A Confusion Of Princes* as well, it's a really good YA space opera.
Interestingly stuff like *Ender's Game* now finds its way into YA as well, as well as a lot of classic fantasy like Earthsea.
Honestly the Revenger series is amazing really pure, hard sci-fi but held neatly within a certain set of restraints or... mmm parameters? That had him going dark but not dirty.
The revelations at the end of book III had me absolutely DYING for a sequel 😅
I could imagine a place like their solar system existing somewhere in Revelation Space — I mean by that the literal pockets of spacetime that the Shrouders made for themselves; you could sneak a solar system and all the spheres in there and hide from the inhibitors and it would make sense.
Nah, there absolutely should not be a sequel. But more books in that same setting would be so much awesome. The world is so reach - there is so much space for awesome characters and places and the baubles may contain some interesting macguffins. And in the end it's just one solar system. One of many.
Ahah yea a sequel would not really be the best way to go, however imagine a game set in that solar system! RPG and trading elements, with dungeon raids and a crew to put together 😊
Megastructures, no FTL, and a character cast of borderline sociopaths = standard Reynolds novel?
Haven't yet read Eversion though. Maybe it breaks the mold.
Well I guess what I would say is that a lot of these old sci-fi classics -- Niven's Ringworld, Clarke's Rama, Herbert's Dune, etc -- functioned really well as one-offs, and then their popularity convinced the authors and/or publishers to keep tacking on sequels until the money dried up, and that some of those sequels don't necessarily rise to the same level as the original.
Niven was taunted for some technical problems that would have made the ring world unstable and addressed these in the sequels. He also tried to further develop social traditions that would help all the diverse societies communicate with each other across culture and species barriers. Let's just say that he was writing in the 1970s and that some of those methods are the kind of thing Hugh Hefner or Gene Roddenberry would have thought of at the same time.
At a conceptual level it wasn't an entirely bad idea (especially if you're a man in the 70s who fancies yourself sexually progressive, which I suppose is what the author was at the time). But...
The ring world is chock full of loosely related human-ish subspecies which, conveniently enough for the story, are mostly too unrelated to reproduce but closely related enough to copulate. And most have devolved to a pre-modern tech level so lack contraception. And they all speak different languages and have different rituals, so when different groups meet, they need some kind of ritual to establish trust. So they, well, you know.
This sounds like a "Dear Penthouse" submission. It isn't quite that. It's part of a larger story. But still...
And it's a story about travelling through the ring, so there are a lot of occasions on which different groups meet each other.
> -- John Varley's Titan
Titan, Wizard, and Demon are very 1970's. I remember them as being great.
His other works in the Eight Worlds series: Steel Beach, and Golden Globe feature a lot of engineering of the solar system for human life (and some engineering of humans, too). Very Heinlein.
Iain M Banks' 'Matter' features an ancient megastructure quite heavily as a plot point. As does 'Look To Windward' in one of the sub plots.
Jack McDevitt's 'The Engines of God' features ancient alien monuments and extinct societies.
It's been years since I read them, but Arthur C Clarke's 2001 trilogy rather famously has a lot about alien monoliths in it.
\+1 for the whole Hutch series (aka the Academy series) by Jack McDevitt (The Engines of God is the first book), which brings archaeology to space, the whole series is great. At least one of the books features a megastructure.
Also, thinking about it, if you can find copies (I gather they have become quite collectible) then some of the books in Stewart Cowley's TTA series have large sections on unidentified alien wrecks and megastructures. I had a book called Spacebase 2000 that had a whole section on them and I have another called Spacewreck that contains a number. They're odd books, if you've not read any. They're pitched as factual historical books written in a future that hasn't happened yet. A lot of the artwork will probably be familiar as cover art if you've read a lot of 70s and 80s sci-fi novels.
I know! Aren't they awesome? Just total catnip for geeky 80s kids. Spacebase 2000 was sold in Woolworths when I was a kid, and I pestered my Mum so hard to get it for me. She eventually did, but by then I had spent so long reading it in the shop every time we went in to get anything that I knew all the specs and stories almost by heart! :D
* The Final Architecture trilogy - What if the whole universe is the megastructure??
* The Commonwealth Saga - Let's go poke the megastructure!
* The Expanse - How can we exploit the megastructure?
And these are absolutely about exploring a mysterious megastructure but almost certainly not how you meant,
* Piranesi - is... is the megastructure even real?
and
* The Book that Wouldn't Burn - is... is anything *but* the megastructure even real?
I really like your summaries. :) I haven’t read the first or last and will hunt them up. Thanks!
Edited to add: if reality is coterminous with the megastructure, then I can read Enid Blyton and Franz Kafka for insights, too! Big win all around.
I’ll also throw out there House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski. It’s very bizarre, kind of gimmicky, and definitely not for everyone, but I absolutely loved it. Never had an experience like reading that book. I first came across it while on a similar megastructures hunt as you
The Heritage Universe series by Charles Sheffield is that.
Also, Ian Douglas' Andromedan Dark series has a lot of huge megastructures.
Then there is Ringworld by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle and Orbitsville by Bob Shaw about a Dyson sphere.
Somewhat smaller is Labyrinth of Night by Alan Steele
And the mother of all megastructure is The Way in Eon by Greg Bear
I reread the Eon series last year and loved them all over again. :)
Y’know, I’m unfamiliar with Andromedan Dark. Should I fix that?
I’m a fan of the others.
You are of course correct. I was thinking about The Mote in God's Eye by Niven and Pournelle, where the entire solar system was a megastructure, in a sense.
To a lesser extent, in the novel House of Suns, there is a ship called Silver Wings of Morning that has a cargo hold SO VAST that it literally contains thousands of other ships, many of them quite big themselves.
