I love space horror stories. I don’t like most horror, but space horror is different. I love the movie Pandorum, even though it was mostly a flop.
I have a long commute to work so I like listening to audiobooks on my drive. Right now I’m listening to The Martian.
I love that movie, and I have to say, if you averaged the book and the movie, it would be perfect. There are challenges in the book that Mark Watney faces that are just too over-the-top, that the movie in cutting for time, dealt with better. Then there were things explained in the book that were left out of the movie that shouldn’t have been and should have been left in there as a few lines of throwaway dialog.
Perfect example: it would have been just a few lines in the movie for Mark to say that he had enough multi-vitamins to last and all he needed was calories so he could live off potatoes for over a year and be fine, but they left it out.
Also – and I understand plot and all – but NASA knows that he has surplus water and his water is a closed system. Why did they launch protein bars? Dehydrated food would have been lighter and they could send more calories. Weight is the enemy in spaceflight so why send one more drop of moisture than the needed to. He could have used his surplus water to rehydrate his food.
But I digress…
One of the parts in the book left out of the movie is when the crew of the Hermes fly by Earth, they talk to their families.
Beth Johanssen has a conversation with her dad and tells him not to worry about her because she is the designated survivor. It’s a lie to make him feel better, but it’s a weird scene.
That gave me an idea for a space horror that I want to write inspired by The Martian but have no idea how.
Nutshell plot:
A team of astronauts is on its way to Mars. While one astronaut is on an EVA, the craft is hit with a meteoroid. The hull is breached and the ship goes to vacuum. Everyone but the astronaut on EVA is killed and flash frozen. A lot of stuff is blown out into space.
The astronaut re-enters the ship. She manages to patch what she can and seals off the rest. Puts the bodies into a part of the ship that has been exposed to space with the intent of at least bringing her crewmates home for burial.
The only way for the ship to come home – due to orbital mechanics – is a free return trajectory. Exactly the same as Apollo 13. When she gets close to Earth, NASA will launch a small craft to dock with the trans-Martian ship and rescue her.
With the loss of supplies blown out into space, she doesn’t have enough food for the rest of the mission. She stretched and stretches her rations but clearly, she will starve.
So one by one she has to retrieve her frozen crewmates, thaw them and eat them. The ship is on free return so there really isn’t much for her to do besides some regular minor maintenance. Not like The Martian where it is a constant struggle against the nature of space.
She is along for the ride, all she needs to do is not die of hunger. This is a slow, psychological descent into madness as she reminisces about her crewmates and her multi-year experience training with them for a Mars mission, as she eats them over the course of several months a piece at a time.
Of course, during this time NASA knows what’s going on, but can’t say anything about it to the public because of how they would react so that adds a dimension to this I haven’t exactly figured out yet. Probably something where it’s this giant cannibalistic elephant in the room that nobody can talk about to keep it a secret from the public. So while she’s still in contact with NASA, she’s isolated because of this unspeakable thing that is happening.
Space horror.
Lastly, I’m waiting on grades but I feel like I did well. I’m glad for the semester to be over, I was at the point where I was equating Hugoniots in my sleep.
There’s a video game, Tharsis, with a similar plot. There are multiple survivors, the ship is failing, and they need to both fix things and not go insane. Since one of the damaged systems is food production, as the crew dies you have the option of cannibalism — but that REALLY adds to the stress of anyone partaking.
It’s an interesting idea for a story, but it needs a gifted story-teller.
I’m not much of a fiction reader – the extent of the fiction I’ve read in the last few years is all of the Monster Hunter International books, with no more than two others.
I did a space horror short story in college. Rereading it, it’s a hack job, but I got some stuff right.
Basically involves a bunch of athiests and humanists heading out to the stars only to have inexplicable maintenance breakdowns and suffer from unexplained sanity breaks that lead to horrifying mutations. I was playing Dead Space at the time.
Tl;dr- athiests low key discover that hell is actually in space where religion is abandoned. Cheesy af, but had good spots.
Not as much of a space horror as a psychological thriller.
Points, for what they are worth.
Select a time frame to tell the story from. Is it all from the perspective of a single telling, or are you going to tell the story as it develops. (Long flashback versus real time.)
Who is telling this story? The sole survivor of the spacecraft? NASA? First person, third person, all?
What is the world/universe where these events happen? Is it modern day with today’s tech, or sometime in the near future? A different universe?
Try to avoid focusing on the tech. Put enough in to make the story realistic, but the focus is the events happening between your astronauts ears, not the spacecraft/rescue.
Start writing with the end in mind. When this woman gets back to Earth, what happens? Does she get rescued, and re-integrate into society? Does she spend the rest of her days in an asylum? Does she reject the rescue and fly right by Earth because she cannot face re-entering society after what she has done?
Few places to look for inspiration.
The movie Castaway does a pretty decent job of the “lone survivor.”
Read Catch-22 (Joseph Heller) for one method of doing the “tell the story through flashbacks”
Read Hyperion (Dan Simmons) for another way to tell a flashback story.
Read any of the survival at sea stories from the age of exploration. Cannibalism was not unusual after a shipwreck and the crew was floating around on the open ocean.
For a good read about the mental mindset required to survive harsh, impossible conditions, read Endurance about the Shackleton expedition.
Final note:
One of the most prolific sci-fi authors of the golden age of sci fi was L. Ron Hubbard. When he was first asked to write a sci-fi story, his response was “I don’t write sci-fi, I write about people.”
Keep that in mind. This story is about this woman’s survival and what it does to her phytologically, not about the tech.
Another good one to read for ideas is
Survivor Type by Steven King.
It’s a short story about a doctor who is the only survivor after the cruise ship sinks.
You could have the survivor take on the memories of the person she eats (in addition to her own) and then each additional person she eats just adds to the noise. By the time she gets back she has the full memories of the entire crew, all their secrets, likes, horrors and so on.
Damn, J! Can’t wait to read it!