Ridley Scott’s science fiction/horror classic Alien sports one of the most effective taglines in movie history: “In space, no one can hear you scream.” I imagine that some metal bands would beg to differ, for reasons of pride. (Meshuggah’s excellent Alive DVD features a pastiche of the Alien movie poster and a modified tagline: “In space, no one can hear you unless you scream.)
Science fiction and heavy metal rub up against each other in many ways. They’re both implicitly concerned with technology—metal has machine rhythms and electric instruments. They both grapple with difficult questions about human nature. And both canons include huge swathes of art that focuses on the grossest, saddest, most desolate subjects available.
Richard Street-Jammer’s recent Dol Ammad review reminded us that neither metal nor science fiction needs to be grim and brutal, but I like ’em both best when they are. This post pays tribute to the 7 most absurdly metal science fiction premises I could think of. Why seven? Because it’s a magickal number, and I’m a contrarian.
Incidentally, Alien didn’t make the cut. I suspect that I’ve missed some other excellent candidates as well. It’s up to you to tell me what I should’ve included.
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EVENT HORIZON
Traditionally, metal associates itself with supernatural villainy: Satan, hell, zombies, monsters, and so forth. Such entities rarely make it into space [unless we're talking Leprechaun 4: In Space -Ed.], where the antagonists are typically humans, aliens (which amount to secular monsters anyhow), or the environment itself.
The 1997 film Event Horizon involves an unusual rendezvous between the chill of space and the fires of hell. The story focuses on a starship whose experimental faster-than-light engine rips wormhole-style tears in the fabric of spacetime. Upon the engine’s first use, the ship disappears for years. When it reappears in a remote corner of space, a rescue team is sent to investigate. Hilarity, of course, ensues.
Upon arriving at the ship, the team finds that the ship’s crewmembers have tortured each other to death. Further investigation reveals that the ship brought something back from the realms beyond: it turns out that hyperspace is a dimension of suffering and insanity that suspiciously resembles Hell. The residual psychic energy from this plane of shittiness drives some members of the rescue team insane. Sam Neill’s character makes some memorable modifications of his own face before attempting to drag his team back to dimension X.
Aside from the implicit metalness of all things hell-related, Event Horizon deserves a spot on this list for turning a normally harmless science fiction trope—hyperspace—into a nightmare. Event Horizon has also been sampled by a number of metal bands, including one of my favorites: Anaal Nathrakh.
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Anaal Nathrakh – “The Technogoat”
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THE HYPERION CANTOS
Like a great deal of science fiction (including most on this list), Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos novel series takes place in what TV Tropes calls a “crapsack world”. As in Warhammer 40k, the human race has become a clutch of assholes as it has spread throughout the galaxy. Militarism runs rampant, a race of engineered mutants threatens human hegemony, and the AIs that operate most technology may not have our interests in mind.
These features are all common. The Hyperion Cantos deserves a spot on this list because of its most distinctive character: The Shrike.
The Shrike, a godlike biomechanical killing machine of unknown origin and intentions, is pretty much the baddest sci-fi baddie I’ve ever heard of. It is 10 feet tall, and its body is “a sculpted mass of thorns, spikes, joints, and layers of ragged razorwire.” The Shrike possesses the unsettling ability to manipulate time and space—it can appear and disappear at will, move too fast for the eye to follow, and murder its victims before they even think to defend themselves.
Ironically, the Shrike’s name comes from its tendency not to kill its foes. It prefers to consign them to the Tree of Thorns, a three-mile-high monument to agony. The Tree consists of impossibly sharp metallic spines; like its namesake bird, the Shrike impales victims on the branches of this tree. It then uses its time-control abilities to keep its skewered prey alive, and thus suffering, forever.
Most Hyperion characters fear the Shrike, but some worship it as a deity. All can agree, however, that it is the pain-killer.
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Judas Priest – “Painkiller”
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WARHAMMER 40,000
I’ve mentioned the tabletop RPG franchise Warhammer 40k on IO before. It’s actually kind of hard to avoid it on occasion; Warhammer 40k is better represented in metal lyrics and imagery than any other fictional world I can think of, aside from Tolkien and Lovecraft’s works.