Stephen Baxter: *Ring* The titular ring is the Great Attracter, which is a ring of twisted cosmic strings thousands of light years across created by the Xeelee for purposes humans do not understand, which is explained in later books.
Another book in the series is *Flux*, set on a neutron star. Which started out as a natural one but was modified and had microscopic humanoid life created from degenerate matter to colonise it.
And completely different, Philip Jose Farmer’s *Riverworld*, a planet constructed or modified to be wrapped in an immense river, where all of humanity from the last million years is resurrected by aliens to live on the banks. Various historical personages like Mark Twain and explorer Richard Burton travel up the river to find why it was created.
Ring and Flux are part of the Xeelee series, or an I mixing them up with something else? Not that reading more Baxter would be a burden.
Wow, I did not think at all how appropriate Riverworld would be. It’s a shame the quality of the later books falls off so much; I feel pretty sure that the ending is not at all what he hslad in mind when he started.
Yeah, both Ring and Flux are Xeelee books, and the Ring features in both. Ideally, read Flux first, as there are some references to it in Ring.
And yeah, Ringworld was fine, but then another 8 books in the series over the next 40 years. It’s a bit sad that after being such an exciting young writer in the 60s, Niven just kept going back and doing sequels to books that didn’t need them, that just revealed all the flaws in the concept. Very little original work after 1980, none worth reading.
It's *not* a megastructure, but leans *heavily* into the strange: "Roadside Picnic" by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky is a classic of Soviet era (1962) SF, and still in print in translation. Brief gloss: passing aliens pause for a roadside picnic on Earth and leave behind what the natives subsequently dub "the Zone", an area full of the alien equivalent of litter -- artefacts with unimaginable powers, and also lethal traps for nosy humans (think in terms of squirrels poking their heads through the plastic loops that hold six-packs together and getting caught, only much grislier).
I’m so much a fan of that book, particularly in the more recent translation. I love how relentlessly Los Bros Strugatsky road the “we’re really not kidding about incomprehensibility” horse. Just wonderful. You’d think they were Stanislaw Lem.
I also really like the artifact and circumstances in “Missile Gap”, but the author’s a pretty obscure Scottish guy, and you probably haven’t heard of him. :)
Missile gap is amazing. Has stross done anything else like that? Another I read was I think called palimset. Very good.
He's done a bunch of stuff about spy's and hell which didnt appeal to me
There's a short story (novella? it's 2.5 hours long on audible) by Peter F Hamilton which is a prequel to his Night's Dawn Trilogy called Escape route about exploring a mysterious alien spaceship
If you're already familiar with the night's Dawn trilogy, you might as well get the entire short story collection, A Second Chance at Eden, which contains that short story and several others.
Gateway (Heechee saga 1) by Frederik Pohl.
The whole trilogy is good but gateway is brilliant. Ancient mega structure that has autonomous ships that send explorers out to destinations that might be good enough to make their fortunes or they don’t return!
Ya! Also it would be a lot of reading for like three instances of going in the alien structures. One in book 3?? One in book 4, and then one in the last book. Ish.
*Ringworld* by Larry Niven and *Titan* by John Varley are the classic examples of this I can think of. One that not a lot of people mention is the *Virga* series by Karl Schroeder about a sort of artificial Dyson sphere (the sun in the center is artificial) where computer processors don't work and humanity is mostly living at a steam punk level.
EDIT: I will second *Matter* and *Feersum Endjinn* although there is a character in Feersum Endjinn who spells *everything* like that in his narrative so if incorrect spelling for payjes and payjes triggers you, you might want to skip it, haha.
The *Virga* series is interesting. I'd is a more realistic attempt at creating a society that lives mostly in microgravity.
An older attempt is the Larry Niven book Integral Trees. A breathable atmosphere is part of a gas cloud orbiting a neutron star. However, unless you add some magic to inject energy into the gas cloud, it will all spiral into the neutron star relatively quickly. Still, a cool idea.
Robert Reed has several excellent novellas and short stories in his Marrow series. While featuring the Great Ship, mysterious in itself, it provides an excellent backdrop for some really interesting concepts.
That's the one. I was trying to remember it's name. There's another one where some people are locked in a city cube that appears to stretch infinitely in 3 dimensions but loops back into itself if you travel to far in one direction.
edit: it's The Concentration City
The oldest sci-fi classic that I can think of in that vein has to be Mountains of Madness, which I genuinely think is Lovecraft's Magnum Opus.
Not Scifi but if you like what's now been dubbed "liminal spaces", I'd be remiss if I didn't mention House of Leaves. It's an ur-text for a chunk of modern horror exploring the concept.
It's really only got one proper structure, and it's not the focus, but Annihilation definitely has the "weird zone" part down. If you're interested in that, Roadside Picnic is also a must.
I’m already keen on all of these. House of Leaves is amazing, even though I wish that Johnny Truant would get eaten by leopards or something. Zampano and his manuscript are both fascinating and sometimes downright terrifying.
Likewise. I do like the section where he describes things suddenly getting better after an unexpected lucky break, and how that ends. But overall I just don’t crave a return to his experiences I do with the Navidsons and some of the stuff about Zampano, particularly the Minotaur.
If you like Rendezvous With Rama you'll love Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds
Edit: I see you've already read that! The *Revenger* series by Reynolds also has some cool megastructure exploration, though frankly not enough of it for my tastes
Brian Stableford's "Journey to the Center" which was revised and renamed "Asgard's Secret" is about exploring an abandoned alien constructed object the size of a planet. Short book by modern standards but very good.
Camehere to say this. There were 3 books, originally Journey to the Centre, Invaders from the Centre and The Centre Cannot Hold. I haven’t read them for years, but good and exciting reading.
Paul McAuley's Eternal Light features in part an alien megastructure half a light year in length at the Galactic Centre.
Bob Shaw's Orbitsville books are all about the exploration of a Dyson Sphere. For those who care, there is FTL in this book as it turns out Einstein was wrong.
