BDO n.

BDOs go back a long way in the history of written sf: the sun and planets within the Earth in Ludvig Holberg’s Nicolai Klimii iter Subterraneum (1741), not actually artificial but still awesome, are proto-BDOs.

Rendevous with Rama is the classic study of the Big Dumb Object, something calculated to give the fan a jolt of ‘sense of wonder’. In this case the BDO was an enormous alien artifact, Rama, which travelled into the solar system and out of it again, mysteriously and pointlessly.

‘So, Gaby, not only are we menaced by the Chaga, we now have this Hyperion Event as well. I understand you have a nickname for it already, what is it, the BDO?’ ‘The Big Dumb Object.’ [Ibid. xxxi. 201] You think the BDO is being converted into a self-contained Earth-like environment as a kind of alien embassy?

The Americans have used their military muscle to annex the BDO, bringing it under their control.

When Alpha Squadron had arrived here after tracking down that alien signal and the colonist’s call for help, the general had assumed the exposed artifact was just another BDO—a Big Dumb Object—not particularly worth losing Terran lives over, unless he had orders to do so.

Joe Norman considered the presence and role of Big Dumb Objects (BDOs) in the work of Arthur C. Clarke and Iain M. Banks. Banks, he reminded us, was a reader of Clarke’s work when he was a young man, and Clarke had been a major influence on Banks’s work. Norman then examined the trope of the BDO as it appears in a number of Clarke’s works, such as ‘The Sentinel’ (1951), 2001 and Rendezvous with Rama (1973), and also in Banks’ Excession (1996). Norman then moved on to demonstrate how Clarke and Banks transformed the BDO from a simple plot device into a sophisticated literary tool.