Not invariably, though. One of the intriguing things about the story with “you shall know them by their artifacts” is that it sometimes lets you indirectly experience the aliens or their civilization, as the characters in the story do.
Hal Clement did this a few times Technical Error is about a group of stranded Earthmen who discover an alien spaceship and have to figure out how to make it work, discovering along the way that the aliens had an entirely different philosophy about tools. In another (Status Symbol, I think ) the protagonist discovers what is, in essence, a very highly developed Alien Personal Digital Assistant, left from the days when the planet was livable and apparently lost overboard on a lake or something, and has to convince it not to kill him.
" You looked through the sight, zoomed in until the target you had selected just filled your vision, then you pressed the trigger. The Lazy Gun did the rest instantaneously.
But you had no idea whatsoever exactly what was going to happen next.
If you had aimed at a person, a spear might suddenly materialize and pierce them through the chest, or some snake’s spit fang might graze their neck, or a ship’s anchor might appear falling above them, crushing them, or two enormous switch-electrodes would leap briefly into being on either side of the hapless target and vaporize him or her. "
I’ve only read one of the ‘Unorthodox Engineers’ stories by Colin Kapp, but they seem to fit the bill. A team of specialist engineers who investigate alien technology, no matter how weird or dangerous, and try to get it working again. https://oikofuge.com/kapp-unorthodox-engineers/
If this profession has a name, maybe it is xenoengineer, or reverse-technologist, or clarketechnologist.
You can also play this genre for laughs. Robert Sheckley wrote a series of storiesabout the AAA Ace company that are wonderfully weird
in one of these, The Laxian Key, they stumble upon a device that produces a substance that can be used as construction material or as food (by one alien race), and has lots of other uses*. It doesn’t have to be plugged in to anything because it gets power inductively from any convenient nearby source (and “nearby” can be pretty far away).
The problem is, once they turn it on, they can’t turn it off, and it continues spewing stuff out relentlessly, as unresponsive to their efforts to stop it as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice’s brooms. The instructions, once translated, tell them to use “The Laxian Key”. Only no one knows what that might be, or where to get it.
They go to the planet where it was made, hoping to sell it to the natives as a food- and- building material - source, only to find the surface of the planet covered with the stuff.
Of course they aren’t interested. “But,” they are told, “If you find a Laxian Key, you can name your price.”
Sure, and when it is utilized in this way into the story it can be effective. But often, authors (even experienced ones) introduce this kind of artifact just as a mystery but with no plan on how they intend to resolve it or notion of how to fit it into the rest of the world. Again. Ringworld–a Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel–does this because the author wanted to write a story about such a massive construct and wedge it into his pre-existing “Known Universe”, but they way he does it is nonsensical under analysis in so many ways that he wrote a followup that was pretty much devoted to fixing all of the problems with the original story, and subsequent sequels of declining coherence trying and mostly failing to tie off loose ends.
And this is the problem with too powerful a technology; you end up having to figure out why an advanced industrial civilization with matter transmutation would build a giant habitable ring or a (solid) Dyson sphere, or some other construct that has evident utility to some less advanced civilization instead of something completely incomprehensible. 2001: A Space Odyssey gets a lot of grief from people because of how inexplicable the ending is, but in fact any contact with a really advanced civilization would likely be incomprehensible and overwhelming to members of a less advanced society, just as televisions and computers would seem like divine magic to the Thracians or Peloponnese.
The protomolecule isn’t really a MacGuffin; a MacGuffin is an item that everyone is pursuing but is totally fungible in terms of the plot or character motivations. The prototypical MacGuffin is the eponymous treasure in The Maltese Falcon. The falcon statuette is made of gold and encrusted with jewels, but it could be a big diamond or a secret formula or anything else of value and it would not alter the plot one bit. The protomolecule of The Expanse, however, starts out as an enigma but it quickly evolves into something that has an active role in the plot development independent of the actions of the characters, and actually has an agenda of its own to construct and open a portal to the Ring Gates. It is actually as much a character as an artifact. It is an example of a BDO done well and in a way that advances the plot rather than just providing a setpiece to explore.
