History Main / SpaceIsolationHorror

** ''VideoGame/MetroidPrime3'' was even criticized by some fans for not having enough of this, and feeling too much like conventional SpaceOpera -- too many characters, too much easy travel, and just too wide a scope.

* ''Series/TheTwilightZone1959'': The episode "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E7TheLonely The Lonely]]" is about a man stranded on an asteroid somewhere far from settled space, placed there to serve out a life sentence alone. A passing cargo hauler takes pity on him and leaves him with a female android, whose company he initially rejects before coming to accept it. [[spoiler:At the end, his sentence is commuted, but the ship that came to pick him up [[ColdEquation can't take both him and the android]], and he refuses to leave his only lifeline behind. The captain of the ship, with ''great'' reluctance (it's implied he's seen this before), shoots the android in the head, revealing "her" wiring, and tells the man, "All you're leaving behind is loneliness."]]

%%* ''[[VideoGame/ChzoMythos 7 Days a Skeptic]]'' - '''Administrivia/ZeroContextExample'''

%%* ''VideoGame/{{Doom}}'' 3 - '''Administrivia/ZeroContextExample'''

* ''Dispatcher'' is a ''very'' indie-jank first-person maze game by a single Eastern European developer, in which you're a crew member trying to escape a grid-based maze spaceship while avoiding a giant frog mutant and zombies. It apparently was received poorly and is no longer available for sale on Steam.

* Late into ''Manga/UQHolder'', [[spoiler:Karin is blasted into space as she tanks a spell meant for hrt comrades, sending her hurtling into the depths of space for 45 years. Since she's effectively completely immortal, she can't die and naturally being alone for that long really starts to get to her mentally, then she spots a sun that she's moving toward.... Luckily the protagonist Touta arrives to save her and she's spared the horror of being burned alive for a very long period of time]].

* ''Manga/JoJosBizarreAdventureBattleTendency'': [[spoiler:In the final battle, Kars is launched into space by a volcanic eruption. His attempt to return to Earth by venting air from his body backfires when the moisture in the air freezes solid and he drifts even further away from Earth. Even worse, his immortal UltimateLifeForm body can survive even in the vacuum of space. After an indeterminate amount of time drifting alone in space, Kars' mind can't take it anymore and he simply stops thinking.]]

* Played straight in the ''Series/{{Firefly}}'' episode "Out of Gas". The titular gas is oxygen, and running low (with a ship that is dead in the water) means sitting around waiting for a slow and painful death or, in a degree of scary that is hard to argue whether is lesser or higher, risking whoever finds you decides murdering you is more profitable (or more ''fun'') than saving your life.

** Defied by Holly in the first episode. Recognizing that Lister will probably suffer this eventually, being the SoleSurvivor of an EverybodysDeadDave scenario and trapped, alone, on a spacecraft the size of a small city and a million light-years away from the nearest human, Holly uses the ship's hard-light technology to recreate Lister's 'best friend' aboard the ship (i.e. the person he interacted with the most) -- his insufferable boss, Rimmer. While free of the isolation, Lister isn't much in the mood to celebrate.

* ''Series/BlackMirror'': The ultimate fate of [[spoiler:Robert Daly]] in "USS Callister" -- [[spoiler:his mind is trapped in the game, unable to exit with all the controls disabled, in an inert spaceship cockpit floating through the infinite darkness of the deleted game, with nothing to do but rant and flail impotently at the controls. Given an offhand comment implying that time doesn't flow the same way in-game as it does in the real world, Daly might be stuck like that forever. Honestly, [[AssholeVictim serves him right]] for how he treated those sentient game characters.]]

* ''Series/TheTwilightZone1959'' episode "The Lonely" is about a man stranded on an asteroid somewhere far from settled space, placed there to serve out a life sentence alone. A passing cargo hauler takes pity on him and leaves him with a female android, whose company he initially rejects before coming to accept it. [[spoiler:At the end, his sentence is commuted, but the ship that came to pick him up [[ColdEquation can't take both him and the android]], and he refuses to leave his only lifeline behind. The captain of the ship, with ''great'' reluctance (it's implied he's seen this before), shoots the android in the head, revealing "her" wiring, and tells the man, "All you're leaving behind is loneliness."]]

