Big Dumb Object

• The monolith in Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's ' is an indecipherable influence on the protohumans to whom it first appears, and later in the film serves to show how little humans have evolved. Astronaut Bowman's attempt to interact with the monolith only makes him a part of its mystery.
• In Arthur C. Clarke's novel Rendezvous with Rama, a 50km-long cylinder is detected entering the solar system. A similar cylindrical probe of gargantuan dimensions threatens Earth in '.
• The object discovered in Quatermass and the Pit was made of a material of extreme hardness, such that diamond-tipped drills and acetylene torches would not damage it. At the same time nothing would adhere to it.
• Charles Sheffield's Heritage Universe setting features many immense alien artifacts, some of which are more inscrutable than others.
• The Marker from Dead Space emits a persistent electromagnetic field from seemingly no source, which could be used to provide limitless energy. Attempting to reverse engineer the Marker, scientists discover that the electromagnetic fields generated by the Marker cause living people to suffer paranoia and hallucinations, while also causing the dead to reanimate, becoming "necromorphs".
• In the movie based on Michael Crichton's novel Sphere, the eponymous object would reflect everything in its presence except people. If it did reflect someone, she or he was alone, and the individual was accepted as worthy to harness the device's power.
• In Iain Banks' novel Against a Dark Background, the Lazy Guns have a lot of mass and yet little weight, and weigh three times as much upside-down as upright.
• *By the same author, the titular Excession is a blackbody sphere that appears on the edge of Culture space and just sits there being inscrutable.
• The dome from the Stephen King novel and television show Under the Dome. The dome is large and transparent unless touched by a person; it gives a slight electric shock when touched for the first time by someone, but not afterwards. It cannot be penetrated, even by a MOAB, and is seemingly causing many mysterious events in Chester's Mill, the town that the dome is enclosing, including causing all electronic devices near it to explode, visions, and, in one character, premature birth.