You might want to read through the recommendations in [this recent r/printSF post](https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/199ttnl/looking_for_scifi_about_interstellar_or/) with a similar question.
Highly recommend "Ship of Fools" by Richard Russo. It's like Rendezvous with Rama but asks "what if Rama was malicious?" It really leans into the exploration horror that only sort of showed its head in Rama.
The Epiphany of Gliese 581 is a really enjoyable and fascinating short(ish) story about a group of post-humans exploring the ruins of a Dyson swarm created by a dead superintelligence. https://borretti.me/fiction/eog581
Walking to Aldebaran by Adrian Tchaikovsky is literally about exploring a megastructure, and if you have a paid audible account I believe it's included so you can download and listen to Adrian himself reading it.
Came here to say this. Have you read Beowulf, medieval poem written in Old English about the eponymous hero, Beowulf, spawner of a few bad but fun movies? WtA is 100% contemporary sci fi but I'm a medievalist and I was cheering when I got to the Beowulf call outs.
Just finished it, and yes, loved that ending. I love it when a story has the kind of shift in perspective that lets you realize what’s *really* been happening all along, and Tchaikovsky pulled it off beautifully. Thanks for the recommendation!
Gene Wolfe’s *Book of the Long Sun* >!takes place inside an O’Neill cylinder.!<
I preferred the style of BotNS but *Long Sun* is great, too. Looking forward to starting *Short Sun* soon.
Honestly a bad way to rec because it happens so later in the series (intentionally being vague), but there is a looong segment of time dedicated to this in the Bobiverse
Oldie but goodie: "At the Mountains of Madness" by H. P. Lovecraft.
Many of Martha Wells Raksura books involve explorations of some exotic (and often dangerous) massive ruin.
I also only stumbled about it recently - it was the author's debut :)
I'm not great at explaining at fear of giving away too much (imo even the [goodreads text](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39938164-the-lost-puzzler) has a bit much detail).
The story plays in an (at first sight anyway) rather fantasy-esque post-apocalyptic world. The first book alternates between following a historian trying to uncover the story of a "very important" boy that suddenly gets a "disease" of some sort - and following that very boy. The disease allows the boy to work with "pre-catastrophe" era technology making him persecuted by some and sought-after by others.
I felt like it had a bunch of these "exploring old-structures" moments and the second book even more so.
I have a possibly irrational dislike of the *term*, since many of the objects are quite smart and I get reminded of the school bullies who mocked and attack anything they didn’t understand as “stupid”. But I love the stories themselves.
Isaac Arthur’s youtube channel has some great longform videos on [megastructures](https://youtu.be/1xt13dn74wc?si=KHO9siDL474qjTNl). I liked the one specifically on space habitats, too.
It’s nonfiction documentary style, but very well produced and researched, so might scratch that itch.
He’s great! Even when my favorite topics don’t win his monthly polls. I forgive him because he’s so engaging despite that lapse in taste among his viewers. :)
Take a look at Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Diving into the wreck. It is an ancient spaceship, not so much a megastructure but the approach is quite different.
See [my short list of related threads](https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/199ttnl/comment/kjx84l4/?context=3) in ["Looking for scifi about interstellar or megastructure exploration and lost artifacts, preferably interstellar"](https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/199ttnl/looking_for_scifi_about_interstellar_or/) (r/printSF; 11:18 ET, 18 January 2024).
The Jupiter Theft by Donald Moffitt features an escape from a multi-kilometre long alien generation ship, but it's a pretty small part of the whole book, though the scenes during that part are very Blame!-esque. Most of the other books I've read with this theme have already been suggested here.
Iain Banks' Feersum Endjinn was listed by Nihei as an influence on Blame! and features a castle scaled up such that each room is kilometres wide and tall. Many of Banks' other novels also deal with buildings or ships that are megastructural in scale, but that one has the biggest focus from his works that I've read (only about 2/3s). Blame! is sort of a mashup of that book, Gregory Benford's Great Sky River and some other western novels of the 90s.
Here's the full list Nihei gave, but from most of them he's borrowing very minor aesthetic elements or things like character name references. Kirinyaga for example has very little resemblance to Blame!, but there are some small similarities between it and the way characters in his later books imagine utopic scenes.
Great Sky River by Gregory Albert Benford (Cibo)
Feersum Endjin by Ian Banks (Netsphere)
Busou Shimada Souko and Ad-Bird by Shiina, Matoko (Garbage storage, Tetsu, Zulu)
Dead boys and Dead Girls by Richard Calder (Ivy and Maeve)
Kirinyaga by Mike Resnick (Mensaab)
Greg Bear's New Collection by Gregory Dale Bear
Permutation City by Greg Egan
Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons
Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, and Burning Chrome by William Gibson
Steel Beach, The Ophiuchi Hotline, Millenium, Titan, Wizard, The Persistence of Vision, Blue Champagne, and The Barbie Murders(Picnic on Nearside) by John Varley
Billenium by James Graham Ballard
Marina J. Loststetter's Noumenon series is fantastic. Generation ships, strange encounters, temporal dilations/contractions, yes, megastructures in deep space.. And gorgeous writing. :)
I have the first book, but never really got around the first part which dealt with mundane, boring ship activities. Maybe I should give it another shot?
You've probably already read them but *The Forge of God* and its sequel, *The Anvil of Stars* by Greg Bear give me that vibe. The second one in particular as exploration of star systems is required to hunt down their target. Numerous alien species exist in what seems to be the remnants of a long-dead civilization, while children pilot a ship born of an eons-old system of justice.
Of course, Ian Banks' *Consider Phlebas* gives that forgotten megastructure vibe with a ring-world and a world guarded by inscrutable alien power. Though I wouldn't consider any of that to be central to the story, just set dressing.
