I’ve been on a cosmic horror kick lately, and what I’d really like to read is stories or novels of the awful and unfathomable on a spaceship. Stories where we go to them, poke what shouldn’t be poked, scan what shouldn’t be scanned, and things proceed from there.
Blindsight by Peter Watts. One of the few books in recent memory to genuinely give me the creeps.
This is a fine note.
I haven’t read the book, but watched the movie. I think Event Horizon might be what you’re looking for.
I’ve heard references to these sorts of stories in the 40k universe, but again I haven’t read the books.
Event Horizon is much better if you pretend it’s a prequel to WH40K.
I think because of the coincidence between both Event Horizon and ships in 40k running into ‘chaos’ in the warp.
But as much as people keep making the parallel, it is just as likely that both drew their ideas from H.P. Lovecraft’s ideas of what lies beyond what we know as spacetime in our comfortable sphere.
It’s not exactly Cthulhu but the revelation space has ships that are monstrous and so old that people barely ever go to most of the parts of them. Could be worth a read.
Alastair Reynolds is the author. It’s not really horror exactly but some screwed up stuff in em. That’s all I got for you sorry! I’ll follow this to see what others suggest
Ah yes, the massive, ancient ship with the interesting business with the captain. That was creepy.
I really enjoy Alastair Reynolds’ novels.
Was there one with torture chamber pods onboard or something? Was that Absolution Gap? I may be mixing up books. Memory no worky.
Yes, I think so. The pods are there in the flashback of the ship and the doctor (who ends up serving cathedral guy) used to take some people as payment. That’s what my memory says. And cathedral guy is one of the main characters of Absolution Gap, so it all adds up.
I was going to suggest Chasm City in particular, for the events on Sky’s ship.
I was going to suggest Chasm City in particular, for the events on Sky’s ship.
I read the post and was about to reply with this but you beat me to it.
As for horrors, the short story “Nightingale” in “Galactic North” is probably exactly what they want but some familiarity with the world building makes it hit harder.
I’m surprised, because there’s some obvious answers to this I don’t see here.
Blindsight A bunch of zombies, led by a vampire fly into deep interstellar space to rendezvous with an alien object that doesn’t understand or care about them.
The God Engines by John Scalzi. VERY different from Scalzi’s other work. FTL works because of psionic aliens who are horrifically tortured by priests to force them to warp space.
The Outside by Ada Hoffman. AI gods rule the universe and are horrific.
The Sollan Empire books by Christopher Ruocchio have MANY elements of this (and other SciFi tropes). The alien race at war with humans worship dark gods from outside the galaxy who want to destroy reality. They also consider humans to be an edible slave race and you’ll encounter the horrific things they do to humans right in book 1, but they really get into that in the most recent book.
Hyperion If the Shrike isn’t a form of cosmic horror, IDK what is.
Sphere by Michael Crichton. Ok, technically a submarine base, but there IS a space ship…
Not quite cosmic horror, but kind of fitting what you’re looking for in the “shouldn’t have been poked” sense:
The Three Body problem – but particularly the second book The Dark Forest – which has a somewhat novel solution for the Fermi paradox. Don’t shine your flashlight in a forest full of monsters, real or imagined. Become the monster.
The Stars are Legion is a sort of body horror writ on a space colony scale. Won’t spoil it too much, but have you ever wanted human mutation taken to the extreme – to the point of megastructures made of humanity?
The Sparrow, sometimes referred to as Jesuits in Space, is sort of a Heart of Darkness type tale where well meaning missionary/anthropologist types poke things they shouldn’t. They don’t unleash cosmic horror, but just the horror of truly unknowable otherness. It resonates with some and falls flat with others.
S.A. Barnes - Dead Silence
Very well written, and exactly what you are looking for.
Blindsight by Peter Watts. It’s the quintessential modern take on cosmic horror. First there is the “external” horror of a truly alien spaceship that is compared to a “crown of thorns” and “devil’s baklava” with its strange inhabitants, and then there is the “internal” horror of musings about the nature and relationship between conciousness and intelligence. Then there is the transhuman main cast, including Jukka Sarasti the vampire and the AI of the ship Theseus. The sidequel Echopraxia is also great, expanding on the concepts and introduces concepts like human hivemind, militarized zombies and Portia-like alien intelligence.
Killing Star by Zebrowski and Pellegrino discusses the Dark Forest hypothesis with various subplots about scientific ambition gone wrong, personal loss, paranoia and religious zeal (some nutjobs cloned Jesus and Buddha, and the clones, after raising their eyebrow in amusement, went “Nah, we’re outta here!”). The novel starts with 99.9% of humans and life on Earth wiped out in relativistic bombing, and then it gets worse. The attacking aliens and their technology is well thought out and the way they hunt down the last remnants of humanity is harrowing.
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Probably not exactly what you have in mind, but I’d still recommend The Reality Dysfunction (and the other two books in the Night’s Dawn Trilogy) by Peter F Hamilton.
There’s a couple of short story collections on Kindle called Space Eldritch. It’s been years since I read them, but I remember enjoying them. A little on the pulpier side, but fun.
The Locked Tomb series! It’s excellent. The first book is Gideon the Ninth.
It’s not exactly the right genre but I think it’s pretty close. Many people describe it as lesbian necromancers in space. But that’s a poor description IMO. More like mystery novels with a side of horror featuring necromancers in space. The lesbian aspect is very minor though certainly relevant to the plot.
“The Final Architecture” series by Adrian Tchaikovsky has some elements of this.
Haven’t seen it suggested yet, so I’ll throw out Linda Nagata’s Inverted Frontier series. Without giving away too much, explorers on the periphery of a collapsed posthuman civilization launch an expedition back towards its center, and along the way find various eldritch monstrosities – of human origin and otherwise – as they try to solve the mystery of the collapse. It’s more thriller than horror in tone, but it checks your other boxes quite well.
Blindsight by Peter Watts (firewall series)
Hyperion by Dan Simmons
Revelation Space series by Alastair Reynolds
Alien by Alan Dean Foster
Thanks for the recs.