I don’t have any experience with the derivative properties, but, yeah, I think a Numenera campaign that used Cyphers as the central focus would be in the sub-genre I’m thinking about. A similar campaign in The Strange even more so.
Yes, that seems exactly like what I’m talking about.
Not necessarily, although that’s a logical structure for the premise. Roadside Picnic, for example, which I used as an example in my OP, is a novel, and is if not the ur-text, than probably the type-specimen. What’s key is that it features multiple different objects, with weird, apparently random properties.
Yeah, that was mentioned upthread. I don’t think it quite fits, as the cursed objects are explicitly magical, and they aren’t really that weird. A key element, I think, is that while the cursed objects in the series are magical and mysterious, they’re logical. We know exactly what they are, what they can do, and why.
Yes, not so much the Stasis Boxes themselves, but the weird, random contents, and the conflict over them, seem in line with what I’m thinking. It’s a bit different, in that it’s future space opera with multiple alien civilizations, so the weird artifacts don’t contrast with a mundane background as much, the objects themselves don’t seem quite as just randomly weird, and their origins aren’t as mysterious - everyone knows that the titular device was created by the Tnuctipun.
The Dyson sphere is one of my pet peeves in this department. Most cases seem to imagine it as a technology-so-advanced-that-it’s-magic device with gravity somehow hard-wired in normal to the interior surface. That’s not how Dyson intended it (it was supposed to be a series of solar panel-like surfaces that intercepted all the radiation output from a sun and put them to utilitarian use), but that’s not quite as sexy. Niven’s Ringworld, at least, imagines a way to make the idea work, using centrifugal pseudo-force to make artificial gravity. It’s actually a pretty clever idea, although, as you say, it has technical problems. These were fixed with unobtainium (scrith!) or retroactive ideas (attitude jets for stability) . But there were still problems with how it fit into his Known Universe. Still, i thought the first couple of books were fun.
But a Dyson sphere – once you introduce it, what the hell do you do with it? the damned thing’s too big. It has an unimaginably large surface area, way bigger than a Ringworld.
Most stories don’t actually do anything with them. They’re there for the SF wonder of it all. Or they serve only as something people fight over, McGuffin-like. Bob Shaw used that very hugeness of the Dyson sphere as the punchline of his Orbitsville – the Dyson sphere is a civilization-killer. It’s so damned big and full of resources that scarcity doesn’t exist. People just keep spreading out through the interior, and nobody has to fight anybody over resources. But then there’s no need for higher civilization to organize things and people.
Not sure I buy it. A lot of people are still going to want high-tech devices and reliable medical care, and that demands a concentration of people. Shaw wrote a sequel, Orbitsville Departure, in which he got rid of the problems by getting rid of the Dyson sphere.
It’s too damned big. You can make a Pellucidar with a sphere the size of the earth. You could lose one of those inside a typical Dyson sphere* and never miss it.
*diameter = diameter of Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Even if you make it only the diameter of Mercury’s orbit it’s comically huge compared to the size of the Earth.
For similar reasons, I have problems with the later Ringworld books turning the Ring into a starship: What’s the point of a vehicle, when the vehicle itself is already 99.9% of the destinations in the Galaxy?
Frederick Pohl’s sf classic Gateway is along these lines. The protagonists risk their lives in abandoned alien spaceships to collect extraterrestrial artifacts, which they sell for profit. I don’t recall if the objects had some kind of power, or were just valuable for being alien.
Phil Foglio wrote a novel once, Illegal Aliens, that as an aside mentioned that explorers once found an abandoned Dyson Sphere around a distant star. After spending years figuring out how to gain access, they finally open up and find… another, smaller Dyson sphere. And inside that, another, and so on, until the original discoverers finally die of old age, never having found the final, inmost sphere.
The objects taught Earth researchers about Heechee tech. Some of them were completely inscrutable and apparently nonfunctional and just valuable as curiosities, others, when deciphered, were amazing boons, and worth buttloads in bonuses to the explorers who found them. Humanity’s understanding of the tech grows over the series, and sometimes the functions of old apparently nonfunctional finds were figured out later.