Open Philosophy 2019; 2: 552–565 *Corresponding author: Raino Isto, Mott Community College, Flint, United States of America; E-mail: raino.isto@gmail.com Open Access. © 2019 Raino Isto, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Public License. Object-Oriented Ontology and Its Critics Raino Isto* How Dumb Are Big Dumb Objects? OOO, Science Fiction, and Scale https://doi.org/10.1515/opphil-2019-0039 Received May 30, 2019; accepted October 16, 2019 Abstract: This article considers the potential intersections of object-oriented ontology and science fiction studies by focusing on a particular type of science-fictional artifact, the category of ‘Big Dumb Objects.’ Big Dumb Objects is a terminology used—often quite playfully—to describe things or structures that are simultaneously massive in size and enigmatic in purpose: they stretch the imagination through both the technical aspects of their construction and the obscurity of their purpose. First used to designate the subjects of several science fiction novels written in the 1970s, Big Dumb Objects (often called BDOs) have been understood in terms of science fiction’s enduring interest in the technological sublime and the transcendental. While object-oriented ontology has often turned to science fiction and weird fiction for inspiration in rethinking the possibilities inherent in things and their relations, it has not considered the implications of BDOs for a theory of the object more broadly. The goal of this article is to consider how extreme size and representations of scale in science fiction can help expand an understanding of the object along lines that are similar to those pursued by object-oriented ontology, especially Timothy Morton’s notion of hyperobjects. Keywords: science fiction, object-oriented ontology, Big Dumb Objects, megastructure, literary theory, hyperobjects, Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven, Dyson Sphere, Timothy Morton Have you reached the point of vertigo? These structures are hard to hold in your head. They’re so flipping big.—Larry Niven1 1 Introduction Where do very large objects—ones the size of planets, the size of suns, the size of whole galaxies—fit into object-oriented ontology (OOO)? Given OOO’s dedication to a ‘flat ontology,’ which “democratizes being” and asserts that objects at all scales are equally real,2 the answer would seem obvious: very large objects are just as actual as individual microscopic particles and vastly dispersed amorphous concepts. In the history of philosophy and literature, very large objects have often been associated with the Kantian sublime (and thus with subject-centered modes of perception), or else with the existence of ontologically privileged ‘master-objects’ (like the ‘world’). As such, the largeness of very large objects often seems to associate them with philosophical traditions that OOO has sought to critique. However, authors such as Timothy Morton have sought to think with very large objects precisely for the ways that they enable us to move beyond both narratives of master-objects and divisions between subjectivity and objecthood. Morton theorizes a class of objects he calls “hyperobjects,” objects that are “massively distributed in time and space in ways 1 Niven, “Bigger,” 122. 2 Bryant, Democracy, 279-280.