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Ask Slashdot: What's the Most Depressing Sci-fi You've Ever Read?
50000BTU_barbecue writes "Usually sci-fi provides adventure with happy endings for everyone. But what story have you read that resonates years later because of some insight about human nature or society that's basically cynical or pessimistic? For me it's Fred Pohl's Jem, with its sharply divided resource-constrained future world driven by politics, and its conclusion that humans are just too destructive to handle contacting alien life, especially if humans have the technological upper hand. I'm wondering what other stories have stuck in people's minds. It can be a short story, a novel or an entire series of books."
10 books of my life I'll never get back (yes, I'm a glutton for punishment)
Childhood's End
1984
Though the most depressing part is the people who think she had good ideas.
The Butterfly Effect (not the movie!)
-- Mean People Suck
I've found the literary branch of steampunk to be generally depressing, with very few bright spots. It's interesting because most expressions of the culture are very Jules Verne / Edgar Rice Burroughs pulp influenced, particularly on the costuming side where steampunk really started. But the literary side is almost entirely Dickens with zeppelins.
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Absolutely nothing good happens to anyone ever.
I win.
Alan Watts: The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are describes the internet (in broad terms) and how it will affect us. I'm reading it now, and his assumptions (at the time 1966) are turning out to be true.
And here I am, on the internet - still.
We're losing personal connections. Facebook is NOT personal connection and neither is Slashdot.
All Summer In A Day (Ray Bradbury).
I don't know if I'd call it depressing. I found it outrageous, myself. Truly outrageous.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land are pretty neck and neck for sad endings. Also the Martian Chronicles by Bradbury.
What do you get when youo combine manic depression, schizophrenia, bigotry, and leprosy, then add in a little literal and figurative rape?
In the end, a pretty good series, but more than anything else I"ve read the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant has the darkest, most depressing prose I've ever read.
There's the famous Star Trek story "City on the Edge of Forever". The original script by Harlan Ellison is even darker, with people in the engineering section of the ship dealing drugs (which is how the doctor ends-up going nutty -- a bad trip).
I just read a story last year in one of Gardner Dozois' Best of the Year anthologies. It involved humans boarding a generation ship that would travel to a new galaxy (50,000 years). The first 1000 years were not too bad but over time the humans became dumber-and-dumber, as they had no more challenging task then to scrub the floors/walls/ceiling and keep the ship clean. After 25,000 years they were walking on all fours & no longer bothering to wear clothes (or speak).
At that point the generation ship was intercepted by a faster-than-light ship that "rescued" the simian-like human beings. I imagine they ended-up in a zoo. (If you have a chance I would recommend buying all of Dozois' annual anthologies. If you like Outer Limits' method of telling a different story each week, you'll like these books.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
1984 Second? Fahrenheit 451. Same reasoning.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
The Bible is as scientific as the awkward potshot you took at it is clever.
Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room!. Of course, when I was a kid people were predicting that the Baby Boom was going to result in some mad exponential growth thing and there'd be billions of people in North America by 2000ish, so I thought I was looking at my future.
Destination: Void by Frank Herbert. (Or as I like to call it: "Destination: Avoid".)
Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
A Flower for Algernon was quite depressing.
I recommend the short story version - the novel-length version had a greater amount of depressing-ness, but was spread out so that the the concentration and impact of it was lessened.
Nevil Shute: On the Beach ... ordinary people doing ordinary things before they all die.
I don't remember too much of it (blocked it out) but what I do remember is enough to keep me from re-reading it:
1) A reprehensible excuse for a human being as a main character
2) The reduction of all life in the USA into one giant oozing blob
3) Europe survives unscathed (maybe)
"Usually sci-fi provides adventure with happy endings for everyone."
Depends on which side your on.
The ending is just brutal, I just get the feeling of everyone hating themselves after pushing a boy to commit xenocide, even though they won the war.
please excuse my apathy
Because it read almost like a documentary for someone who grew up behind the iron curtain.
The Road
Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison (http://tinyurl.com/9mnvuux) is the most depressing novel I have ever read.
