Space Madness: Difference between revisions
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* In the short story "The Second Kind of Loneliness" by [[George R. R. Martin]], the sole inhabitant of a space station spends most of the story wondering why his relief hasn't arrived. Only at the end does he remember that he murdered his relief several months prior for interrupting the solitude he had finally become accustomed to.
* ''The Shores Of Death'' by Michael Morcock: no-one can leave the Earth for as much as a month without their spirit driving them mad with the pain of separation from mother Gaia. One man manages to spend years away by reforming himself into a mutant monstrosity, but his acolytes die horribly. Then again, Orlando Sharvis may in fact be another incarnation of Arioch, or perhaps Satan.
* In the short story ''Competition'' by James Causey, just looking into a viewport is enough to send a female biochemist into temporary
* In the short story ''Egocentric Orbit'' by John Cory, the first men launched into space withdraw into themselves and refuse to talk to anyone, such is the ego-boosting effect of seeing the entire world revolve around them.
* In the [[William Gibson]] short story ''Hinterlands'', those who travel the interstellar "Highway" invariably return catatonic, insane or dead by their own hand. In rare cases a returnee can be temporarily grounded in reality by taking some really good drugs with someone they can totally relate to.
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* Mack Reynolds wrote a ''[[Star Trek: The Original Series|Star Trek]]'' book, ''Mission to Horatius'', in which the possibility of "space cafard" became a concern. Spock described it as:
{{quote|"Compounded of claustrophobia, ennui--boredom, if you will--and the instinctive dread of a species, born on a planet surface, of living outside its native environment.... A mania that evidently is highly contagious. It is said that in the early days of space travel, cafard could sweep through a ship in a matter of hours, until all on board were raging maniacs, and--"}}
* ''Tomorrow War'' by Alexander Zorich all ships has at least some bays equipped with real windows (not videoscreens). If this feature is omitted, the crew will grow less stable until someone starts to drool or breaks the screen and then walks out of an airlock. One of the reasons may be [[Hyperspace Is a Scary Place|sensory deprivation during jumps]]
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* In the ''[[Farscape]]'' episode "Coup By Clam", "transmissible celestial dementia" is a greatly feared infectious disease.
* The first ''[[Twilight Zone]]'' episode "Where Is Everybody?" is about a man who finds himself in an empty town. He's revealed to have hallucinated the whole thing during an exercise designed to replicate the feeling of isolation in outer space.
* On ''[[John Doe]]'', a metal dome in the forest turns out to be a simulated space vessel, in which astronauts have been confined for months to test the mechanisms and psychological hazards of a manned trip to Mars. Initial investigation suggests the crew have killed each other due to
* On ''[[Community]]'' Pierce succumbs to this after a few minutes of being locked inside a space simulator.
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== Real Life ==
* This trope likely originated in 1950's experiments designed to test the effects of working in a cramped, low-oxygen
** As the recent experiments Mars-100 and Mars-500, mentioned below, show, while there could be some frictions, they're nothing that cannot be dealt with.
* One of the justifications for the short-lived push for women astronauts in the late 1950's was that studies had shown they could cope with isolation better than men.
* The European Space Agency locked 6 people in a house/mock-spaceship for over 500 days, as an experiment to see how people would cope with a trip to [[The Red Planet|Mars]] and back. Naturally, they still still had gravity, but the communications delays and isolation from "Earth" were simulated pretty well. [[Averted Trope|They emerged unscathed]], though they were certainly ''happy'' to be out.
* The fears of the
** Another version is that he had this code in a sealed envelope inside his capsule and he wasn't supposed to know it beforehand. Two different people told him the code on the launch day. Bonus points for second one telling the code just minutes before sealing the ship.
** The whole team was completely convinced (and was later proven right) that the theory was bupkis, as it was proposed by a doctor who never had any experience with spaceflight or even aviation medicine. But he had too much clout to be simply ignored, so they were forced to play along.
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