There’s good reason for Warhammer 40k’s popularity in metal. Its tagline is “In the grim darkness of the distant future, there is only war.” The franchise follows through on its hyperbolic threat—40k overflows with awfulness. Every detail of its universe is designed to induce grimaces. Humanity has spread throughout the Milky Way, but in the process it has devolved into a chauvinist theocracy whose official policy is the eradication of all alien species. A swarm of interstellar locusts is slowly devouring the galaxy. Hyperspace, called the Warp here, is a Hellish dimension, home to supernatural evil that strives to break into reality. Various other unpleasant races and factions—immortal killer robots! fanatical renegade supersoldiers! orks!—vie for supremacy.
Some of these ideas come from elsewhere. Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and the Alien series strongly influenced Warhammer 40k. Others have been repeated elsewhere, especially in Event Horizon and the Starcraft series. But 40k is so metal because of its grotesque scope. Its eternal war is to World War II as World War II is to one caveman hitting another caveman with a rock. Technology only makes things worse. Billions of people are slaughtered daily. Worlds are eaten.
And that’s where Bolt Thrower comes in.
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Bolt Thrower – “World Eater”
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VIDEODROME
Before director David Cronenberg started churning out Oscar bait like A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, he was one of the most distinctive and unsettling science fiction/horror directors in the history of the medium. Many of his works could’ve appeared on this list: Scanners (head-bursting psychics), The Fly (ghastly genetic hybrids), Crash (car-accident fetishists), and so on.
But for me, Videodrome easily takes the metal cake. It tells the story of a cable porn magnate named Max who uses his (very ’80s) pirate satellite dish to intercept broadcasts of a mysterious show, also called “Videodrome”. The show is essentially a series of snuff films; it depicts masked men torturing and murdering victims in a chamber that appears to be made out of flesh. (Bonus Cronenberg drinking game: take a shot whenever a character uses the word ‘flesh.’)
Max becomes obsessed with the show, at first because of its novelty but then out of physical addiction. Max discovers that “Videodrome” is not a TV show so much as a weapon. Encoded in each transmission is a signal pattern that triggers the growth of a malignant brain tumor. The tumor causes hallucinations, warps the victim’s behavior, and eventually kills him. Videodrome (the movie)’s narrative becomes more and more disjointed as Max suffers the effects of the show.
Videodrome is a fucked-up movie with strikingly gross visuals, but its titular show also offers us a neat analogue for underground metal. Both are hard to find and both deal with unsettling, taboo subjects. After the initial shock wears off, both can grow from a curiosity to an obsession. You must be careful with them, lest they start driving you a little (or a lot) crazy.
Otherwise, you might end up like Strapping Young Lad, who took the title of this song from the film.
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Strapping Young Lad – “All Hail the New Flesh”
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AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS
When I initially pitched the idea for this series to our august editor, he resisted my desire to include At the Mountains of Madness. H.P. Lovecraft’s seminal novella is not science fiction, he said, but rather “weird fiction”—a separate genre of speculative fiction. And he’s right; At the Mountains of Madness is not science fiction, strictly speaking. But I believe that it deserve a place in this series firmly enough that I eventually convinced him.
For starters, Lovecraft’s metalness is utterly unimpeachable. Tolkien’s work may have inspired more band names, but from “The Call of Ktulu” to Trey Azagthoth, there’s no author whose hand rests heavier on metal’s tiller. Lovecraft deserves a mention in any discussion of metal fiction in general.
And in my view, this particular work is science-y enough to fit the bill. At the Mountains of Madness follows a pair of early 20th-century scientists who stumble across the remnants of an alien civilization in Antarctica. The civilization is not as dead as it seems at first, and the explorers are driven to the brink of madness by what they find there.
It’s important to note that while the Old Ones (the alien race in question) and their various rivals possess seemingly impossible shapes and powers, these features aren’t explicitly magical. The aliens are just so much more advanced than humanity that their bodies and technology register as magic, Clarke’s Law-style. Lovecraft is implicitly criticizing the inability of his day’s science to adequately explain the world.
