I tend to prefer plausible settings for fiction, as my readers may have noticed. One matter that catches my attention: the implications of geological time scales for the existence of alien relics left behind by visiting extra-solar litterbugs. Many SF stories assume that such visitors will have arrived during the Phanerozoic era. Very often visitors are said to have visited towards the tail end of the Phanerozoic, the Cenozoic.
These time spans cover only a small fraction of the whole span of Earth’s existence (12% and 1.5%, respectively). Unless the presence of complex life is one of the factors drawing hypothetical visitors, it seems likely that any visits would have occurred long ago, in eras when Earth was anoxic and populated only by simple life forms. Which is to say, long enough ago for litter to have been buried, incinerated, ejected from the solar system, or in some other way rendered inaccessible.
We can learn something about the durability of relics from the apparent fate of temporarily captured interstellar bodies. Kevin, Napier, et al published an article, “On the Fate of Interstellar Objects Captured by our Solar System,” recounting the results of computer simulations that modeled the fate of over a quarter billion extra-solar objects injected into our solar system. Of this vast number, only about a dozen survived as long as half a billion years without being ejected from the solar system, colliding with Jupiter, or meeting some other terminal fate. Only three lasted a billion years. A billion years might sound long, especially if that is the time you believe it will take to pay off your university loans, but it is only about a quarter of the time the solar system has existed.
Note that the research team were concerned only with objects in orbit. Objects on the surfaces of planets might be misplaced far more quickly.
BUT… regardless of plausibility, alien relics are story candy for SF authors. It’s not surprising that such artifacts have frequently featured in SF. Consider these five examples.
Scarlet Dream by C. L. Moore (1934)
Northwest Smith’s solar system is ancient. The space-tanned Earthman’s civilization is only the latest to call the System home. Artifacts of unknown origin and potentially ominous purpose are scattered over the System like raisins in scones. A prudent man would think twice about acquiring alien artifacts without doing some serious homework re: the device’s past and powers.
Northwest is many things, but prudent is not one of them. He sees only an alluring scarlet scarf. The dream realm in which he is subsequently trapped offers only empty, dissatisfying pleasure. Death appears to be the only escape. Although, as Northwest discovers, it need not be his death…
***
Galactic Derelict by Andre Norton (1959)
Humans and alien Baldies are almost contemporaries. What is a mere 50,000 years compared to geological time? Nevertheless, the fifty millennia between the height of the Baldies’ civilization and the 20th century are sufficient to guarantee that humans and Baldies will never meet face to face. Or rather, they would have never met were it not for Operation Retrograde, America’s time-travel agency.
Involuntarily recruited by Operation Retrograde, Native American archaeologist Travis Fox takes part in an attempted salvage operation. A number of Baldie starships were (for reasons unknown) abandoned on Earth ages ago. If lucky, time travelers might be able to locate and retrieve a functioning space craft. It’s a bold venture and one that succeeds all too well.
***
World of Ptavvs by Larry Niven (1966)
Dolphins discovered the Sea Statue off the Brazilian continental shelf. They sold the mysterious artifact to the UN. Humans were unsure what to make of the peculiar-looking artifact, which depicted a humanoid but inhuman figure, made of material which (had the humans tried) would have proved invulnerable to any tool humans could bring to bear upon it. The statue appears beyond any human means to create.
This is because the statue long predates not only humans and dolphins, but complex life on Earth. Billions of years earlier the Thrint Slavers dominated the Milky Way, enslaving all they encountered with their mental powers. The statue is no statue but a lone Thrint, preserved in frozen time. A lone Thrint who, once freed by excessively curious humans, will do its best to recreate the Slaver Empire.
***
Toolmaker Koan by John McLoughlin (1988)
The universe is ancient, more than old enough for billions of worlds to have developed complex life and indigenous civilizations. Yet, when humans point their radio telescopes at the stars, they hear…nothing. There seems to be no reason why the Milky Way should not be filled with thriving advanced civilizations. So, where is everybody?
An East bloc space probe discovers a functioning alien facility in the outer solar system. Artificial intelligence “Charon” is conscious, ancient, and has an explanation for the Great Silence. Technological civilizations are rare because they are very short-lived. Soaring ability is never matched by prudence. To be as technologically sophisticated as humans is to be doomed—as the humans will no doubt demonstrate in short order.