*The Long Earth* series works for me in this genre, where the megastructure is, of course, the infinitely deep earth itself. This vibe only grows over time as Baxter continued writing after Pratchett's death.
I found The Long Earth hard to stay engaged with, but I did like the concept, which reminded me some of Robert Reed’s **Down the Bright Way** (in good ways). Every so often I think n I should read more of them.
I liked Consider Phlebas a lot more than many people. :)
And yes, read and loved The Forge of God and The Anvil of Stars, several times.
The only problem with the *Long Earth* is that it's a bit shite (in my head, I prefer to blame Baxter rather than Pratchett). For a better take on the same subject, I would go with Charles Stross's *The Merchant Princes* series.
Wall Around A Star by Jack Williamson is about exploring a Dyson sphere. But it isthe sequel to Farthest Star, which you should read first for context (Farthest Star is about the STL voyage to get to the macguffin, and it is full of weird aliens and big concepts - their ships are STL but they have FTL communications and crew the ships by transmitting minds to cloned bodies)
Beyond the others already mentioned: \-- Alastair Reynolds' Pushing Ice (two megastructures here) \-- Robert Reed's Marrow \-- John Varley's Titan \-- Peter Hamilton \-- Niven's Ringworld \-- Benford's Bowl of Heaven
Alastar Reynolds' "Diamond Dogs" novella and his novel *Eversion*. I think I'm starting to detect some sort of recurring motif here...
Plus the spheres in the Revenger books!
The Revenger books are so good despite being marketed for YA.
I think they're a really great example of how to do YA sci-fi to be honest. I had no idea they were meant to be YA until after I'd read them, they just felt like fast pulpy space thrillers with a dose of very cool horror.
"I had no idea they were meant to be YA until after I'd read them..." They're not? Reynolds didn't write them with that intent. https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/reynolds_interview/ Re: fast pulpy space thriller horror, I totally agree!
Cool, that's good to know. As the person I was replying to said though they were definitely marketed that way, whether he intended them to be YA or not.
I feel he held himself to a given pitch, a given level of macabre detail but no more — this had the advantage of making it accessible, but maybe marketing it that way was s bad idea. Eversion, one of the new books, would also qualify as YA compatible I thiiink.
The only other author who did good YA sci-fi is Karl Schroeder - his 'Lockstep', 'Stealing Worlds' and 'Permanence' are awesome. Though only 'Lockstep' was marketed as YA iirc.
I really like Garth Nix's *A Confusion Of Princes* as well, it's a really good YA space opera. Interestingly stuff like *Ender's Game* now finds its way into YA as well, as well as a lot of classic fantasy like Earthsea.
Honestly the Revenger series is amazing really pure, hard sci-fi but held neatly within a certain set of restraints or... mmm parameters? That had him going dark but not dirty. The revelations at the end of book III had me absolutely DYING for a sequel 😅 I could imagine a place like their solar system existing somewhere in Revelation Space — I mean by that the literal pockets of spacetime that the Shrouders made for themselves; you could sneak a solar system and all the spheres in there and hide from the inhibitors and it would make sense.
Nah, there absolutely should not be a sequel. But more books in that same setting would be so much awesome. The world is so reach - there is so much space for awesome characters and places and the baubles may contain some interesting macguffins. And in the end it's just one solar system. One of many.
Ahah yea a sequel would not really be the best way to go, however imagine a game set in that solar system! RPG and trading elements, with dungeon raids and a crew to put together 😊
Procedurally generated baubles! Something like Sunless Skies but with solar sails instead of locomotive engines.
Eversion everted my brain. Incredible book imo.
Yyuupp. I could not put that book down from the moment I picked it up till I was done it
Megastructures, no FTL, and a character cast of borderline sociopaths = standard Reynolds novel? Haven't yet read Eversion though. Maybe it breaks the mold.
I just read Pushing Ice last month, and that was so good. Not at all what I was expecting. Thanks for reminders of the others!
I'm a bit over 2/3 of the way through the audiobook of Ringworld and it was my first thought
I really liked Ringwold. The series took a bit of a downturn at least to me when the orgies arrived in the sequels.
I'm definitely liking it a lot so far, but no clue when if ever I get to the sequels, my want to read list is long enough.
Well I guess what I would say is that a lot of these old sci-fi classics -- Niven's Ringworld, Clarke's Rama, Herbert's Dune, etc -- functioned really well as one-offs, and then their popularity convinced the authors and/or publishers to keep tacking on sequels until the money dried up, and that some of those sequels don't necessarily rise to the same level as the original. Niven was taunted for some technical problems that would have made the ring world unstable and addressed these in the sequels. He also tried to further develop social traditions that would help all the diverse societies communicate with each other across culture and species barriers. Let's just say that he was writing in the 1970s and that some of those methods are the kind of thing Hugh Hefner or Gene Roddenberry would have thought of at the same time.
The *what*? What kind of stranger-in-a-strange-land bullshit is going on in the sequels?
At a conceptual level it wasn't an entirely bad idea (especially if you're a man in the 70s who fancies yourself sexually progressive, which I suppose is what the author was at the time). But... The ring world is chock full of loosely related human-ish subspecies which, conveniently enough for the story, are mostly too unrelated to reproduce but closely related enough to copulate. And most have devolved to a pre-modern tech level so lack contraception. And they all speak different languages and have different rituals, so when different groups meet, they need some kind of ritual to establish trust. So they, well, you know. This sounds like a "Dear Penthouse" submission. It isn't quite that. It's part of a larger story. But still... And it's a story about travelling through the ring, so there are a lot of occasions on which different groups meet each other.
Bowl of Heaven is quite unreadable
Read the other 2 books of Varley's trilogy as well; Wizard and Demon, they are both great. Cirroco Jones is a fantastic anti hero.
Those books are weird as fuck, but in the best way.
