What they find at the other end of the signal is a shock: the Aurora, a famous luxury space-liner that vanished on its maiden tour of the solar system more than twenty years ago. With nothing to lose and no desire to return to Earth, Claire and her team decide to investigate. Claire Kovalik is days away from being unemployed-made obsolete-when her beacon repair crew picks up a strange distress signal. Titanic meets The Shining in this SF horror in which a woman and her crew board a decades-lost luxury cruiser and find the wreckage of a nightmare that hasn’t yet ended. This is a cerebral hard sci-fi read with a hefty dose of weirdness. I always felt it could benefit from a reread, and I often see it cited as one of the best science fiction novels to feature elements of horror. I read Blindsight several years ago, and it was one of the strangest and most thought-provoking alien first contact stories I’ve ever experienced. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they’ve been sent to find – but you’d give anything for that to be true, if you knew what was waiting for them. Send them to the edge of the solar system, praying you can trust such freaks and monsters with the fate of a world. Send a man with half his mind gone since childhood. Send a pacifist warrior, and a vampire recalled from the grave by the voodoo of paleogenetics. Who to send to meet the alien, when the alien doesn’t want to meet? Send a linguist with multiple-personality disorder, and a biologist so spliced to machinery he can’t feel his own flesh.

Something talks out there: but not to us. The heavens have been silent since – until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet.

It’s been two months since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned.

Books like dead space