Aniara
High Rise meets generation ships, turning to ʻOumuamua. Did not know this is an adaptation of a sci-fi poem from the 50s.
A seemingly bog-standard trip to colonise Mars is veered off course by Space Weather, and shoots them into the nothingness of space. Wailing and gnashing of teeth ensues. What was supposed to be a cruise ride, Titanic-style, is now a generation ship, without the proper preparation.
There’s only a special drug: Mima, some kind of sympathetic being that projects images of past Earth, clean and safe, into your mind. The problem is that is a “living” being too, so after a couple of months of over usage, that being is too depressed to live, which only fucks up morale even more.
The crew tell everyone all should be well in a couple of years, but after that deadline comes and goes, nobody believes them anymore. When they spot some kind of metallic rod headed their way, they hype it as their salvation, not knowing it’s an inert piece of alien stuff.
The crew just loses all credibility and it’s all downhill from there. Everything just rots away as crucial people die without replacement, food runs out, the machine stops. 5 million years later they reach a planet but not even their remains exist anymore.
All this is narrated from the point of view of the Mima handler, a extrovert loner that finds and loses love and life on the trip. There’s plenty of crazy shit when society starts to break down, and weird fertility cults with orgies are not the worst thing it could happen.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.