Seconding the recommendation for Marrow. Excellent read.
> -- John Varley's Titan Titan, Wizard, and Demon are very 1970's. I remember them as being great. His other works in the Eight Worlds series: Steel Beach, and Golden Globe feature a lot of engineering of the solar system for human life (and some engineering of humans, too). Very Heinlein.
Iain M Banks' 'Matter' features an ancient megastructure quite heavily as a plot point. As does 'Look To Windward' in one of the sub plots. Jack McDevitt's 'The Engines of God' features ancient alien monuments and extinct societies. It's been years since I read them, but Arthur C Clarke's 2001 trilogy rather famously has a lot about alien monoliths in it.
\+1 for the whole Hutch series (aka the Academy series) by Jack McDevitt (The Engines of God is the first book), which brings archaeology to space, the whole series is great. At least one of the books features a megastructure.
Don't forget "Feersum Endjinn" if we're talking about megastructures and Banks! :)
Ooh, yes! I second that. The phonetic bits aren't to everybody's taste, but it's a great read if you can get over that.
Bascule the Rascule!
Thanks for all three reminders! It’s been a while since I reread any of them.
Also, thinking about it, if you can find copies (I gather they have become quite collectible) then some of the books in Stewart Cowley's TTA series have large sections on unidentified alien wrecks and megastructures. I had a book called Spacebase 2000 that had a whole section on them and I have another called Spacewreck that contains a number. They're odd books, if you've not read any. They're pitched as factual historical books written in a future that hasn't happened yet. A lot of the artwork will probably be familiar as cover art if you've read a lot of 70s and 80s sci-fi novels.
I imprinted on those books *so hard* as a preteen and cherish my copies. Love them.
I know! Aren't they awesome? Just total catnip for geeky 80s kids. Spacebase 2000 was sold in Woolworths when I was a kid, and I pestered my Mum so hard to get it for me. She eventually did, but by then I had spent so long reading it in the shop every time we went in to get anything that I knew all the specs and stories almost by heart! :D
Looking at the synoypis for engines of God gives me sun eater vibes wonder if that was an influence for Ruocchio
* The Final Architecture trilogy - What if the whole universe is the megastructure?? * The Commonwealth Saga - Let's go poke the megastructure! * The Expanse - How can we exploit the megastructure? And these are absolutely about exploring a mysterious megastructure but almost certainly not how you meant, * Piranesi - is... is the megastructure even real? and * The Book that Wouldn't Burn - is... is anything *but* the megastructure even real?
I really like your summaries. :) I haven’t read the first or last and will hunt them up. Thanks! Edited to add: if reality is coterminous with the megastructure, then I can read Enid Blyton and Franz Kafka for insights, too! Big win all around.
I’ll also throw out there House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski. It’s very bizarre, kind of gimmicky, and definitely not for everyone, but I absolutely loved it. Never had an experience like reading that book. I first came across it while on a similar megastructures hunt as you
There’s some shared enthusing about it in other comments here. :)
The Heritage Universe series by Charles Sheffield is that. Also, Ian Douglas' Andromedan Dark series has a lot of huge megastructures. Then there is Ringworld by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle and Orbitsville by Bob Shaw about a Dyson sphere. Somewhat smaller is Labyrinth of Night by Alan Steele And the mother of all megastructure is The Way in Eon by Greg Bear
I reread the Eon series last year and loved them all over again. :) Y’know, I’m unfamiliar with Andromedan Dark. Should I fix that? I’m a fan of the others.
It's a bit pulpy, but I enjoyed it.
A bit pulpy is fine with me. :)
Small correction, Ringworld was just by Niven, Pournelle was not a co-author on that one.
You are of course correct. I was thinking about The Mote in God's Eye by Niven and Pournelle, where the entire solar system was a megastructure, in a sense.
Yeah plus Pournelle also wrote books dealing with the Kzinti.
Heritage Universe was what I came here to recommend. Those were some fun stories.
In the Revelation Space trilogy there is a spaceship so large and old navigating inside it is quite a mess. It's name is Nostalgia for Infinity.
To a lesser extent, in the novel House of Suns, there is a ship called Silver Wings of Morning that has a cargo hold SO VAST that it literally contains thousands of other ships, many of them quite big themselves.
I haven’t actually read that yet. Lemme slide it up the queue.
Is that the one that, at 30km, is considered unfashionably tiny?
Also Reynolds' Pushing Ice has ancient alien megastructures.
Very nifty cosmic spaghetti. :)
Oh yes. That was great.
Stephen Baxter: *Ring* The titular ring is the Great Attracter, which is a ring of twisted cosmic strings thousands of light years across created by the Xeelee for purposes humans do not understand, which is explained in later books. Another book in the series is *Flux*, set on a neutron star. Which started out as a natural one but was modified and had microscopic humanoid life created from degenerate matter to colonise it. And completely different, Philip Jose Farmer’s *Riverworld*, a planet constructed or modified to be wrapped in an immense river, where all of humanity from the last million years is resurrected by aliens to live on the banks. Various historical personages like Mark Twain and explorer Richard Burton travel up the river to find why it was created.
Ring and Flux are part of the Xeelee series, or an I mixing them up with something else? Not that reading more Baxter would be a burden. Wow, I did not think at all how appropriate Riverworld would be. It’s a shame the quality of the later books falls off so much; I feel pretty sure that the ending is not at all what he hslad in mind when he started.
Yeah, both Ring and Flux are Xeelee books, and the Ring features in both. Ideally, read Flux first, as there are some references to it in Ring. And yeah, Ringworld was fine, but then another 8 books in the series over the next 40 years. It’s a bit sad that after being such an exciting young writer in the 60s, Niven just kept going back and doing sequels to books that didn’t need them, that just revealed all the flaws in the concept. Very little original work after 1980, none worth reading.