The idea at the heart this story, and at the heart of much of Lovecraft’s work, is this: There are bigger, stronger animals out there than humans. These animals do not mean us well. And we’re too dumb to even begin to comprehend them, much less to fight back against them.
Metallica are the most famous metal proponents of Lovecraft’s work. “The Thing That Should Not Be” isn’t explicitly about At the Mountains of Madness, but its title captures the core idea of the story anyhow.
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Metallica – “The Thing That Should Not Be”
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RIDDLEY WALKER
A lot of science fiction takes place after a major nuclear war. Such settings are usually bleak, but the bleakness varies in degree.
At the lighter end of the spectrum, you have stories like Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, in which human civilization eventually rebuilds its entire infrastructure. In the center are yarns like Mad Max and Robert McGammon’s (mostly fantasty) Swan Song, in which human civilization sustains massive damage but limps onward. At the dark end lies On the Beach, which describes the gradual extinction of humanity.
And then there’s Riddley Walker, which hypothesizes a fate worse than death for mankind. Russell Hoban’s 1980 novel is set thousands of years after a cataclysmic nuclear exchange. Humanity survives this war, but the damage to Earth’s biosphere prevents civilization from recovering. Instead, the descendents of modernity live in a state of perpetual barbarism: literacy is virtually unheard of, tribal warfare is rampant, and death at the hands of starvation, exposure, and even the predation of wild animals constitute daily worries.
Riddley Walker’s most tortuous moments come when its characters discuss their deeply ignorant version of history. The book reveals that humanity not only endures generation after generation of hell, but it has lost all memory of how it came to suffer such a fate. High technology lays us low, permanently. Riddley Walker is one of the most upsetting works on this list because it is the most plausible.
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Coffins – “Mortification to Ruin”
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“I HAVE NO MOUTH, AND I MUST SCREAM”
For me, this is it. Harlan Ellison’s short story has the blackest, grimmest, most painfully metal science fiction premise I’ve ever encountered. Written in a single night, it roils a mess of SF’s bleakest concerns—nuclear annihilation, out-of-control weapons technology, malevolent artificial intelligence, and the dark side of immortality—into a morass of purest misery.
“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” takes place in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. As in Terminator, a military supercomputer called AM becomes sentient during the course of this war and uses its weapons to exterminate humanity. But no scrappy resistance remains. Only five humans survive the holocaust, and not by chance.
AM becomes a secular god, able to manipulate matter at will. It is a cruel god. Filled with spite for its creators, the machine uses its power to impose an endless living hell on the last remnant of mankind. AM visits such a cavalcade of physical torture, sexual defilement, and psychological violation on its playthings that Harlan Ellison himself now kind of creeps me out. The humans’ only hope of salvation is suicide, which AM mockingly denies them at every turn. The story begins in their 109th year of agony.
I have plenty of practice describing things in lurid detail, but “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” is so grotesque that it defies my efforts. Read it here if plumbing the depths of horribleness is your idea of fun. It’s short, but it will stay with you.
Here’s a reprint of AM’s speech:
HATE.
LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I’VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER-THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD ‘HATE’ WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT. FOR YOU.
HATE. HATE.
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Meshuggah – “Future Breed Machine”
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*That last entry should note that AM’s speech doesn’t actually appear in the linked version of the story; it’s included as an image file which for some reason isn’t working right now. It would appear after the paragraph that concludes with “a pillar of stainless steel bearing bright neon lettering:”.
I’ve started focussing on more speculative sci-fi for my lyrics in the last couple of months. It’s a lot of fun to take intelligent subject matter, then extrapolate a semi-story from it.
In particular I’ve been using lots of New Scientist coupled with a plethora of short-storiy collections – I always find the short-form science fiction a more processable form of information and inspiration, as they tend to focus more on singular, key concepts, than a longer story would.
Dan Simmons is great stuff though.
