Sometimes we just need to get away, to be by ourselves, collect our thoughts, figure out what to do next.
But Halley may have taken it too far when she took a job as a caretaker on a spaceship full of cryogenically frozen people. And not just because the people-sicles are terrible conversationalists.
In the following email interview about her scary sci-fi novel Cold Eternity (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), author S.A. Barnes talks (non-spoilery) about what happens to Halley…and why.
In space-based science fiction stories, the main character is usually the leader; like, say, the captain of the ship. The commander of the military. It’s one of many reasons why Alien was such a revelation when it came out in 1979; its main character was an officer, just not the one in charge.
It’s something author S.A. Barnes is doing as well in her psychological space horror novel Ghost Station (paperback, hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), in which the main character is not the one leading an expedition, she’s a psychologist in the crew.
In the following email interview, Barnes discusses what inspired and influenced this scary sci-fi story.
One of the things that made the movie Alien so scary was that Ripley and her crewmates were not soldiers or scientists or in any way prepared to take on a hostile invader, they were space truckers.
Which is just one of many things they have in common with the crew of the LINA, the small beacon-repair vessel at the center of S.A. Barnes’ sci-fi space horror novel Dead Silence (paperback, hardcover, Kindle, audiobook).
But what’s interesting is that — in the following email interview, in which Barnes discusses what inspired and influenced this novel — she actually says it was Aliens not Alien that had the biggest influence on this scary story.