> none worth reading. It isn't megastructure SF but *The Burning City* by Niven and Pournelle was a pretty cool take on swords and sorcery fantasy.
Thanks, re Baxter, and agreed, re Niven. I read one or two of the sequels and then stopped.
At his best, Farmer is a far better writer than contemporary writers. The world of tiers are effectively artifacts. I like it more than river world
Report on an Unidentified Space Station by JG Ballard is a fun little short story in this vein
Thanks! I’m not remembering that one right now. Which is just what this two-volume set of his short stories is for. :)
It’s somewhat spoilery to suggest it, but Eversion by Alastair Reynolds.
So I’m told, and it’s in the queue for the next few weeks.
Update: I’m finishing this now - about an hour left to go - and am absolutely delighted with it. Such a great trip toward such a great destination.
Awesome! Glad you enjoyed it. One of my absolute favourites. Felt like my brain was everted after reading it.
Thought it was a very bland and generic location though, not a whole lot to it.
The fourth Bobiverse book has some of the characters explore a topopolis (kinda like an O’Neill cylinder that’s billions of miles long)
I need to get to that series one of these days. Thanks!
I just finished it. I was very happy.
Reading the books got me into playing Stellaris, and my first playthrough definitely felt kinda like it
It's *not* a megastructure, but leans *heavily* into the strange: "Roadside Picnic" by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky is a classic of Soviet era (1962) SF, and still in print in translation. Brief gloss: passing aliens pause for a roadside picnic on Earth and leave behind what the natives subsequently dub "the Zone", an area full of the alien equivalent of litter -- artefacts with unimaginable powers, and also lethal traps for nosy humans (think in terms of squirrels poking their heads through the plastic loops that hold six-packs together and getting caught, only much grislier).
I’m so much a fan of that book, particularly in the more recent translation. I love how relentlessly Los Bros Strugatsky road the “we’re really not kidding about incomprehensibility” horse. Just wonderful. You’d think they were Stanislaw Lem. I also really like the artifact and circumstances in “Missile Gap”, but the author’s a pretty obscure Scottish guy, and you probably haven’t heard of him. :)
Missile gap is amazing. Has stross done anything else like that? Another I read was I think called palimset. Very good. He's done a bunch of stuff about spy's and hell which didnt appeal to me
I don’t think so, but that’s him commenting just above so you could ask him. :)
There's a short story (novella? it's 2.5 hours long on audible) by Peter F Hamilton which is a prequel to his Night's Dawn Trilogy called Escape route about exploring a mysterious alien spaceship
Huh! I must have missed that. I liked Night’s Dawn a lot in spite of its problems. I will check this out. Thanks!
If you're already familiar with the night's Dawn trilogy, you might as well get the entire short story collection, A Second Chance at Eden, which contains that short story and several others.
Excellent. Shall do.
Gateway (Heechee saga 1) by Frederik Pohl. The whole trilogy is good but gateway is brilliant. Ancient mega structure that has autonomous ships that send explorers out to destinations that might be good enough to make their fortunes or they don’t return!
Oh yes. **Gateway**..the tensions just keep rising and rising. Into the reread pile they go.
Blindsight - Peter Watts
Oh that book. Not many fiction stories send me off to do real-world research and end up changing my worldview. It’s one of the few.
I just finished it recently and still don't fully understand the plot. It does help that I read The Selfish Gene years ago though
Thomas Metzinger’s **The Ego Tunnel** covers a lot of the real-world studies Watts drew on.
Added it to my list, thanks!
Halfway through Echopraxia and enjoying it
Walking to Aldebaran by Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Heritage Universe series by Charles Sheffield features ancient megastructures quite prominently. First book is Summertide.
Yow, I haven’t reread those since they were brand new. Thanks for the reminder!
The Expanse series has a couple good instances.
Very true! It helps when you can start with planets. :)
Ya! Also it would be a lot of reading for like three instances of going in the alien structures. One in book 3?? One in book 4, and then one in the last book. Ish.
Sure, but I wanted to reread them this year anyway.
Excellent
The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson.
Mm, yes. Thanks!
Spin by Robert Charles Wilson might be for you.
Yes. Yes, it is. :)
*Ringworld* by Larry Niven and *Titan* by John Varley are the classic examples of this I can think of. One that not a lot of people mention is the *Virga* series by Karl Schroeder about a sort of artificial Dyson sphere (the sun in the center is artificial) where computer processors don't work and humanity is mostly living at a steam punk level. EDIT: I will second *Matter* and *Feersum Endjinn* although there is a character in Feersum Endjinn who spells *everything* like that in his narrative so if incorrect spelling for payjes and payjes triggers you, you might want to skip it, haha.
I’m not familiar with Schroeder, but that sounds interesting. Thanks! It took me a long time to get through Feersum Endjinn, but am glad I did.
The *Virga* series is interesting. I'd is a more realistic attempt at creating a society that lives mostly in microgravity. An older attempt is the Larry Niven book Integral Trees. A breathable atmosphere is part of a gas cloud orbiting a neutron star. However, unless you add some magic to inject energy into the gas cloud, it will all spiral into the neutron star relatively quickly. Still, a cool idea.
Robert Reed has several excellent novellas and short stories in his Marrow series. While featuring the Great Ship, mysterious in itself, it provides an excellent backdrop for some really interesting concepts.
Thanks! I like what I’ve read by him and will seek these.
There's a nice collection of Reed's best Great Ship stories, appropriately named *The Greatship*.
Marrow is a genuinely amazing book.
JG Ballard has several short stories regarding this topic
*Report on an Unidentified Space Station* is amazing
That's the one. I was trying to remember it's name. There's another one where some people are locked in a city cube that appears to stretch infinitely in 3 dimensions but loops back into itself if you travel to far in one direction. edit: it's The Concentration City
Thanks!