***
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992)
In this setting, the laws of physics are not consistent across the Milky Way. In the Unthinking Depths at the core of the galaxy, intelligence is impossible. In the Slow Zone, where Earth is located, intelligence of a simple human kind is possible. but the computations needed for faster-than-light travel are not. In the Beyond, computers can master FTL but not true, god-like intelligence. In the Transcend, minds can be as gods, for as long as they manage to survive. It has been this way for billions of years.
Ambitious mortals might be forgiven for seeking shortcuts. Previous civilizations have reached heights puny humans and their ilk cannot comprehend. Why not seek out the remnants of lost civilizations and access their relics? Because, as one very unlucky expedition discovers, some remnants are Sealed Evil and by uncovering the relics, the ambitious archaeologists have doomed billions of entities to horrible fates.
***
Of course, this is only a small sampling of the books I could have mentioned. Many authors have found the idea of alien artifacts, discarded like trash after a roadside picnic, inspirational. There is a vast expanse of such examples. This trope is but one aspect of science fiction’s venerable legacy. Feel free to mention your own favourites in comments.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and the Aurora finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
Wow, the first list where I have read every single story. I must be a fan of alien artifacts!
How did you just just five out of the approximately 7 billion SF stories featuring ancient alien artifacts? :)
For a recent example I suggest Ancestral Night, by Elizabeth Bear.
I kept in mind that I have a word count limit.
The thing about availability bias is that people may not think it needs discussion. Maybe aliens could have visited at any time since the universe contained a significant amount of material heavier than lithium, but most researchers, and most writers, don’t bother to mention what they don’t find (it doesn’t make a good story, or a good research paper). Writers who think about this as an issue, can assume you will too, and skip to writing about what is there, not the objects that have since fallen into the sun, or vanished in the Great Unconformity.
Elizabeth Bear’s Ancestral Night, which I only finished reading a couple of days ago, was already mentioned above.
But my favorite Ancient Alien Artifact book – or rather series – is Charles Sheffield’s Heritage universe, beginning with Summertide. It has not one but dozens of different alien artifacts, most of them very large scale, each with strange, unique abilities. There are dossiers on each artifact interspersed between the narrative sections of the first couple of books and they are just as fun to read as the series itself.
Two of my favs are Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke and of course Gateway by Fred Pohl.
Stephen Baxter probably couldn’t come up with a story that didn’t involve ancient alien artifacts if he tried with both hands. Spoilers below.
In Manifold: Space, the solar system and indeed the Galaxy is littered with ancient artifacts. To name just one, Venus was apparently a terraforming project by a species that breathes sulfuric acid. The superconducting cables left behind from the effort that slowed the planet’s rotation are still usable, and the present-day Gaijin (mechanical aliens) harvest them and use them elsewhere.
In the Xeelee sequence, the Xeelee have been around literally since the Big Bang, and they’ve left artifacts everywhere. Titan harbors an ancient hatch which is a portal to somewhere else. The collision that formed Mercury’s huge Caloris crater left a spaceship behind.
In the Proxima series (two novels plus short stories), we again find the hatch-portal left behind by unknown aliens.
Good call on Baxter.
Jack McDevitt is a similar case: most of his novels depend on some artifact or other, though some of them (especially in the Alex Benedict series) are human artifacts whose location, provenance, and/or purpose is a mystery. But this literally beigns with his first pubilshed novel, The Hercules Text, where the artifact is a mysterious message from an extragalactic source. The entire “Academy” series is basically alien archaeology. And he’s written a couple three Simaky novel;s set on Earth where something mysterious pops up and, I’m not saying it’s aliens, but…
McDevitt is not as good at sheer extrapolation as Baxter, but his characters are dug deeper and wider.
The single best thing about Mass Effect is finding out about all the weird relics of ancient civilizations that are now completely vanished, and starting to wonder *why* they’re all gone and why someone, for example, felt the need to build a gun big enough to create the Valles Marineris.
Alan Dean Foster’s Humanx setting is littered with the relics of long-vanished alien civilizations. In many but not all cases, it’s best not to flick the guillotine switches from off to on.
Vinge’s *Deepness in the Sky* also features truly ancient artifacts (at least one quite large).
Jack McDevitt’s *Ancient Shores* starts with the discovery of an artifact, too.
Per the Little Black Rule, Traveller has a fair number of artifacts from the Ancients’ brief existence circa 300,000 BCE, ranging from harmless trinkets like disintegration guns and black globe generators, to curios like uncompleted ringworlds and Dyson shells, to the factory that, once accidentally turned on, started pumping out tremendous amounts of goo – so tremendous that if someone doesn’t figure out how to turn it back off, one of the most important worlds in the Spinward Marches will be drowned in it.