** Lister avoids the trope in the first episode even after becoming the SoleSurvivor after EverybodysDeadDave: The ship's computer (wisely) decides Lister will probably suffer this eventually, and so recreates Lister's 'best friend' aboard the ship (i.e. the person he interacted with the most) -- his insufferable boss, Rimmer. While free of the isolation horro of space, Lister isn't much in the mood to celebrate.
-->'''Lister:''' Holly, why Rimmer's hologram? Why'd you have to bring Rimmer's hologram back? He was the most unpopular man on board this ship. I mean, he even had to organise his own surprise birthday parties!\\

* Subverted in ''Series/RedDwarf'', where Lister's main reaction at looking out of the cabin porthole into the awesome and terrifying infinity of Deep Space is how bloody arse-achingly dull and boring it all gets after a while...

* ''Film/TheMartian'' might take place on the surface of Mars rather than in space per se, but it still has all the trappings of this trope. NASA astronaut Mark Watney is marooned {{Robinsonade}}-style on a barren planet without a breathable atmosphere, one sufficiently serious equipment failure away from dying in a variety of unpleasant ways and with a very limited supply of food and other consumables. A rescue mission would take many, many months to reach him even if the rest of his crew and MissionControl didn't think he was dead, and [[TheRadioDiesFirst the outpost's communications were irreparably trashed during the same accident that got him into this mess]] so he can't send a distress call. Oh, and [[TheAloner he has nobody to talk to but his diary]].

* At the beginning of ''Film/AvengersEndgame'', Stark and Nabula are on the Benatar, Starlord's spaceship, following [[ReducedToDust the Snap]] when it breaks down and runs out of fuel, leaving them stranded light years away from a civilized star system. After they run out of food, Stark records a message, saying his goodbyes, though he mentions the possibility that since they're floating so far from Earth that the message may never be heard by anyone else. Luckily, Captain Marvel manages to find the Benatar and brings them back to Earth.

* The first story ''Magnetic Rose'' in ''Anime/{{Memories}}'' shows this is Heinz's final fate as he is ejected into space while his ship and crew explode and his partner Miguel [[spoiler:stays inside the ship and is brainwashed by the insane AI to think he is Carlos.]].

* Implied in Disney's ''WesternAnimation/LiloAndStitch'' as the fate of Experiment 626: he's to be taken by prison transport to a barren asteroid, and abandoned there. Perhaps the authorities forbid capital punishment, or the condemned is too indestructible to be executed. It's still marooning on a cold, lonely rock in the void of space.

* The astronauts on the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13 Apollo 13]] discovered midway to the moon that a malfunction had occurred, requiring them to return to Earth immediately, through a terrifyingly narrow re-entry window. If the re-entry attempt had gone wrong, the astronauts would have been either burned alive or stranded in space.

%%* ''VideoGame/SystemShock'' series - '''Administrivia/ZeroContextExample'''

* ''Franchise/{{Alien}}'': The whole franchise is about people stuck in a ClosedCircle courtesy of being far away in space with little to no chance of people coming to the rescue ''at all'' (and if they do, it will take them weeks to ''months'' to get to you) with the titular hostile species lurking on the dark and dreary corners of the ship or the planet trying to get you.

For story purposes (especially in the past when hard sci-fi wasn't prevalent based on [[ScienceMarchesOn lack of knowledge]]) [[SpaceIsAnOcean the deep sea works just as well]], since it has similar conditions for survival and similarly severe risks for going outside. In some ways it is worse, given how humanity that could help are no more than a few miles away, but usually cannot be contacted.

%%* ''VideoGame/DeadSpace'' series - '''Administrivia/ZeroContextExample'''

For story purposes (especially in the past when [[MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness hard sci-fi]] wasn't prevalent based on [[ScienceMarchesOn lack of knowledge]]) [[SpaceIsAnOcean the deep sea works just as well]], since it has similar conditions for survival and similarly severe risks for going outside. In some ways it is worse, given how humanity that could help are no more than a few miles away, but usually cannot be contacted.

* Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov almost met a sticky end during the first-ever spacewalk. His suit ballooned and became rigid, making any movement almost impossible. His body internal body temperature started to rise to alarming temperatures, flooding his suit with sweat up to his knees. After several minutes outside the capsule, he attempted to re-enter the detachable airlock. He found that he could only enter headfirst by pulling his suit's umbilical cord. Alexei became stuck sideways in the process and was forced to partially decompress his suit to fully enter the airlock (risking the bends). A suicide pill was built into his suit, in case he failed to make it back inside the spacecraft.

