Ghost Station

Ghost Station, by S A Barnes, is a new space suspense story.  The novel’s tension comes from a distant, deep-space setting and from interpersonal secrets among the crew, long before introducing the truly unsettling ancient alien species, with darkly nonhuman goals and actions.

When the story opens, Ophelia Bray takes a contract job as a psychologist to a distant space research team who’ve just tragically lost a team member. Her job will be to counsel the rest of the team, while assessing them for ERS — murderous space insanity. There’s no medical test for ERS, it’s a collection of symptoms that end with the sufferer running out of an airlock or stabbing their crewmates, and plenty of tough colonists and miners don’t believe it even exists. Ophelia’s family, the wealthy and powerful Brays, don’t want her to take the job for their main competitor Montrose, and attempt a combination of threats and bribes to keep her away, and when she arrives at her new job, her new coworkers don’t want her around either. Dr Bray is determined both to prove herself as separate from the Brays, and determined to fulfill her duties.  

The story takes us to the distant, desolate planet Lyria 393-C. It’s now owned by Montrose, and the crew is taking samples and readings before it’s evaluated for a possible colony or mining outpost or some other way Montrose can turn the planet into money. But they’re not the first arrivals, Lyrica was previously held by Pinnacle, the Bray family company and Montrose’s main competitor, and before that, some kind of pre-warp alien civ lived and died here.

The book builds suspense, with anxiety coming from the dark possibilities on the strange planet, from tensions and secret in the crew, and from Ophelia’s own background, all twisted together. I love trying to guess thrillers, and there’s no shortage of dangers here. I have to warn readers that this is a bit gorier than what I usually read, but the focus is on a creeping sense of dread from isolation and from the terrifying possibility that your own senses are unreliable, not from gross scenes. 

The overall world of Ghost Station has wild future tech, like cold sleep to access to distant galaxies, but still relies on underpaid, exploited labor doing dangerous work to increase the wealth of a few powerful families. I enjoyed the worldbuilding descriptions, with enough explanation to set the stakes without feeling like a tech manual. (I tend to enjoy scifi where there’s wild future tech, but there’s no need for a detailed explanation when the characters hop a lightspeed shuttle like they’re on the subway.)  Anyway, this novel offers solid  explanations of how the sleep bands should work, or how a departing crew usually leaves a base, but the overall storyline relies on human fears about isolation and distrust, not just deep-space technology. In some ways, it’s not just a space thriller, it’s a story about whether we can transcend our families and our pasts.  

Ghost Station pairs surprisingly well with my recent read,  John Christopher’s The Lotus Caves, and also with one I read a couple years ago, Lena Nguyen’s We Have Always Been Here.  The Lotus Caves, the latest in my retro scifi reads, felt similar because it blends daily life in a remote outpost with the creepy, wild possibilities of space life. There’s a similarity between The Plant in The Lotus Caves, and the alien rock-life in Ghost Station, reading the minds of humans and controlling the environment. I enjoy this because if you read a lot of scifi, it’s easy to get burned out on stories of Aliens Want To Take Over Earth, and these are some truly alien motivations. 

Ghost Station also reminded me of We Have Always Been Here, first in the obvious ways, both are suspense stories about a space psychologist on a distant mission where it’s unclear whether the team is going insane from isolation or whether there is something deeply disturbing on this new planet. There’s also the element of team distrust. But by the end of WHABH, socially-awkward space psychologist Grace Park starts to think about her life and what kind of person she is, and Ophelia Bray does the same here.

Overall, a great space thriller, just be prepared for a body count.