"In space, no one can hear you scream." - Alien, dir. Ridley Scott (1979)
A ghost ship drifts through the endless darkness, perhaps in high orbit around Saturn, or perhaps an FTL jump or two away from Earth. Her distress beacon pulses invitingly, asking you and your crew to come a little closer, see what there is to see. Check for survivors. Loot the place, make a nice payday off it. Just one problem: you aren't alone on the derelict. Something else took interest in the beacon before you got here, or was the reason the beacon was set off in the first place. As your crew dwindles in number, picked off one by one in increasingly gruesome and elaborate ways, you can't stop yourself from wishing you had just trusted your first instinct to nuke this evil ship from orbit.
The fine particulars may vary a bit; sometimes there are a couple of survivors who reluctantly disclose the horrors they've witnessed before your arrival. Sometimes the derelict may be an abandoned planetside colony or research facility, for example, and is not necessarily an actual mobile vessel, even if that's certainly the more customary approach to this microgenre of sci-fi horror. Your genre may not even be horror in the first place... usually. Best to be sure you're wearing a blue shirt, before beaming down to have a look around, just in case. Or a suit of power armour.
"Libera tutemet ex inferis." - Event Horizon, dir. Paul W. S. Anderson (1997)
Space derelict fiction holds a special place in my heart, as it is a fusion of several other genres that I've loved since childhood, and it served as my gateway to horror fiction as a whole. It has the properties of a haunted house, but the inquisitive fascination of a first contact narrative from sci-fi. Typically at least one sympathetic character survives, so it is saturated with features of the survival horror and thriller or manhunt genres, and often there is also an element of a revenge plot built in, as sequels bring a previous story's survivor back into the heart of danger in an attempt to eradicate the threat permanently, or to "save our souls," if not necessarily our ship.
What follows is a non-comprehensive list of reasonably well-received space derelict fiction works across many formats of media. Please feel encouraged to directly message me with more to append to this list!
Films
- Alien and its sequels - Note that this franchise also boasts numerous video games and a tabletop roleplaying game of the same title, so I shall conserve a bit of space by counting them under this single heading.
- Event Horizon
- Sunshine, dir.Danny Boyle (2007)
- Solaris, dir. Steven Soderbergh (2002)
- Apollo 18, dir. Gonzalo López-Gallego (2011)
- Europa Report, dir.Sebastián Cordero (2013)
- Pandorum, dir. Christian Alvart (2009)
Video Games
Pen and Paper Games
- The Wretched - A solo tabletop RPG which uses a set of Jenga blocks as a way of generating suspense during gameplay. Written by Chris Bissette and published to itch.io (2020)
- Mothership - Tuesday Knight Games (2018)
- Dark Moon (formerly known as BSG Express) - Evan Derrick, published by Stronghold Games (2011)
Books
Iron Noder 2024, 24/30