Ghost Station by S.A. Barnes

 Space.....the Final....yeah nevermind that's been done already. Scifi Horror is a difficult genre to write well. How does one build suspense when you can instantly teleport away from some boogeyman? What threat from ghouls or spectral miasmas exists in the warm glow of holographic displays? Creating believable, relatable situations in a futuristic setting requires balancing the excitement of advanced technologies with the recognizable continuation of the modern human condition. Barnes' newest book Cold Storage achieves this by juxtaposing political corruption with.....well nevermind that would spoil the ending. Honestly, that one gets better the more I think about it.

But I digress; we're here today to talk about Ghost Station.  We begin with Ophelia Bray's first assignment as the team psychologist for a survey crew investigating planets. The multiple levels of tension within this novel really help it sink its hooks into your imagination. First, you have the conflict of Ophelia being seen as a threat to the existing survey team, as they view her as a threat to their ability to keep working since she could declare them mentally unfit for service. Second, you have Ophelia's own guilt over a tragedy that drove her to accept this assignment far out in deep space after her once promising career collapsed. Third, the central question of the novel revolves around discovering what really happened to the previous mission that had been sent to investigate the planet.....or was there another one that was erased for some unknown reason? The book does head towards a cosmic horror angle that I wish it had spent more time with since that is something I definitely do enjoy immensely. And to it's credit, Ghost Station avoids the info-dumping that partially spoils (IMHO) Cold Storage's final act.  Some questions are left open but still answered enough to satisfy this specific story. 

In all three of Barnes' novels that I've read (Dead Silence, Ghost Station, and Cold Storage), a central theme is always isolation. Our protagonist is cut off from society and forced to fend for themselves against some threat or pending calamity. They are the outsider compelled by mischance to prevent troubles from falling upon an otherwise unaware general public. The happy times are only one torn curtain away from horrors unseen. Peace resting on ignorance. The fragility of a stable life built on the deadly choices of The Powers That Be. 

S.A. Barnes' books work well because her brand of Science Fiction strays away from the utopian ideals of Rodenberry's Star Trek. Humanity doesn't improve individually or societally as a result of our outward drive to the stars. We are as we have been. Just with faster boats and bigger bombs. Where Ghost Station works fantastically is taking that human struggle and ramming it straight against another story, one might say an alien story, that is utterly indifferent to the human struggle it is interrupting. And I think that is the true horror that confronts with reading Cosmic Horror. Done well, it becomes pure existential dread. In the grand scheme of things, you don't matter. Your story is just A story. You aren't the main character in anything. That is the deep fear that screams out of the mouth of the corpse in an abandoned spacesuit on a forgotten planet. At the end of the day, you are disposable. The human reaction to that proposal of meaninglessness, I feel, speaks to the existence of a human soul and spirit that persists despite and in strong rejection to a sense of cosmic nihilism that draws a distinction between Barnes and a more Lovecraftian position. In her books, Barnes' characters do find a value and meaning in their humanity that helps push back against the bleakest void pressing in on themselves. They either find or create their own islands to stand and anchor themselves on the lip of the proverbial event horizon. And that, I think, is the most consistently human story of all.