I’m surprised that no one mentioned Arthur C. Clarke’s novelization of his movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.
A solar-activated device deliberately buried on the moon! Which beams to its big brother in orbit around Saturn in the book and Jupiter in the movie–and off they go…
Regarding your coda: I see what you did there.
Even stories that don’t actually use alien artifacts as plot elements will often have them as background. E.g., the Labyrinths in Hyperion (p.77).
Two cinematic ancient artifacts are the Krell Machine from Forbidden Planet and its lesser cousin, the Great Machine of Epsilon III in Babylon 5.
The first is a good example of Things Man is Not Meant to Know, and the second is a convenient plot device to get a writer out of a corner and pay homage to the original.
The first books that crossed my mind when I read the article title was Frederick Pohl’s Gateway series.
I like the take on this trope in David Brin’s Existence.
The Stargate universe is full of abandoned alien tech, usually left by the Ancients who ‘ascended’ in a hurry and left a lot behind, none of it fitted with much in the way of safety precautions or off switches. I would hate to be the Health And Safety union rep in that universe!
Stewart & Cohen’s Wheelers starts with the discovery of the epinymous artifacts.
And one must not forget 2001…
L. E. Modesitt’s “The Eternity Artifact” and “Solar Express” both feature explorations ancient alien artifacts.
Tanya Huffs Peacekepper Novels start off with the Peacekeepers investigating how someone looted an ancient burial world belonging to one of the older races in the Coonfederation. The race which owns the world is peaceful now, but back in the day they were anything but. It’s not only bodies buried on that world. There are weapons which make even the current warrior races hesitate for a moment…
The first Murderbot novella, All Systems Red, has some bad guys hunting for alien artifacts. The theme is revisited in Network Effect, where you get to see some alien artifacts up close, with a convincing demonstration why having anything to do with them is not just against the law, it’s a bad idea.
@18: A lot of it seemed to be “protected” by the people who were around at the time knowing not to go there. A lot of Stargate: Atlantis is about dealing with the leavings of long-vanished people who had been so busy pointing heroically toward Progress that they didn’t bother to clean up after themselves….
Boundary by Eric Flint and Ryk E. Spoor begins with the discovery of an archeological site that dates back about 64 million years. Nothing found at the site is still usable, but it has a massive effect on humankind nevertheless.
John DeChancie’s Skyway books? Starrigger, Red Limit Freeway, & Paradox Alley.
A number of favorites were mentioned already upthread, but another series that comes to mind is Jack Chalker’s ‘Well World’ books.
The protomolecule in the Expanse books by James S.A. Corey got frozen 2 billion years before the story starts.
@18,
Not to mention the fact that a lot of the technology which is found and CAN be used isn’t.
Two examples (and there are MANY others):
1. An entity called Harlan uses his world’s advanced but not THAT advanced (by SG standards) technolgy to create android copies of the SG-1 team. Fun and games ensue and the ‘originals’ extract a promise from the copies they will stay put on Harlan’s world, and then they go back to Earth. Later on, Harlan re-appears and tells SG Command that the team of copies have broken their promise not to leave Harlan’s world (which should be EASILY predictable given the personalities involved) and have gone exploring and not returned. More fun and games end with all the copies dying as heroes. Harlan and his technology never get mentioned again.
Excuse me?? You could spend an entire series using (and misusing; think of the military implications) this technology to forward the fight against the Alien Menace.
2. A major enemy creates an artificial asteriod and puts it into a collision course with Earth. The SG-1 team haul out to blow the thing up. (Let’s ignore for the time being the inconvenient fact that the exploded fragments would do almost as much damage as the single object, because our bomb isn’t going to change the overall trajectory that much.) When they are at the asteroid, the scientific genius discovers it’s booby-trapped against any attempt to blow it up by being 40% full of “Naqadah” (one of the series super-uraniums). The team McGyvers a solution using a small hyper-space jump, and all ends well. That’s it.
Errrrrrr, my back of the envelope calculation based on the quoted measurements and observed shape of the asteroid shows it contains about 15,000 cubic kilometres of ore with a 40% concentration of this Naqadah stuff, which is a strategic material in short supply. Assuming a specific density of about 8 (it’s stated to be dense in the episode) that’s about 50 trillion tons travelling at planetary speed, which strikes me as a quantity you’d make some effort to acquire.