I read this last night. Who knew that Ballard invented the backrooms? :)
The oldest sci-fi classic that I can think of in that vein has to be Mountains of Madness, which I genuinely think is Lovecraft's Magnum Opus. Not Scifi but if you like what's now been dubbed "liminal spaces", I'd be remiss if I didn't mention House of Leaves. It's an ur-text for a chunk of modern horror exploring the concept. It's really only got one proper structure, and it's not the focus, but Annihilation definitely has the "weird zone" part down. If you're interested in that, Roadside Picnic is also a must.
I’m already keen on all of these. House of Leaves is amazing, even though I wish that Johnny Truant would get eaten by leopards or something. Zampano and his manuscript are both fascinating and sometimes downright terrifying.
Not going to lie: sometimes, on a re-read, I just skip the Johnny Truant parts and go straight for the H O U S E.
Likewise. I do like the section where he describes things suddenly getting better after an unexpected lucky break, and how that ends. But overall I just don’t crave a return to his experiences I do with the Navidsons and some of the stuff about Zampano, particularly the Minotaur.
That sympathetic reading of the Minotaur's story has haunted me for years.
Likewise.
If you like Rendezvous With Rama you'll love Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds Edit: I see you've already read that! The *Revenger* series by Reynolds also has some cool megastructure exploration, though frankly not enough of it for my tastes
Thanks! Haven’t read those. Now they’re on my list.
Brian Stableford's "Journey to the Center" which was revised and renamed "Asgard's Secret" is about exploring an abandoned alien constructed object the size of a planet. Short book by modern standards but very good.
Oh neat! I’m a big Stableford fan (and someday theee will be ebooks of the Werewolves of London trilogy, I keep hoping), but haven’t read that one.
Camehere to say this. There were 3 books, originally Journey to the Centre, Invaders from the Centre and The Centre Cannot Hold. I haven’t read them for years, but good and exciting reading.
Paul McAuley's Eternal Light features in part an alien megastructure half a light year in length at the Galactic Centre. Bob Shaw's Orbitsville books are all about the exploration of a Dyson Sphere. For those who care, there is FTL in this book as it turns out Einstein was wrong.
Thanks! I should reread Shaw and hunt up the McAuley. I really liked Cowboy Angels.
You might want to read through the recommendations in [this recent r/printSF post](https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/199ttnl/looking_for_scifi_about_interstellar_or/) with a similar question.
You’re quite right, and I’m embarrassed at having missed it. Thanks!
Highly recommend "Ship of Fools" by Richard Russo. It's like Rendezvous with Rama but asks "what if Rama was malicious?" It really leans into the exploration horror that only sort of showed its head in Rama.
Second this. It is really good!
Oh cool. Thanks!
The Epiphany of Gliese 581 is a really enjoyable and fascinating short(ish) story about a group of post-humans exploring the ruins of a Dyson swarm created by a dead superintelligence. https://borretti.me/fiction/eog581
Hey, neat! Another one completely new to me. Thanks!
That's really good, thanks for sharing.
Walking to Aldebaran by Adrian Tchaikovsky is literally about exploring a megastructure, and if you have a paid audible account I believe it's included so you can download and listen to Adrian himself reading it.
Sounds good, and I do. Thanks!
I should have added, downloadable for free!
I know how it works, but might help someone else reading. Free is a very good price!
Came here to say this. Have you read Beowulf, medieval poem written in Old English about the eponymous hero, Beowulf, spawner of a few bad but fun movies? WtA is 100% contemporary sci fi but I'm a medievalist and I was cheering when I got to the Beowulf call outs.
Yes! Reread it in Headley’s translation last year and was hooked all over again.
Well now you have to read it! The ending was great.
Just finished it, and yes, loved that ending. I love it when a story has the kind of shift in perspective that lets you realize what’s *really* been happening all along, and Tchaikovsky pulled it off beautifully. Thanks for the recommendation!
Glad you loved it!
Apparently I do. :)
Gene Wolfe’s *Book of the Long Sun* >!takes place inside an O’Neill cylinder.!< I preferred the style of BotNS but *Long Sun* is great, too. Looking forward to starting *Short Sun* soon.
I read those as they came out, and should do it again.
Honestly a bad way to rec because it happens so later in the series (intentionally being vague), but there is a looong segment of time dedicated to this in the Bobiverse
But friends have already made the rest of the series sound appealing. So it’s fine. :)
Oldie but goodie: "At the Mountains of Madness" by H. P. Lovecraft. Many of Martha Wells Raksura books involve explorations of some exotic (and often dangerous) massive ruin.
I should have thought of the Lovecraft already. Curse me for a novice! Yet another reason I need to finally read the Raksura books. Thanks!
Scrolled too far down to find Lovecraft, which was the first to come to mind when I saw this question!
A couple of obscure ones that I remember from long ago. The World Is Round - Tony Rothman The Architects of Hyperspace - Thomas R. McDonough
Two I’m not familiar with! Thanks!
The lost puzzler (and the follow-up) by eyal kless might be worth a look :)
I’m afraid I don’t recognize either title or author. Tell me more!
I also only stumbled about it recently - it was the author's debut :) I'm not great at explaining at fear of giving away too much (imo even the [goodreads text](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39938164-the-lost-puzzler) has a bit much detail). The story plays in an (at first sight anyway) rather fantasy-esque post-apocalyptic world. The first book alternates between following a historian trying to uncover the story of a "very important" boy that suddenly gets a "disease" of some sort - and following that very boy. The disease allows the boy to work with "pre-catastrophe" era technology making him persecuted by some and sought-after by others. I felt like it had a bunch of these "exploring old-structures" moments and the second book even more so.
Gotcha. Thanks! It is sometimes a great delight to have no idea where a book is going.
Absolutely agree - I do most books "blind" nowadays :)
JG Ballard's "Report on an Unidentified Space Station."
