Audio Fiction Friday: Project Hail Mary Built You Up, Let The Hyacinth Disaster Break You Down
By Gavin Gaddis
Project Hail Mary immediately became one of the bright spots of film in 2026. Right as the Artemis II moon flyby reminded the world it’s possible for us all to embrace the joy of science for the sake of science, along comes a banger adaptation of a novel about a science teacher talking to a rock alien about space algae. Today I pitch to you the opposite side of the coin. A thematic sister story to Project Hail Mary that will make you cry just as much as Rocky’s pure innocence did, except it’s a story where every character dies.
Stick with me.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the doom and gloom of the world. For every joyful moment like Artemis II there’s a half-dozen other things that can ruin your day. Hope is a valuable resource, and fiction that fosters hope is some of the most important art out there. I could spend thousands of words telling you about how Zom100: Bucket List of the Dead and Trigun Stampede and Dungeon Meshi will fill your soul, but this is EAR•WAX. Let’s talk about a podcast.
The Hyacinth Disaster is a seven episode audio drama produced by David Carlson. As is tradition with many series like it, THD excuses its audio existence with a framing device: you’re listening to a black box recording from the mining ship MRS Hyacinth. That detail, plus the title of the show, starts you off on the back foot. A disaster is happening, and the only record is the recordings.
The Hyacinth is an asteroid mining ship (with a cool official design you can see in the show art and on the show’s site) on a clandestine mission as the series starts. Recently, the MRS Corvus, captained by a good friend of the Hyacinth crew, has been taken hostage due to petty mining rights squabbles between the corporation they work for and the corporation the hostage-takers work for. Despite contractual assurances ransom would be paid for her, the corp isn’t paying up.
In response, the crew of the Hyacinth sneak out into the asteroid belt to scan a potentially valuable asteroid off the books. If they can find a motherlode, they can effectively blackmail the corporation into saving Ember and the Corvus. The problem? There’s something… wrong with the asteroid.
Granted, the stakes are much lower than the entirety of two sentient races potentially going extinct in Project Hail Mary. Setting aside the unfortunate fact Project Hail Mary Andy Weir is the kind of elder nerd who posts generative AI images of his wife to Facebook, he’s the kind of writer who unabashedly uses hope as his story engine. Both of his runaway successes are about sheer hope and human ingenuity overcoming impossible odds. Mark Watney survives on Mars by himself because that’s just what you do. People are counting on him. Ryland Grace works his hardest on what he knows is a suicide mission because that’s just what you do. People are counting on him. The crew of the Hyacinth are trying to save a handful of people from a soulless, uncaring system. People are counting on them.
Unlike Project Hail Mary and The Martian: everyone dies in this show. A detail I share freely without spoiler tags because knowing a story has death doesn’t mean it is inherently negative. As Hermes and the chorus clearly state at the beginning of every production of Hadestown: “It's an old song, it's an old tale from way back when. It's a sad song, but we're gonna sing it anyway.” Season one of The Terror starts by telling you every character dies by the end, yet it’s still a hell of a story to experience.
Mechanically, The Hyacinth Disaster has a lot to offer as well. Fans of how broken the Serenity was in Firefly will absolutely love the Hyacinth. Characters do regularly discuss how broken their equipment is, but beyond that the sound design makes even the systems that work sound laborious. Whenever captain Conlin Hynes (voiced by Carlson) switches channels you hear him flipping big chunky switches and shrill, cheap-sounding system notifications repeat every single time. During scenes where Con has to switch comms channels multiple times in a short period of time you can feel him getting annoyed with how pointlessly complex the process is.
Throughout the story there are many moments where the characters could simply quit. From simply flying away to taking a long jump out a short airlock, many characters have the choice to simply not partake of the horror that develops around them on the godforsaken rock they chose to scan. Yet they continue, because Ember and her crew have nobody else fighting for them.
If I’ve at all swayed you towards checking out The Hyacinth Disaster, I highly recommend listening or downloading episodes direct from David Carlson’s official site. In addition to the fun extra lore and 3D renders of the Hyacinth, you get the original show files as they were published nine years ago. Since then, Rusty Quill has taken over stewardship of the RSS feed and in 2026 the experience is… suboptimal. As of this writing there are up to five minutes of ads running in the form of chunky preroll and postroll dynamically-inserted ad spots. Still, all these years later I argue The Hyacinth Disaster is a bright spot of hard sci-fi in the audio drama space. A self-contained story in what feels like a lived-in world, including just enough optional lore online to whet your whistle if you really want more.
That’s it for us today. We’ll leave you with a brief clip of our new show Drama Club - which just came out today! Four audio drama creators talking about what it takes to make audio drama. Check out this clip and the show, if you please.
