How To Create Tension With Isolation In Space Settings

Prepping for his talk at this weekend’s Writing the Occult: Time & Place event, Rick Danforth processes his thoughts in public: what exactly does it add to your narrative when you isolate your characters in the one place no one can hear you scream for help?

It’s a time-honoured tradition in SF media: putting the characters into isolation in Space. The tool has been used by many genre classics, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Alien to Event Horizon to The Martian. Like ice cream and chocolate, Space isolation just doesn’t seem to go out of fashion.

Why? Simply put, it provides fantastic conditions for compelling storytelling.

It’s a tool I use constantly with my short fiction, and not necessarily intentionally—it’s just so compelling for storytelling that I find myself coming back again and again. 

What makes isolation in space interesting for the reader?

It immediately raises the stakes. If I’m sitting at home and something goes wrong, support is usually available:

• If I hear a burglar downstairs, I have a 30kg dog in the house.
• I also have neighbours and friends who live close by.
• I can call the police to come and (hopefully) arrest them.
• And, most importantly, I can just leave the house. Run away to somewhere safer. The dog probably has it in the bag anyway.

The Story Tools Of Isolation

So what are the tools in our story toolkit that best help with creating the isolation tension for our readers, viewers or listeners?

1. Location 

Location is a key element—it’s the part that creates the isolation. A good, believable story setting is the absolute bedrock of a good, believable story. 

The location can also tie into the core plot features to go along with the isolated setting, and that is where matching it to your story becomes important.

Below we have a list of some common settings we see with isolated Space settings:

• Domed city: A large barrier forming an impenetrable seal over an area, separating inhabitants from the rest of the world. Isolation is total and permanent. As seen in Silent Running.
• Spaceship: A mobile vessel carrying a crew through a void where isolation can be compounded by distance, limited resources and the lack of outside assistance. As seen in Project Hail Mary, Alien, and (let’s be honest) an awful lot of films.
• Far-away planet: A remote world separated from civilisation by vast distance where isolation is defined by sheer inaccessibility. As seen in The Martian.

In each case, the location/setting ties deeply into the plot, which aids the isolation. We can understand the reasons the characters are isolated, and the additional problems that the setting causes them. The Martian has an abandoned astronaut on Mars trying to get home, hindered by the isolation that also preys on him mentally. In Alien, the isolation is the cause of the paranoia and fear. They are a small team, so they start isolated with each other—but with no escape, no support, nowhere to run. And then each death makes them more isolated as the tension begins to rise. Both of these settings are plausible, and the isolation makes sense. The plot and the setting combine wonderfully. 

Something that these settings also offer the writer is an economy of world-building, description and cast. It chews through word count quickly if you keep changing scenes and places with a whistle-stop tour of the world. If that’s the story you want to tell, great. But keeping it in the isolated setting can help the author, especially for short stories and flash fiction. You don’t need to waste word count on introducing the cast, lots of new description, or explaining the mechanics of the otherworldly setting. Instead, the word count can be harnessed more for the plot, the vibes, the fear. Even in a longer piece this can help make it feel more personal and claustrophobic.

It also gives you wonderful options to add cabin fever and sensory deprivation to your story. 

Natural problems

And that’s before we get onto the additional problems that an isolated space setting can provide. Here is a list of some basic items that most people in Western society take for granted (within reason):

But remove any of these items from the list in an isolated space setting and you have a massive, plot-worthy dilemma that will end in death if not resolved. There is nobody to help, nowhere to purchase supplies. So, we have an extra and immediate stake in our plot. This keeps the tension rising, the reader interested, and the character having a miserable day (which is the best).

The lack of communication makes it worse, yet again. At least if nobody can physically help you but they can call, they can help guide you through tasks; they can offer words of encouragement. Without that, it’s so much worse. In The Martian—a more optimistic story than some of the others mentioned here—the main character starts with nothing and builds up to the level of communication. It’s a huge celebratory plot point when he gains advice and support from his team.