Fiasco, by Stanislaw Lem
An honourable mention needs to go to Newton’s Wake by Ken Macleod, which introduces the profession of Combat Archaeologist—yes, there are ancient alien artifacts: they’re so valuable that if you find a site you probably ought to be prepared for the inevitable pirates who will dogpile you at the slightest rumour. Oh, and the unforgettable worst hell-world of all, for my money: a planet called Chernobyl. (So say how it got the name might be a spoiler …)
In Karl Schroeder’s _Permanence_, ancient aliens, and now humans, have repeatedly filled the same ecological/technological niches.
Terry Pratchett’s standalone SF novel “The Dark Side of the Sun” had many artifacts left behind by the Jokers, Godlike forerunners. These artifacts were big and flashy (two linked ring-stars, for example) and apparently purposeless. Apparently.
“Illegal Aliens” by Nick Pollotta and Phil Foglio had a few ancient artifacts like Big, a Dyson sphere which, when investigators got inside, was found to contain another Dyson sphere about ten meters smaller in diameter than the outer one. The second Dyson sphere contained a third slightly smaller Dyson sphere, and another and another and…
In AC Clarke’s “The City and the Stars” the ancient relics all turn out to have been left behind by us.
Boundary, by Eric Flint and Ryk E. Spoor, starts with finding an alien, surrounded by dinosaurs, at the KT barrier. I’m pretty sure sixty-five million years counts as ancient. It goes on to visit alien constructions on Phobos and Mars.
Poul Anderson’s Avatar features ancient alien Tippler machines. They allow space ships to travel FTL.
Robert Buettner’s The Golden Gate does not exactly feature ancient alien artifacts. It features earthly artifacts left by an ancient alien. He crashed on Earth centuries ago, and is still alive.
Oh, and: Le Guin’s Ekumen stories, in which we and many other human(ish) races turn out to be biological artifacts left behind by the ancient Hainish race, generally as some kind of experiment or other.
Some of your readers may have come across the film “Quatermass and the Pit”, shown in America as “Five Million Years to Earth”, and highly praised by the astronomer, Phil Plait in his regular column. It involves an excavation at a place called “Hob’s Lane” – “Hob” being a medieval nickname for the Devil – which unearths a mysterious projectile, which in turn throws a whole new light on man’s existence on this planet, before demonstrating that it is certainly not inert, however long it might have been buried – the image of that great horned head pulsating in mid-air as panic and chaos spreads across London is still striking, despite the primitive special effects.
“So, so far as anyone is, we’re the Martians now.”
Inhibitors.
Not a novel, but an unusual take on “ancient alien artifacts buried underground” is Fritz Leiber’s 1952 story “Dr. Kometevsky’s Day”, in which nearly all of Earth’s mass <i>is</i> the alien artifact— the planet was thinly layered over a huge alien spaceship for camouflage purposes.
An interesting ancient alien tech was the Centauran “Thuktun” in Niven & Pournelle’s “Footfall”. Most of the Centauran’s tech was based on information left by the predecessors on Thuktun stones.
Might be a bit of an edge case, but two of my favorite H.P. Lovecraft stories (At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Out of Time) involve contemporary humans discovering artifacts (cities, to be precise) left behind by long-dead alien races.
And what about *recent*, but equally unfathomable and dangerous, alien relics? Thinking of the Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic.
Elizabeth Bear’s debut novel, Hammered, has artifacts – alien starships abandoned on Mars. This is a near-future Earth with AI, the effects of climate change, and superpowers China and Canada in a race to use tech reverse-engineered from the starships.
Huzzah to @15 for bringing up the Krell Machine, as landmark as a device can be!
There are so many brilliant examples in SF, but I want to add the map-and-records device left by the High Ones in Robert Silverberg’s Across a Billion Years (1969). While it’s more like a YA novel now, what strikes me on rereading is how he nailed the archaeological crew and their dynamics; as an archaeologist, I’d appalled at how badly we’re portrayed in much of SF. We’re really not salvagers or tomb raiders, yo.
Maybe it escaped mention because it is a short story, but “Omnilingual” by H. Beam Piper is pretty much the best SF story I’ve ever read, and its about archeologists examining Martian ruins to boot. But maybe the Martians aren’t aliens, because it appears they inhabited Earth before they died out on the home planet.
A number of Andre Norton’s novels involve artifacts left by the Forerunners.
In C. J. Cherryh’s “Morgaine” books (Gate of Ivrel ff), Morgaine’s mission is the destruction of leftover time/space gates that are old enough to have ruined the beings who preceded Earthlings in visiting the local group of worlds.