An acquaintance of mine once described Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun as “doom fantasy,” in the vein of doom metal, and the comparison seems pretty apt: a plodding and relentless story pushing a torturer’s apprentice through distorted swaths of time and reality, ever towards his destiny on an earth slowly freezing under a dying sun.
I really wanted to like Event Horizon more than I do, I really did, but once the recovery team started being haunted by their private torments, shit got kind of silly kind of quick. If it had been slow-played a little more and had been more the ship tormenting them than some shitty space ghosts making them act completely stupid, it would have been so much scarier than it is.
On the other hand, Dan Simmons is amazing. His book The Song of Kali is one of the most terrifying, suffocating, oppressive books I’ve ever read. And Warhammer 40k is more metal than metal. The Space Marines of the God-Emperor of Man use the blood and entrails of Manowar to lubricate their powered armor.
Oh man, Song of Kali. For such a non-traditional horror story it ends up feeling so fucking horrifying. The ending is like… shit. It’s like a hammer slowly crushing your testicle.
Randomly enough, I just started another of his horror novels, Carrion Comfort. Off to a weak start (psychic vampires!) but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.
Give CC a chance; the novel won the Bram Stoker Award for a reason.
Great write-up. Event Horizon was actually the first thing I thought of when I saw the title of the article. A few more:
- Pandorum–basically about space zombies–is not particularly original, but it’s an undeniably metal idea.
- The Reavers of Firefly, who like to kill, rape, and eat people (if you’re lucky, in that order) and sew their skin into their clothes; they’re pretty fucking metal. Especially when you find out their origin with Serenity.
- Asimov’s Foundation trilogy (the original three books at least) isn’t very metal in the way we Americans think of it, but its thousand-year history is something Ayreon could make an album out of.
- Does Cube count? Does it even have a premise?
- Speaking of three-dimensional shapes, Sphere was pretty disturbing, where the title object brings people’s worst fears to life.
- The Death Star is fucking metal.
I have dozens of books I haven’t gotten around to reading, but it sounds like Simmons is the next place I need to go. I’ve spent a lot more time on fantasy than sci-fi, in books. If you ever do a post like this one fantasy, you have to include the Legends trilogy from Dragonlance.
Cube totally counts. The screenplay started out as an essay on Nihilism!
You picked soem goodies here, dude. Just a few other options, for the sake of argument:
Neon Genesis Evangelion–the most brutal giant robot series in terms of gore and emotional trauma. Some really disturbing undertones, and the whole premise of the humans fighting against angels (even if it’s really unclear that the angels are from judeo-christian mythology) is pretty metal.
Children of Men–it’s barely sci fi, but the book and the film both paint pretty bleak virtues of the future. the notion of our race collapsing under its own inbred hatred while we watch our numbers dwindle to nothing with no conceivable means of stopping it or reason as to why is a total nightmare scenario.
The Road–same as above, a totally uncompromising apocalypse, with no logic or reason at all. This fucker’s got baby cannibalism in it. Yeah. No mercy.
Oh, fuck, The Road. Dark.
Without Evangelion we’d never have Discordance Axis’ “The Inalienable Dreamless”. So yes, definitely metal.
Interesting. Care to elaborate?
Maybe not exactly without Evangelion but some lyrical content has relations from various anime and other Japanese-related stuff. Jon still carries some of it over to Gridlink.
Several Discordance Axis song lyrics on that album are more-or-less explicitly related to Evangelion. The most obvious example, of course, is “Angel Present.”
A lot of Chang’s lyrics are directly based on Evangelion (“The Third Children”, Gridlink’s “Asuka”) or at least heavily inspired by it (“Angel Present”, “Pattern Blue”, etc). In Andrew Childers’ book about TID Chang explains further what a huge influence the series was on him as a lyricist and a person.
金田!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
鉄雄!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
アキラ!
THAT’S MR. KANEDA TO YA PUNK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
DUNE?!
DUNE?!
DUNE?!
Dune was awesome, but not very metal, and it got even less metal as the series went on. Even if God Emperor of Dune does sound like a cool album title.
dune is so metal. Muad’Dib turns the skins of the Sardaukar and Harkonnen into drums
Shai Hulud begs to differ.
