The new NBC series Debris got me thinking about other sci-fi works that have as a central element Weird Objects that violate known laws of physics, and the conflict among collectors. Other examples that occurred to me included The Lost Room, Warehouse 13, and what may be the ur-work of this sub-genre, Roadside Picnic.. Is this recognized as its own sub-genre? Does it have a name?
Not sure if has a name. I can think of The Peace War (or Across Realtime) by Vernor Vinge in which some scientists create a type of force field created by a device called a bobbler which bureaucrats running the research centre use to force an ending to a war and then go on to exert authority over the world.
The sequel is where the concept of the technological singularity is first mooted.
ArtifactPunk? (I just made that up). “Rogue Moon” (Budrys) and “Firewater” (William Tenn) are precursors.
There’s the horror series Friday the 13th.
It was a cursed object of the week series.
I don’t know about the genre, but the objects themselves are usually called out-of-place objects, or OOP for short.
The SCP Project is a mostly-good online compilation of these: The premise is that there’s a group called the SCP Foundation (Secure, Contain, Protect) that’s dedicated to safely storing such objects, and members of the community contribute entries.
Also The Librarians.
Perhaps Artifiction?
In casual reading and watching, I have not run across a term for it.
The TV Tropes page for Warehouse 13 has links to several categories:
Secret Government Warehouse
Artifact Collection Agency
Bazaar of the Bizarre
Artifact of Doom
If I had to assign an overall name, I think I would go with “Bazaar of the Bizarre”. The name was coined by Fritz Leiber in a Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser story, and used by Dragon Magazine for one of their columns.
Would The Expanse be included in this? With the protomolocule being the weird object?
I don’t think that’s quite what I had in mind. The examples I’m thinking of don’t involve the invention of new technology or the technological singularity, they involve the discovery of profoundly weird objects that the protagonists can’t ever really understand. It’s sort of (intentionally and explicitly) fictional techno-Fortreanism (maybe that’s a name for it?).
I’m not familiar with “Firewater”, but “Rogue Moon” I think fits squarely into what I’m thinking of.
I thought of that, but I think that’s kind of adjacent. The objects have a clear origin and function, are explicitly magical, the protagonists don’t try to figure them out (beyond identifying them and neutralizing them), and for the most part there’s no conflict over them among collectors. Most importantly, the objects aren’t really weird, in the same Fortean, High Strangeness manner of what I’m thinking of.
Yeah, that’s another one I thought about. I’m more used to OOP as a term in pseudo-archaelogy to refer to mundane but anachronistic items (the ball bearing encased in million-year old rock, etc.). The SCP Project is definitely in the range of what I’m thinking of.
I’m not familiar with The Expanse, but it doesn’t sound like it. The sub-genre (if such it is) that I’m thinking about is about weird objects, each one with its own set of rules that the protagonists try (but often fail) to understand, not a single object.
Then I apologise for muddying the waters in the first reply!
Don’t know if there is a named genre. If there were, I’d expect to see some “related” mention in the TV Tropes or Wikipedia entries for Big Dumb Objects.
Big Dumb Objects indeed:
…though examples in this article include things like a Dyson Sphere, which doesn’t quite fit the OPs description.
I think this is really clever, so I want everyone to read it again.
…
eta: if true stories were included… ArtiFactOrFiction.
In science fiction writing the term for found massive objects of unknown provenance and function is “Big Dumb Objects” (BDO). It has been done and overdone from Clarke’s “The Sentinel” and 2001: A Space Odyssey to Larry Niven’s Ringworld and Stephen Baxter’s “Ring” (which turns out to be a cosmic string structure that causes the observed galactic flow of the Great Attractor) to create an Einstein-Rosen bridge allowing them to escaped this doomed universe.
The problem with BDOs is that author’s often introduce them as a central mystery without a good backstory on how it came to be or what it was originally used for, and as its characteristics are revealed piecemeal it becomes progressively more improbable or self-inconsistent. Niven’s Ringworld is a prime example; originally it was assumed to have been constructed by the Pak and populated by their breeders, but so many things about it violate the essentially tenets of Pak mentality, and the sidequest to discover their technomagical transmutation technology ends up derailing any actual story that might have occurred.
Mysterious and powerful objects of various sizes occur throughout science fiction and fantasy going back to Gilgamesh and The Odyssey. It is such an ancient trope I doubt you could pigeonhole it as a particular sub-genre, although it is most often found in pulpy-actioneers and the occasional philosophical piece like 2001: A Space Odyssey. I would term a show like Warehouse 13 as “pulp mystery”, since the plots are largely investigative in nature and the action and prop design is deliberately pulp-influenced.
The particular type of show or movie that presents a MacGuffin of some unspecified power specifically to drive the plot forward regardless of its necessity is the vaunted “Mystery Box Mystery”, in which a mysterious object or substance is presented, the plot swirled around it, and then things are resolved (or not) without ever actually addressing the mystery or all of the stupid things that facilitated the characters pursuing it. You can recognize this genre because it is every film JJ Abrams has ever directed or actively produced.
Stranger
From Wikipedia:
The Earth is visited by large, enigmatic alien spheres, who take up residence in colonies on several prairies and deserts across the world. They make visits to cities, factories and other areas of human activity, seemingly to merely float and observe. All attempts at communication are unsuccessful and despite the best efforts of mankind, no one is able to decipher their intentions. Some, however, have come in to close encounter with the aliens, and emerged dramatically altered beings. These people, called humanity-prime, and dubbed ‘primeys’, are highly intelligent, can bend matter to their will, but are also, by human standards, quite, quite mad. Algernon Hebster is a highly successful businessman, owing mostly to his dealings with primeys, who supply him with the knowledge for advanced technologies which he puts to use in commerce. The problem is that primeys are so dangerous that dealing with them is highly illegal and every attempt is made to confine them to the reservations around their perceived alien masters.
I’ve seen the concept appear in video games, where collecting weird artifacts is an ever-popular gaming mechanism. One famous example is the “Pieces of Eden” from the never-ending Assassin’s Creed games - strange remnants of a pre-human Earth civilization, each of which with its own unique powers and dangers.
Also a way to lazily half-ass writing a movie/TV series. (See: Rise of Skywalker, The Watch.)
Also Michael Crichton’s Sphere fits this
The Numenera RPG, and its various derivative properties (like the Tides of Numenera computer game), takes place in a world littered by science/magical artifacts of this type.
Also, the Revenger books have the characters breaking into “baubles”, which contain various valuable artifacts. Both the recovery and the artifacts themselves are dangerous in a Roadside Picnic sort of way. The scavengers have found various empirical rules for how the baubles operate, but they’re unreliable and hard to adhere to in any case.
I think categorizing this as a sub-genre may be difficult. It’s more of a trope that spans genres. Or even a meta-trope that spans tropes (like the ones in mbh’s list).