Any other decent 'we found an alien object' novels like Sphere?
I Found Something
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People will shit on Michael Crichton for his reputation as an airport novelist, but he's truly one of the greatest speculative fiction writers of the past thirty years.
>airport novelist
I don't even see that as a bad thing: something that can distract you for several hours from the potential threat of falling thousands of feet to your death.
Harlan Ellison bust his balls to keep his books in airports.
nowadays in airports you just find shitty Obama biographies (they don't even show Michele's cock), and Harari books, i'd rather read Crichton tbh
Well air travel got cheap, and so did the clientele.
People hate him? Why?
Popular science fiction always has it's snobs. Having movies options means you've sold out according to 'proper' literary fiction writers who write boring shit about women harvesting geraniums and making preserves to supplement their 3 job incomes while their estranged father fights cancer.
He has a pretty amazing range of ideas. Only sequel he ever wrote was Lost World and that was after some pressure.
Can think of two:
Rendezvous with Rama - Arthur C Clarke
Alien spashship turns up in the solar system with humans have near future tech and go and explore it.
Excession - Iain M Banks
Set in high tech warp drive type future. Super intelligent beings drop an object in the galaxy.
This and 2001/2010. Pretty sure Crichton stole the idea but I enjoyed Sphere more than any of his other works so I guess it’s ok.
Do not read the sequels to Rama. It was a “co-written” project and feels nothing like Clarke.
Do they become super horny like all scifi sequels of that era?
Dang I was going to post Rama
Oh yes please! I love this genre, but I don't have a large repertoire.
Dead Space: Martyr is very good
Deep Storm by Lincoln Child
Grieg Beck wrote a couple, like The Siberian Incident
Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer takes place after they find the alien object, and are now just throwing people at the problem phase. If that helps.
is it better than the movie? i liked the movie except all the scenes where women are on screen talking
Better. The women aren't just being women, there's a good reason they're there, and they all have a job to do. The movie really amped up the bitchiness, but because it's a diary of the biologist, there's a lot less chat.
The boring scenes about her husband are still boring in the book, but she also writes about her past studies and ambitions which is nice to see.
No break dance battle in the book. But it does actually have the reason for the name Annihilation, which is a baffling omission.
Not really, did you read the whole trilogy?
Its heavily implied that Area X grew out of a defect in an old lighthouse lens built by German occultists. So its alien in that its from so sort of HELP ME naggerMAN realm, but not so much from some off-planet intelligence. VDM is into that shit.
that sounds interesting, maybe will have to check the trilogy if the women are not too annoying in book 1
Ship of fools by richard russo. Has excellent pacing, I read it all in a day.
I haven't read it but I think Transfigurations by Michael Bishop is about discovering alien ruins (not an object but yeah).
roadside picnic, but it's more like we found a bunch of shit rather than one object
2001: A Space Odyssey and the sequels
This genre is called "BDO" ("big dumb object"), I believe. Searching on that might help.
A (sort of) predecessor: At the Mountains Of Madness, by naggerman.
A couple of famous examples: Rendezvous With Rama & Ringworld.
I think it works best when the people really never understand the mysterious alien THING. Roadside Picnic (the book Stalker was based on) is another example of this idea, although it has a different feel.
>This genre is called "BDO" ("big dumb object")
i hate redditors so fucking much
Sci fi writers probably came up with it. Definitely sounds like something Harlan Ellison would have said. Maybe Stupid Fucking Maguffin.
>Ringworld
Was both fascinating, and about 100 pages too long. It's surprisingly a character study of the people who go there and the ring itself, but I felt it had nothing more to offer from about the half way mark. Felt like a high class sci fi show doing the inevitable cheap episode in British Columbia.
They’re called first contact.
Kys, you are not welcomed here
>The term was not in general use until Peter Nicholls included it in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction as a joke in 1993,[1] while its creation has been attributed to reviewer Roz Kaveney.
Wow, its amazing how someone can take a genre I love and turn it into the gayest shit imaginable.
Every reply has been a solid recommendation or entirely on-topic. Maybe there is hope for this board after all.
>no blindsight by peter watts
sci fi niggas are you even trying
The eternity artifact, author has a bad habit of making MC infallible in his other books but the sizable novel was my intro into scifi
To continue this post Tue "bdo" as that other anon so graciously put it is actually a planet that is passing through the galaxy and the mc's are contracted to figure out what it is and leave it before it leaves the galaxy ( no they don't have a problem with the planet or leaving it or anything on it)B truly though it is a unique story though
"Eon" by Greg Bear.
The asteroid Juno disappears, then years later, suddenly reappears, totally transformed.
He ripped off Rendezvous with Rama, ran it through his digestive tract and dribbled shit into his typewriter. Patty-Sue saves the day trite garbage, only worth reading to provide a contrast to what a good story is.
Then write something better, gatekeeper.
Anyone can criticize. That takes no special talent.
You provided an implicit opinion through a recommendation, I provided an opinion based on having previously read your recommendation. Why are you buttblasted by this? It’s just not a very good book
Roadside Picnic
This isn't a novel, but its quite LULZ.
https://indiegroundfilms.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/a-topiary-numbered.pdf
Shane Carruth (the guy who wrote, directed, and starred in Primer on like a literal $8K budget), was trying to get this script made for years. Its one of the most engrossing sci-fi stories I've ever read that isn't a novel. It falls pretty squarely in the "alien object" genre, although its a bit closer to Childhood's End in that its about a force or influence, not necessarily an object.
This dude breaks it down pretty well but sorta blows the conclusion, or what Carruth was ultimately getting at.
Just like this asshole, I would fund this movie in a heartbeat. Carruth has since gotten #metooed and gone off the deep end, but I think he'll be back, assuming he doesn't kys himself, which I could see him doing, for fun.
Roadside Picnic(which was adapted as a film titled Stalker by Tartakovsky) is Sphere but Soviet
>Roadside Picnic(which was adapted as a film titled Stalker by Tartakovsky) is Sphere but Soviet
so basically the same, but the protagonist is depressed, gets drunk, and fights people all the time
Andromeda strain, gridlinked kinda
I guess congo could be in there as well t.b.h