David Carlson
10 episodes listed below
Deep-space panic on a failing channel.
The Hyacinth Disaster turns asteroid surveying into a pressure cooker of broken comms, failing equipment, and ugly corporate leverage. Its crew fights through air shortages, rescue attempts, buried truths, and a bargain that keeps getting worse.
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The Hyacinth Disaster is a seven-part sci-fi audio drama with its boots planted in panic, labor, and bad reception. A crew hunts value in a Jovian asteroid while trying to turn that value into leverage for the Corvus. The job does not stay a job. Equipment fails, tunnels become traps, and the rock behaves in ways nobody on the line can explain cleanly. The show is strongest when it lets procedure carry the drama. Characters talk through frequencies, suit damage, shuttle fuel, scan numbers, air supply, relays, and improvised rescue routes, and the listener pieces the catastrophe together from the chatter. It moves fast. The result feels less like a narrated adventure than a black-box recording from an industrial disaster in deep space. Grim pushes through darkness and debris. Finch tries to keep systems, people, and nerves from collapsing. Blue makes hard calls and questions easy money. Dreadnought shifts from liability to something more complicated. Argus, Ember Roth, Temple, and Hines become part of a widening mess of debt, ransom, grief, and corporate hunger. The asteroid is not just scenery. It is a prize, a threat, and a question nobody should be so eager to answer. The series also understands how people sound when fear has no clean outlet. They joke, snap, stall, apologize, and keep working because stopping would make the situation real. Its moral pressure comes from the same place as its suspense: nobody has enough information, but every choice costs someone. Corporate negotiation turns especially sour when money arrives too quickly and with too few questions. That suspicion gives the finale a sharp bite. The show is short, rough-edged, and tightly serialized. It is built for listeners who like science fiction where the machinery matters, the banter has teeth, and heroism usually looks like refusing to leave a voice unanswered.
Made for: For listeners who want serialized sci-fi audio drama with hard technical stakes, abrasive crew chemistry, and survival decisions made under awful pressure. It fits fans of tense ensemble fiction more than slow explanatory worldbuilding.
What sets it apart: The show builds most of its world through comms traffic and troubleshooting instead of exposition. Its disaster logic feels physical: air, fuel, rock, signal, leverage, then consequences.
The crew of the MRS Hyacinth rush to survey a Jovian asteroid, hoping it is worth enough to ransom the crew of their sister ship - the Corvus - before the deadline hits. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
A tightly connected space disaster serial where broken machinery, corporate pressure, and crew loyalty turn every transmission into a consequential choice.
The Hyacinth Disaster turns an illicit asteroid survey into a pressure chamber of damaged equipment, corporate leverage, and desperate rescue plans.
One bad asteroid turns your headphones into mission control, and fifteen billion cannot settle the argument.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A tense bargaining standoff where every offer sounds like a trap.
This episode turns a tense bargain into a stress test for trust. A damaged shuttle and a shaky comm line force the crew into tighter, uglier choices, and the clipped back-and-forth does the heavy lifting.
A frantic rescue run through caverns, with broken comms doing the heavy lifting.
This chapter runs on pressure: a busted shuttle, a blind push through caverns, and a crew trying to keep Grim alive while the comms keep dropping in and out.
A mining job turns into a tense scramble of scans, secrets, and bad timing.
The Hyacinth Disaster opens on a mining vessel run that goes straight to pressure: survey scans, a disabled locator, and a crew trying to keep Corporate from noticing how far off course they are. What gives it shape is the friction.
A tense rescue episode where procedure, shaky comms, and dry banter keep the escape feeling one mistake from collapse.
Episode 6 keeps its pressure on the mechanics of rescue: one crewmember is stuck on the surface, the shuttle is the last way out, and the comms start to fray as everyone tries to stay useful. The episode gets its tension from procedure more than spectacle, and that choice works.
A tight rescue story where procedure carries the drama.
Part 5 turns The Hyacinth Disaster into a tight pressure chamber. Broken comms, crushed debris, one injured survivor pinned in the wreckage, and the rest of the crew trying to reach him. The chapter works because procedure carries the feeling.
A brisk comms drama where repair work and bargaining keep colliding.
Part 7 folds a damaged shuttle, a ransom bargain, and a refusal to play corporate nice into a tight comms drama. It gets a lot of force from clipped exchanges and shifting leverage, so the tension comes through in the talk as much as in the choices people make.
A mining crew aboard the Hyacinth faces cascading losses: Khan is killed when an asteroid fragment destroys the bridge, and Argus suffocates while trying to dig through debris to reach the trapped Dreadnought, who has been unconscious with crushed legs and failing air.
In the series finale of The Hyacinth Disaster, Blue refuses a five-billion-dollar corporate offer for the asteroid's coordinates and instead trades the data directly to pirate Commander Temple in exchange for the release of Captain Ember Roth and the Corvus crew.
In this sixth episode of The Hyacinth Disaster, the crew scrambles to extract Grim from inside a hostile asteroid while their only shuttle waits on standby.
The finale of The Hyacinth Disaster follows the surviving crew — Blue, Finch, and Grim — as they attempt to rescue Captain Ember Roth from pirate captivity using a record-value asteroid survey as leverage.
In Episode 4 of The Hyacinth Disaster, Grim becomes blind after a crack in his suit forces him to tape a visor over it, trapping him in an asteroid pit.
The Hyacinth Disaster Episode 1 is set in 2151 and follows a skeleton crew of six miners — led by Captain Conlan Hines — who have secretly taken their ship, the Hyacinth, to survey an asteroid they hope will be valuable enough to convince Heliasis Mining Company to pay ransom for Captain Ember Roth and her 52-person crew, held by rival corporation Lycaon Minerals.