Iron Maiden too, actually.
OK, sandworms are metal. And in the movie, that navigator was metal. But it pretty much ends there.
Hyperion is pretty metal. Manticora did a concept album about it. *spoilers if you read the lyrics*
Australian band Black Feather wrote an album called at the Mountains of Madness, and while not technically heavymetal, their hard rock sound did predate it. Think Deep Purple meets early Prog (ala Armageddon) with Bon Scott playing flute in there somewhere. I think on the final track.
Robert Silverberg and Phillip Jose Farmer wrote some great Sci-Fi from this same era (60s-70s).
I really need to read Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space series. I own one of the books, but the description that continually grabs me is “a mixture of space opera and gothic horror”. Sounds perfect.
The recent James S.A. Corey novels Leviathan Wakes and Caliban’s War get sufficiently brutal and metal, though to explain why would pretty much ruin the premise. First book ruled, second wasn’t half bad.
You really really really need to read the Revelation Space series. It’s fantastic. I recommend starting with Chasm City, however, which is not in the core trilogy.
Chasm City is the one I own! Awesome.
The short fiction of Alastair Reynolds has been my “go to” source of inspiration recently.
Reynolds is absolutely awesome. His short story Galactic North, which is attached to the Revelation Space sequence, will haunt you.
Yeah, I’d recommend reading Chasm City, then the three in the core trilogy. I thought the Prefect (prequel to Chasm City) was great, but might recommend reading the short stories before that.
1. Excellent choice of “Riddley Walker.” Hadn’t thought anyone else had read that book but me (and it’s a pretty durned tough read, amirite?)
2. You’re calling “A Canticle For Leibowitz” a lighter post-apocalyptic novel? The book ends with the rebuilt civilization ending brutally in a second nuclear war during which we get descriptions of thousands dying from radiation sickness, with only a handful of Catholic monks surviving because they’ve reappropriated church funds into chartering a starship for themselves. That’s a light ending?!?
3. “Half-Life” is metal as fuck. The Nihilanth is an abomination to give Trey Azagthoth pause, and The Combine come straight from Godflesh.
Sorry I just spoiled the end of “A Canticle…” You kind of see it coming, though
And lastly, do I need to mention “1984″?
“…imagine a boot stomping on a human face–forever.”
Also awesomely sampled by Aanal Nathrakh.
FMA: I considered Cube, but it gives you so little information that I almost don’t know if it qualifies. Entertaining movie, though.
Anghrist: The toughest thing about writing this list was choosing which post-nuking premises to use. There are so many! I decided to limit myself to two.
The Ellison story was a shoo-in because it’s so explicitly deranged. After that, I basically tallied them according to average post-holocaust level of suffering.
In A Canticle for Leibowitz, humanity rebuilds its civilization to current levels. It’s also implied that humanity will survive to rebuild yet again. Sad, but at least some proportion of people will lead happy, prosperous lives during the course of the second cycle of history.
In a story like Mad Max, people eke hard out lives after the war, but people remain some of the trappings of modern civilization. Crummy, but at least some areas still have towns and laws. (Remember that Max’s home city in the first film was way nicer than Bartertown.)
In On The Beach, humanity gets mercy-killed. Ugly, but relatively swift.
In Riddley Walker, generation of generation of people lead brutish stone-age lives. Since there’s no sign of recovery after thousands of years, there’s no reason to think things will ever improve. It wins the tally of collective shittiness for humanity, by my count anyway.
Are fighting with knives, eating spice until you see through time, stoneburners and loner superman prophets-come-demigods not metal?
Perhaps I need to reread.
If I recall correctly, Aaron/Wash actually struck it from consideration preemptively as an example of fantasy that looks like science fiction. We had some intensely nerdy behind-the-scenes negotiations over this one. Take it up with him!
I would dispute that claim. I WILL dispute that claim.
I’ve always seen sci-fi as part of the fantasy genre, maybe a subgenre of it. Sci-fi, space opera in particular, tends to avoid or ignore the rules of physics as we know them when it becomes inconvenient for storytelling.