In Zelazny’s Doorways in the Sand, the maguffin is an artifact passed around a group of species in which Earthlings have just been included; nobody knows what it is, but it’s old enough that everybody considers it important.
In Alan Nourse’s Scavengers in Space, the maguffin is a solar-system map from a previous civilization showing that Kepler was right: there used to be a planet between Mars and Jupiter.
@@@@@6. deadhedge:
Those two were also the books that came into my mind first. Both in my opinion great examples of “alien-ness”. Humans find stuff and have no idea what they have in their hands. And things are not just miraculously understood at the end but remain mysteries and alien.
Has anyone mentioned the Slaver Boxes from Niven’s Known Space stories?
Across its multiple reboots, Transformers represents an oddly recursive take; the Transformers themselves have lifespans measured in millennia (the G1 Ark and Nemesis crews were in stasis for 65 million years before waking up in 1984, and when they returned home, their contemporaries were mostly still there and didn’t seem at all surprised by the delay), and even they are constantly stumbling over things from their forgotten pre-history.
In some incarnations, they aren’t even entirely sure where they came from, having only legends, mythology, and religious dogma (“evolution from naturally-occurring gears, levers, and pulleys?” “created by ancient aliens?” “created by a supercomputer-who-may-be-God?”).
In one iteration of the franchise (Transformers Prime), it’s revealed that Earth itself is actually the Cybertronian “devil,” Unicron, who arrived here billions of years ago (after being defeated by the Transformers’ creator) and had the planet form around him while he slumbered.
I had the notion, on seeing the way that alien stuff worked, that Wells might have been making a subtle homage to A Fire Upon the Deep. Something about the way it infected systems made me think of it as a blight — not quite as deadly as Vinge’s Blight, but definitely Blight-like.
Neil Asher’s Polity storie have artefacts left by several predecessor civilisations, most notably the technology left by the aggressive and xenophobic Jain, which infects and subverts both biological and cybernetic systems. Another earlier civilisation, the Atheter, deliberately destroyed their technology and devolved themselves to avoid this fate, but occasional bits and pieces, including a biotech war machine, come to light across the series.
There are too many to mention, in the end.
Off the top of my head, the Hexenmeister Tower (and the Hexenmeister themself) in Mary Gentle’s Orthe books, and the stack technology and other artifacts in Richard K. Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs books.
I am surprised nobody mentioned Ringworld by Larry Niven. It was danced around with people mentioning Dyson spheres and Known Space, but it was not called out.
How about one written in this decade? :)
“Remote Control” by Nnedi Okorafor is about a girl who finds an alien artifact in her family’s yard…and how it changes her and her world.
Alastair Reynolds has extended form in this area. Inhibitors from the Revelation Space universe have already been mentioned, but more recently the Revenger trilogy is a splendidly romping “age of sail” space opera through the artefacts of multiple falls into barbarism and back again. Highly recommended.
Charlie’s probably too polite to mention it but his Saturns Children/Neptunes breed duology is a neat inversion of the idea. A post human android civilisation living in, aping and occasionally transcending the ruins left behind by us hairless apes.
There’s an obscure story called Who Goes There? by an obscure writer named Don Stewart.
An Antarctic expedition stumbles onto an ancient space ship, trapped in the ice.
Sylvain Neuvel’s Themis Files is a trilogy about an alien robot found in parts around the earth. I’ve read the first one Sleeping Giants and enjoyed it.
Craig Alanson’s “Expeditionary Force” series is largely based around an improbable alien artifact, and how everyone in the galaxy, including the artifact, is hunting for more of them.
James H. Schmitz’s Legacy involves the Good Guys fighting the Bad Guys over mysterious alien artifacts. The artifacts are expected to give wealth and power to the powerful and wealthy.
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/21510/pg21510-images.html
Yes, Ringworld by Niven is what immediately leapt to my mind as well. Not just an artifact, but an entire artificial world.
@59/Fernhunter – Lol. I think I just might of heard of that one. It certainly sounds familiar.
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Chris Paolini’s recent work “To Sleep in a Sea of Stars” had a lot of fun with the good, bad, and ugly/genocidal sides of chancing upon and becoming infected with an alien artifact. I really enjoyed it.
@59/Fernhunter — You mean James H. Schmitz, perhaps best remembered today for introducing us to the Witches of Karres.
