Dystopian science fiction + Cosmic Horror

Eldritch beings. Inter-dimensional paradoxes. Shapeshifting aliens. Time dilation. Psychological trauma. Parallel consciousness. Clones. Free will. Not exactly the kind of stuff you want pumped into your brain after a long, stressful day of work, but I live for this stuff. There’s something about the pure, unfiltered terror of making contact with something unknowable and something so unthinkable that it completely freezes your ability to make any sense of it, leaving you to ponder the meaninglessness and purposelessness of everything. And this is why I love this mashup of genres.

I’ve talked about how dystopian science fiction stories are my favorite type of books to read. These are typically stories where the nature of existence is questioned in post-apocalyptic or far-future scenarios. Examples include The Last of Us, 1984, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Brave New World, Fahrenheit: 451, The Foundation Trilogy, Children of Men, Edge of Tomorrow, The Book of Eli, Cat’s Cradle, and The Sirens of Titan.

And then there’s cosmic horror, a lesser-appealing genre that deals with terrifying forms of intelligent life so advanced and so otherworldly that it strikes fear at the mere thought of encountering something like it. These are not your typical blockbuster alien invasion of Earth stories, they’re far more sinister and nuanced in how they handle the subject matter. Examples here include Annhilation, Bloodborne, The Shape of Water, Darkest Dungeon, Eternal Darkness, The Call of Cthulu, Nightfall, Interstellar, Stranger Things, The Mist, Alien, and Arrival.

There’s some occasional overlap between the two genres in terms of setting and world, but for the most part, they deal with different themes and are shooting to deliver their narrative in different ways. It may not make sense for some sci-fi stories to introduce elements of horror into it. And cosmic horror tales don’t necessarily need to happen in the void of space. But occasionally, these two genres mash up together, and it delivers such good fiction that nothing else, in my opinion, even comes close to how good it is.

Prey is a game that came out in 2017 that beautifully mashes these two up. You play as a character on an abandoned space station (a common trope for the genre) to figure out what happened. Soon, the story evolves in a dark and mysterious tale of how a form of alien phantoms learned to mimic human matter and have slowly infiltrated the entirety of the station. It gets quite grim towards the end as well. This is hands down one of my favorite games of all time, and the setting has a lot to do with it. The game builds up this genre mashup beautifully and lets you loose in its world, allowing you to explore the station and learn more about the Typhon at your own pace. I spent hours in this game poring over research documents and experiments that the scientists on the space station were conducting on the aliens, and it was so well fleshed-out that I was completely immersed into it. And it has a total mindfuck ending that’s stuck with me ever since I finished it.

Observation is another game I played recently with a similar premise to Prey, but the twist is that you control an AI, not a human. It adds a unique perspective on the formula, especially from a gameplay standpoint. You get to authorize certain commands as the AI and are in control of many of the station’s subsystems and processes. You build a sort of co-dependence with your human partner and embark on an eerily thrilling story that plays like a mashup between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Annhilation. It’s so good. I have to seriously applaud the way the narrative was delivered in this game. It was better than what a lot of Hollywood can put out and it utilized all the gameplay gimmicks to its fullest advantage, immersing the player completely into its world and making them care deeply about the fate of its characters. It’s got quite a twist ending, too.

The Martian Chronicles, a book containing many short stories written by Ray Bradbury, is also a superb example of this genre-blending. Much of the book contains tales of humans finding themselves in dire situations either in space or on other planets, and the stories explore how they deal with the environments they’re thrown into. Some are psychological, some dystopian, some pure horror, and some downright maniacal. I honestly couldn’t put this book down and some of the stories in there had me thinking about them for days and weeks on end. It picks a little facet of the human condition and devotes an entire chapter on exploring how that particular idiosyncrasy of being human eventually either ends up being our downfall or sparks a large chain reaction in the larger universe.

Beyond the Aquila Rift, a cosmic horror science-fiction short story that was adapted into a screenplay for Netflix’s Love, Death + Robots anthology, merges these genres beautifully too. It again starts off with the familiar science-fiction trope of a sole survivor on a space station where something has gone seriously wrong, and draws you in with its rich narrative around the purpose of the mission and its crew. And then it hits you with a shock twist that you may have seen coming through the little details it leaves you with but weren’t quite sure how to pinpoint it. Better yet, they notch the cosmic horror up to eleven with the final ending. Not gonna spoil it here, but it made my jaw drop and I immediately felt the urge to experience it all over again. That’s the mark of a great narrative.

We live for good stories. It’s what all the mediums try to deliver, but in different formats. “Science fiction” is a label lately misappropriated to generic Hollywood films where aliens invade a major metropolitan city. The genre offers so much more in terms of where it can go and what it’s capable of. The books and games in this genre are a shining example of this. Cosmic horror, spurred by Lovecraft’s original tales, lives on in various forms today and is starting to make a resurgence across the mediums as audiences embrace the absurdity of macabre inter-dimensional horror. I’m personally pretty excited to see more from this genre mashup and see where we can go from here. If anything, the future promises to only get weirder.