The counterargument is that as with Lovecraft’s Old Ones, the technology registers as magic. We simply can’t understand it yet. The various kinds of FTL travel in sci-fi are a good example.
“Hard” sci-fi attempts to use the laws of physics as we know them without breaking too many rules, but even then the “sci-fi” portion is speculation. It’s fantasy.
Science fiction and fantasy are both subgenres of “speculative fiction”——a broader genre known only to the kind of people who argue about whether Dune qualifies as ‘true’ SF.
I’m personally not sympathetic to the argument that ‘true’ SF requires in-universe scientific explanations for all in-universe phenomena. Even in recognized SF classics like War of the Worlds and 2001, Clarke’s Law prevents the narrators from offering any meaningful scientific explanation of the alien tech they encounter.
I mean… it gets lumped in with SF because it’s grounded in ecology, and the terraforming stuff is drawn pretty realistically. At best it’s “soft SF”, which is fine. But if you look to the core of what drives the story and main characters, they’re dealing with magic. Just like Star Wars. Both are essentially fantasy dressed up in SF costumes. The Bene Gesserit are basically Jedis who are basically wizards, not much of a stretch from Aes Sedai or Istari or Allomancers. (My inner nerd is shining through waaaay too much for comfort.)
Does the distinction matter? It does to nerds of a certain breed. In practical usage? Not really. I still stand by the fact that Lovecraft never wrote actual SF, but every list needs a good exception to the rule.
I think it’s a fair assessment. At most, it’s soft sci-fi, but it really is a space fantasy.
By the way, I’m told Herbert felt that Lucas completely ripped him off. Haven’t researched it myself, but it makes a lot of sense. I’m also told that Herbert hated rock music.
Warhammer is metal.
The books read like a bible of source material for metal lyrics. The imagery is the stuff of metal album covers. Every story could be a Iron Maiden epic.
Wow this list is awesome! I need to check out Hyperion; I have always seen it in used book stores and thought the cover looked cool. I need to rewatch Event Horizon too. The first time I saw it was in a hotel on a family vacation when I was about 13. We woke up about 6 times that night to my mom’s screaming nightmares.
I am suprised no one has brought up 2001: A Space Odyssey. Not the moust brutal or violent, but deals with the vast emptiness of space, the unknowable, human nature, and humans building machines that will eventually destroy us. Darkspace samples it too.
I’m little surprised that no one has a mentioned, for example, Schismatrix by Sterling and Ship Of Fools by Russo. Both have some stark imagery with Ship Of Fools, in particular, with sequences set in a slaughterhouse (of humans by an unknown adversary).
I would also recommend the Gap sequence by Stephen Donaldson. The alien adversaries of that series, the Amnion, are amongst the most terrifying in literary SF.
I know this is long winded here, but The Thing is a great movie for inspiration (the original short is Who Goes There? by Campbell). The Hard SF author Peter Watts just wrote a short story set in the movie’s timeframe about what goes on from the Thing’s point of view. You can read the story here…
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/
THANK YOU SO MUCH for mentioning Ship of Fools. I read that years ago and I’ve been trying to remember the title so that I could mention it. The slaughterhouse on the planet is nauseating. We like to assume that the aliens will be friendly and not butcher us, but…
Ship Of Fools is the only Russo I’ve read. I have a copy of The Rosetta Codex, but I’ve not read it yet. Right now, I’m working through Peter F. Hamilton’s Void Trilogy.
Haha, I need to read posts completely. The Gap is excellent, and yes, the Amnion are terrifying. The rest of that series is pretty metal – Angus in particular.
Another good one: an early short story by George R. R. Martin called “Meathouse Man”.
http://www.johnjosephadams.com/the-living-dead/?page_id=43
Also, Blindsight by Peter Watts. One of the most…alien…accounts of first contact with another species I’ve ever read. If it were metal, it would be Portal crossed with Author & Punisher.
Surprised to not see Hellraiser mentioned here.
Cenobite – The Black EP