Stacking, escalation and weaving threads

So, we have our original problem, but this time in Space: You’re on your spaceship, months away from anybody. And out of nowhere, the burglar appears. Or, to be more traditional, a monster.

There is nobody to help you. You don’t know if the intruder is violently inclined. You have to deal with the issue yourself or suffer the consequences of inactivity. Will they break the ship? Come for your flesh and blood? Do they want to steal the ship?

And this is where the premise can expand the fun for us as authors. We have our stranger on the ship as the inciting problem, and as we are trying to cope with that we start having issues with the oxygen, the food, the water, or something like that.

Bear in mind that they do have to be linked, otherwise it will feel too random and snap the reader out of the story. The isolation and the intruder need to be neatly and believably tied together. For example, we have an alien monster on board. Next stop, it smashes through the air supply; we have gone from one awful problem to two, and they’re linked. You try to distract it so you can fix the air supply; it ends up ruining the food supply. These escalations feel natural. The character is increasing peril, and the tension is building as we go along.

You don’t need to have a monster or even a person at all on the ship—The Martian is a wonderful example of a Man vs Nature story, just set in Space. The more things he fixes, the more things go wrong, but they don’t feel random. It’s clearly explained that the equipment was never intended to last this long, so any emerging issues become perfectly plausible. And some of the issues, such as an explosion in the Hab when making water, are directly caused by choices he has made. The merciless environment of Mars is a sufficient replacement for a physical villain in this toolkit. 

Watch Out For Some Common pitfalls

That’s how we do it, but what do we need to avoid while we do it? 

The biggest issue I see is not sufficiently isolating the main character. There is a lot of temptation to give them a wide supporting cast, but unless they then die off or betray the lead it can ruin the tension of the isolated setting. It’s hard to be in an isolated setting when you’re surrounded by helpful friends or colleagues.

Sometimes the character starts alone, like in Project Hail Mary. 

Sometimes they start with others who are then killed off, like in Alien. This is a wonderful extra method of adding tension as they get picked off one by one. 

And sometimes they start early with someone helping them, and they become the villain, like in Pandorum. 

There are many ways to achieve the goal. But ultimately, your protagonist can’t be surrounded by comforting friends and family if you want to maintain the tension and drama. 

The other big issue for me is explaining the reasons behind said isolation. In Project Hail Mary, you have the hopes of the world riding on this one ship, and it would be weird to base those hopes on one single (unqualified) person. So, the extra characters are killed in transit. Nice, and easily explained by the record-breaking length of the trip. 

Other Types Of Isolation 

So far we have focused on the concept of physical isolation, and how to stack the issues that setting provides. But physical is not the only kind of isolation we are able to stack in our stories. How about one of these:

• Societal isolation: When you are physically there, but lonely in a crowd for various reasons. Mickey 17 shows this wonderfully well. Mickey’s job means each time he dies, he is “restored” from a previous cloned image, which means most of the ship see him as a freak and want nothing to do with him. He’s socially isolated and perpetually respawned.
• Isolation but with communications: You’re alone in Space, nobody can physically help you, but at least you can get some help (see the latter parts of The Martian, as discussed earlier).

It can be great fun to play around and combine these different types of isolation, stacking the different levels together and make your character/s feel more isolated, more alone, and more stressed about the horrors they experience.

Keep It Believable For Ultimate Impact

Isolation works best when we keep it simple, yet plausible. It works best when it takes away everything except the character and the obstacle they have to overcome. It narrows and distils the essence of the story into a sharper focus than more crowded pieces could ever hope to achieve.

There is nobody to help you. Nobody to comfort you. There’s only you, the problem, and what you are willing to do to overcome it.

With this sorted, we can layer problems one after another to truly create the worst day possible.

Rick Danforth will speak further on this topic at Writing the Occult: Time & Place on Saturday 5 September, alongside a host of speculative fiction writers and creators. More details and tickets available at writingtheoccult.carrd.co

All Space photos here from NASA’s Unsplash account; film stills are from IMDb.