So You Want to Read Gothic Space Opera: Here’s Where to Start
In a gothic space opera, pseudo-medievalism, superstition, insanity, and decay are juxtaposed with space travel: a perfect embodiment of progress, science, and rationality. The starship becomes a stand-in for the haunted mansion, and the universe at large the misty moors that surround it.
Cults, all-powerful religions, and demonic forces are commonly found in the genre, and the wear and tear of space travel — time dilation, and the assumption of death-like states of suspended animation for examples — on human relationships are often emphasized. Human life far from civilization becomes stranger, perhaps even hostile. In gothic space opera, human beings become the aliens they fear.
Movies like Movies like “Event Horizon” and “Sunshine,” the popular wargame franchise “Warhammer 40,000,” and the video game “Dead Space” could all be considered canonical works of this proposed genre, albeit after the fact. Literature offers many possible examples, as well. Here are some of them for your consideration.
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Add to BookshelfNightflyers: The Illustrated Edition
by George R. R. Martin
The Nightflyer is a fully autonomous space vessel on a long-distance flight to a mysterious rendezvous with an alien race. It might also be haunted. There’s something lurking in the shadows of the ship — something dangerous, something inhuman. Can the crew stop it before the ship arrives at its destination?
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Hyperion
by Dan Simmons
Hyperion‘s Canterbury Tales in Space narrative of pilgrims swapping stories en route to an otherworldly shrine haunted by a demon-like creature known as the Shrike would seem to be the archetypal gothic space opera. Strange cults abound, including the nature-worshipping Brotherhood of Muir, and the Church of the Final Atonement, which reveres the Shrike as an avatar of the Lord of Pain. Toss in a doomed, crumbling city in the sand, a massive, shrine-like space ships, an ancient prophecy or two, and you’ve got everything a fan of gothic literature could ever want.
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Ship of Fools
by Richard Paul Russo
Home to generations of humans, the starship Argonos has wandered aimlessly throughout the galaxy for hundreds of years, desperately searching for other signs of life. Now, a steady, unidentified transmission lures them toward a nearby planet, where the grisly remains of a former colony await the crew. Haunted by what they have seen, the crew has no choice but to follow when another signal beckons the Argonos into deep space—and into the dark heart of an alien mystery…
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The Fall of Hyperion
by Dan Simmons
In the stunning continuation of the epic adventure begun in Hyperion, Simmons returns us to a far future resplendent with drama and invention. On the world of Hyperion, the mysterious Time Tombs are opening. And the secrets they contain mean that nothing—nothing anywhere in the universe—will ever be the same.
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