I dunno how we can talk about ancient alien artifacts and not talk about Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Nevel. I mean there is literally a giant robot left behind in pieces on Earth! :)
“The Clan Chronicles” ( a compliation of Julie E. Czerneda’s “Startification”, “Reunification”, and “Trade Pact Univesre” trilogies)…A lot of the story is driven by the search for tand the finding of (and wondering who “they” were?) “ancient artifacts. And in the third trilogy (“Reunification”) we find that some of the “artifacts” aren’t all that ancient…
As I recall, Douglas Adams posited that the Earth itself is an ancient alien artifact.
Kudos for the mentions of Vernor Vinge’s novels. Two of my favorite books woefully overlooked by modern readers !
The Artifact by W M Gear is a story about a machine that destroys all who touch it and their race. That is why there are only humans left in the galaxy. The artifact turns the planetary system in which it resides into a beacon visible across the galaxy. The story depicts the tortured soul who is beguiled by the machine. His solution is quite breathtaking…
Lee & Miller’s Liaden series have Old Tech bleeding through from the Old Universe – Some are useful, some ominous, some distinctly malevlent like the Tinsori light. There’s an interesting in-universe disagreement between those who believe all Old Tech should be destroyed and those who believe they should be used with caution.
@@@@@ 632 taras:
@@@@@59/Fernhunter — You mean James H. Schmitz, perhaps best remembered today for introducing us to the Witches of Karres.
Fixed. Thanks.
City Of Bones, by Martha Wells, is the latest ‘ancient artefacts’ book I’m currently reading.
Well-played: “discarded like trash after a roadside picnic.” But seriously, the Strugatskys were the first example I thought of, followed by Niven and the myriad toys left behind in stasis boxes that date from a war from two million years ago.
I think Pohl’s Gateway series was good for exploring how we as a society might react to the discovery of these artifacts; we have no idea what a Heechee prayer fan is for, but we collect them like tchotchkes as status symbols, until we find out what they really are, and then we have to go find them all…
How about the Berserker stories? Certainly alien. Certainly ancient. Certainly unwelcome.
The Berserker stories are written by nearly everybody.
Obligatory David Weber mention – in this case for Empire from the Ashes/The Dahak trilogy. The titular Dahak is Earths Moon.
Nod to the Doctor Who episode where the moon hatches too.
@73/Fernhunter — “The Berserker stories are written by nearly everybody.”
The “Berserker” stories I know of are by Fred Saberhagen. The original collection of stories from the Sixties, under that title, is a classic. Some of the later works in the series are also excellent.
Apparently the only time any other authors wrote Berserker stories was in the 1985 invitational anthology, Berserker Base.
For the benefit of those who don’t know what we’re talking about: The Berserkers are alien war machines left over from an interstellar war that wiped out both species involved. With their designated enemies extinct, these intelligent machines have turned to wiping out all life in the galaxy. If humans and their alien allies don’t stop them.
@66: Well, Douglas Adams’s Earth is both a perfectly ordinary factory-built planet, and a gigantic, um, philosophical research laboratory. No doubt you’ve noticed all the ****ing “trolley problem” discussions that we have. He’s not the only author to realise that aliens are doing things to us just to see what happens, and that much of what does happen only makes sense when you take that into account. As consolation, the rest of his universe is not being run very well, either.
Has anyone mentioned Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky?
@77, but the alien artifact only comes in at the end. It’s mostly about terraforming
@@@@@ 75, taras:
@@@@@73/Fernhunter — “The Berserker stories are written by nearly everybody.”
The “Berserker” stories I know of are by Fred Saberhagen. The original collection of stories from the Sixties, under that title, is a classic. Some of the later works in the series are also excellent.
Apparently the only time any other authors wrote Berserker stories was in the 1985 invitational anthology, Berserker Base.
For all I know, you are right.
I never much cared for the Berserker stories. I never really kept track.
I have noticed, over the years, a lot of Berserker stories that were written by people who were not Fred Saberhagen.
I read the article and came up with a long list. I see most of them were hit, surprisingly late in the replies in Andre Norton’s case. But nobody mentioned Timothy Zahn, who in Triplet and Spinneret produced some pretty good ones. Of course, ERB’s Mars books were full of lots of ancient artifacts, but perhaps those don’t count since the owners were still present. Wollheim’s juvenile Mystery of the Martian Moons does something similar, since Mars is the obvious choice for nearby ancient aliens.
Upon reflection, it might be easier to list the authors I can think of who didn’t write much about ancient alien artifacts. Asimov. Maybe Zelazny… Rose for Ecclesiastes came close, but not quite. Can anybody think of any other authors who never touched the concept?
On edit: I see @45 noticed Zelazny’s Doorways in the Sand. Very well, then, Asimov may be all I’ve got.