* ''Manga/JoJosBizarreAdventureBattleTendency'': [[spoiler:In the final battle, Kars is launched into space by a volcanic eruption. His attempt to return to Earth by venting air from his body backfires when the moisture in the air freezes solid and he drifts even further away from Earth. Even worse, his immortal UltimateLifeform body can survive even in the vacuum of space. After an indeterminate amount of time drifting alone in space, Kars' mind can't take it anymore and he simply stops thinking.]]

* ''{{Film/Alien}}'': The whole franchise is about people stuck in a ClosedCircle courtesy of being far away in space with little to no chance of people coming to the rescue ''at all'' (and if they do, it will take them weeks to ''months'' to get to you) with the titular hostile species lurking on the dark and dreary corners of the ship or the planet trying to get you.

* ''Film/{{Pandorum}}'': A crewman awaking from suspended animation to find the ship he's on in dire straits, and trying to puzzle out exactly what the hell happened. [[spoiler:Bonus points for occurring on a spaceship ''that landed in the ocean and sank,'' making it an example of both types.]]

* 1989 saw a surprising number of movies that were basically this but underwater - kind of an inversion of the SpaceIsAnOcean trope. ''Film/TheAbyss'' is the best-remembered, and probably the best in general, of the bunch, but there was also ''Film/DeepStarSix'', ''Film/LordsOfTheDeep'', and ''Film/Leviathan1989''.

* This happens briefly to Gully Foyle at the beginning of ''Literature/TheStarsMyDestination''. The trauma of the experience is so pivotal to his character development and his main motivation for the rest of the book.

-->''"This isn't science fiction. Strange new worlds aren't inhabited by talking monkeys or technologically gifted, sexy utopian women. They're cold, dark rocks harboring terrible secrets-- secrets that gobble your crew up one by one."''
* Unlike the original live-action series, the first ''Literature/RedDwarf'' novel plays the trope harrowingly straight when Lister first awakens from [[HumanPopsicle cryosleep]] to find out he's the trope namer for EverybodysDeadDave: Loneliness, SurvivorGuilt and a side helping of existential angst send him into a long HeroicBSOD that is not the least bit PlayedForLaughs.

* ''Series/StarTrekVoyager'' had a couple of episodes where Seven of Nine and/or the Doctor were the only crew members immune to the Stellar Anomaly of the Week and thus had to command the ship by themselves for long periods of time when the rest of the crew hibernated in stasis pods or were under the mental control of aliens.
* Subverted in ''Series/RedDwarf'', where Lister's main reaction at looking out of the cabin porthole into the awesome and terrifying infinity of Deep Space is how bloody arse-achingly dull and boring it all gets after a while....

* ''Series/BlackMirror'': The ultimate fate of [[spoiler:Robert Daly]] in "USS Callister" - [[spoiler:his mind is trapped in the game, unable to exit with all the controls disabled, in an inert spaceship cockpit floating through the infinite darkness of the deleted game, with nothing to do but rant and flail impotently at the controls. Given an offhand comment implying that time doesn't flow the same way in-game as it does in the real world, Daly might be stuck like that forever. Honestly, [[AssholeVictim serves him right]] for how he treated those sentient game characters.]]

%%* ''[[ChzoMythos 7 Days a Skeptic]]'' - '''Administrivia/ZeroContextExample'''

** ''Metroid Prime 3'' was even criticized by some fans for not having enough of this, and feeling too much like conventional SpaceOpera - too many characters, too much easy travel, and just too wide a scope.

** ''Lost Cosmonaut'' is about a woman who goes into space before Yuri Gagarin. She finds a "muttnik" capsule with half of a childs body orbiting it. When she threatens to tell, MissionControl blasts her into a higher orbit to starve or suffocate.
** ''In From the Cold'' has the protagonist alone in a moon base after the other astronaut died in an airlock malfunction. [[spoiler: The dead astronaut tries to get back in...]]
** One has an experimental FTL engine fail, and the crew goes insane, eventually dying until the automatic return kicks in.
** In ''Thaw,'' sometime in the distant future, a man wakes up from his cryonic suspension onboard a spaceship, only to find himself [[CryonicsFailure only partially dethawed and trapped in his capsule, which seems to have failed.]] Then, he notices that the ship is on emergency lighting, and even that seems to be failing. THEN he notices that the other capsules in the room have also failed and either contains decayed corpses or blood splatters like someone bashed their heads open from the inside. Realizing that some sort of disaster has befallen the ship, he suddenly notices that they are still in orbit around Earth, having never left... except this Earth has a giant glacier of a new ice age covering most of the northern hemisphere, and no signs of human cities anywhere...