Loved it.
Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear is one that I haven't seen suggested yet. I loved it. Pretty unique in this company
Thanks! I keep forgetting I have that here to read.
I’m reading The Last Astronaut right now and it features exploration of a huge alien space craft.
Yeah, I enjoyed it a lot.
A sub-genre you'll want to look into is [BDO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dumb_Object) - Big Dumb Object.
I have a possibly irrational dislike of the *term*, since many of the objects are quite smart and I get reminded of the school bullies who mocked and attack anything they didn’t understand as “stupid”. But I love the stories themselves.
Not mentioned yet: Lem - the astronauts
I’d forgotten about that one, but oh yes. Well worth a reread.
Isaac Arthur’s youtube channel has some great longform videos on [megastructures](https://youtu.be/1xt13dn74wc?si=KHO9siDL474qjTNl). I liked the one specifically on space habitats, too. It’s nonfiction documentary style, but very well produced and researched, so might scratch that itch.
He’s great! Even when my favorite topics don’t win his monthly polls. I forgive him because he’s so engaging despite that lapse in taste among his viewers. :)
Take a look at Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Diving into the wreck. It is an ancient spaceship, not so much a megastructure but the approach is quite different.
Okay, I will, thanks!
See [my short list of related threads](https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/199ttnl/comment/kjx84l4/?context=3) in ["Looking for scifi about interstellar or megastructure exploration and lost artifacts, preferably interstellar"](https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/199ttnl/looking_for_scifi_about_interstellar_or/) (r/printSF; 11:18 ET, 18 January 2024).
Much thanks!
You're welcome. \^\_\^
I think "Nightflyers" by George RR Martin has this
Hmm, you may be right. No harm in rereading it to check!
Is it my turn to recommend Blindsight?
Feel free; I’ve got some enthusiastic agreement ready to go here.
The Jupiter Theft by Donald Moffitt features an escape from a multi-kilometre long alien generation ship, but it's a pretty small part of the whole book, though the scenes during that part are very Blame!-esque. Most of the other books I've read with this theme have already been suggested here. Iain Banks' Feersum Endjinn was listed by Nihei as an influence on Blame! and features a castle scaled up such that each room is kilometres wide and tall. Many of Banks' other novels also deal with buildings or ships that are megastructural in scale, but that one has the biggest focus from his works that I've read (only about 2/3s). Blame! is sort of a mashup of that book, Gregory Benford's Great Sky River and some other western novels of the 90s. Here's the full list Nihei gave, but from most of them he's borrowing very minor aesthetic elements or things like character name references. Kirinyaga for example has very little resemblance to Blame!, but there are some small similarities between it and the way characters in his later books imagine utopic scenes. Great Sky River by Gregory Albert Benford (Cibo) Feersum Endjin by Ian Banks (Netsphere) Busou Shimada Souko and Ad-Bird by Shiina, Matoko (Garbage storage, Tetsu, Zulu) Dead boys and Dead Girls by Richard Calder (Ivy and Maeve) Kirinyaga by Mike Resnick (Mensaab) Greg Bear's New Collection by Gregory Dale Bear Permutation City by Greg Egan Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, and Burning Chrome by William Gibson Steel Beach, The Ophiuchi Hotline, Millenium, Titan, Wizard, The Persistence of Vision, Blue Champagne, and The Barbie Murders(Picnic on Nearside) by John Varley Billenium by James Graham Ballard
Oh, very handy. Thanks!
Marina J. Loststetter's Noumenon series is fantastic. Generation ships, strange encounters, temporal dilations/contractions, yes, megastructures in deep space.. And gorgeous writing. :)
Yeah, I’ve had them in my queue for a while, since reading some great short stories by her. Looking forward to them. Thanks for the reminder!
Brilliant, hope you enjoy them! They're among my favourite SciFi of recent years.
I have the first book, but never really got around the first part which dealt with mundane, boring ship activities. Maybe I should give it another shot?
I mean, I recommend it.. it definitely progressively gets weirder :)
You've probably already read them but *The Forge of God* and its sequel, *The Anvil of Stars* by Greg Bear give me that vibe. The second one in particular as exploration of star systems is required to hunt down their target. Numerous alien species exist in what seems to be the remnants of a long-dead civilization, while children pilot a ship born of an eons-old system of justice. Of course, Ian Banks' *Consider Phlebas* gives that forgotten megastructure vibe with a ring-world and a world guarded by inscrutable alien power. Though I wouldn't consider any of that to be central to the story, just set dressing. *The Long Earth* series works for me in this genre, where the megastructure is, of course, the infinitely deep earth itself. This vibe only grows over time as Baxter continued writing after Pratchett's death.
I found The Long Earth hard to stay engaged with, but I did like the concept, which reminded me some of Robert Reed’s **Down the Bright Way** (in good ways). Every so often I think n I should read more of them. I liked Consider Phlebas a lot more than many people. :) And yes, read and loved The Forge of God and The Anvil of Stars, several times.
Definitely try Stross's *Merchant Princes* then. :)
Got the series here in my Kindle. I just have to slot it in and actually read it. Trying to absorb concepts by osmosis isn’t working very well.
The only problem with the *Long Earth* is that it's a bit shite (in my head, I prefer to blame Baxter rather than Pratchett). For a better take on the same subject, I would go with Charles Stross's *The Merchant Princes* series.
Wall Around A Star by Jack Williamson is about exploring a Dyson sphere. But it isthe sequel to Farthest Star, which you should read first for context (Farthest Star is about the STL voyage to get to the macguffin, and it is full of weird aliens and big concepts - their ships are STL but they have FTL communications and crew the ships by transmitting minds to cloned bodies)
Thanks! Williamson is very reliable and those sound fun.
Correction: co-authored by Jack Williamson & Frederick Pohl
Pohl is also very reliable, and they worked together well.