It was the basis for "Soylent Green" (http://tinyurl.com/8bzfewf), but Soylent Green was a pick-me-up compared to this novel.
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
Earth loses. Literally.
I like when sysadmins roamed the earth.
Basically a computer virus infects the internet.
The sysadmins go to the data centers to fix it.
There are terrorist attacks and a real virus is released that kills just about everyone except the sysadmins as data centers filter the air.
You can read the contents on the link below.
There is a comic book adaptation as well as a radio play as the story is cc licensed.
http://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked_-_When_Sysadmins_Ruled_the_Earth.html
Stranger in a Strange Land. Our cultures tend to want to kill anyone that is too far from our version of normal.
Jan Weiss - The House of a Thousand Floors.
If you want depression, this is up that valley.
You can't handle the truth.
Yes, him. The magnificent awesome Martin. The guy who writes books where everyone you care about dies, nothing good every happens to anyone, no good deed goes unpunished (the few good deeds that happen), its everyone for themselves or their families - most times, and most importantly, its not even winter yet but its coming! Want a downer? Read A Song of Fire and Ice.
Just saying'
When I was young, I found it depressing because of the ending. Now that I'm older I find it depressing because I've seen it begin to grow in the world around me...:P
I'm honest enough to admit I lie to myself.
Although it wasn't as depressing as the six bucks I paid to see the movie.
I never got very far into the book, because the main character (I hesitate to say protagonist) had such a dark soul. So maybe it has a happier ending, but I couldn't get to it.
The message and the technical execution both made me want to top myself.
...the human race just ends with a whimper.
Synopsis: Humans are self-destructive, never learn from their mistakes, and are doomed to destroy themselves over and over again.
Very interesting story, but an ending that I still think about.
Unknowable, incomprehensible aliens come to Earth and destroy it. It takes a while, so everybody just waits to get blown up for no reason.
Summary:
1. Aliens arrive
2. Little contact with humans. We don't know anything about them and can't really communicate with them.
3. Humans are helpless, but we do figure out Earth is doomed.
4. Boom. Everyone dies. The End.
I was having a pretty low day when I started it, and it made it a lot worse. Howey is a master at creating personable characters that you fall in love with in only a few short pages. Then he teaches you brutally why you shouldn't become emotionally involved with his characters. I highly recommend reading it, and overall it's not too depressing, but those first few chapters are some of the roughest in sci-fi I've read.
A short, only a couple of pages long. One of the funniest AND one of the saddest SF stories ever IMO, which is quite an accomplishment for such a short length. Google it, you can find it online (not posting a link since I'm not aware of the copyright limits etc.)
.
Simply because it seems so plausible. I imagine what could have been. As I get older, the reality of our miss-guided human priorities weighs me down. I think about that book, and it just makes me sad.
It's right up there in the "damn this world sucks" department, although not quite as depressing as the first time I read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy straight through. That may have been sleep deprivation, though, but the effect was that in the beginning everything was a stroll through the Shire even when the Ringwraiths were after the hobbits and by the end it was gloom and doom and depression even when Aragorn was being crowned. Impressive effect.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
It seems to me that a vast segment of science fiction (especially the stuff that was coming out around the cold war) was pretty depressing - a big chunk of it ends with humanity dying, either because we're dumb or because we're malicious. Sometimes both.
I might start with the anthology "Bangs and Whimpers: stories about the end of the world"
Another good one is (which doesn't end with everyone dying) is "Repent Harlequin, said the tic toc man" (short story)
I'm not particularly sure, because if I'm reading something and its depressing I stop reading it. So which one that I stopped reading was the most depressing isn't easy to determine.
Mankind is too stupid to learn from its own mistakes.
Mass Effect 3. I was depressed for about a week after playing the original ending. (Hey, you never said it had to be good, just depressing.)
Bergeron
What the world could become....
"Mostly Harmless" was a good read, but it was depressing throughout and ended on a horrible note.
Spoiler
Everybody dies, and the entire Earth is nothing more than sausage meat for a bureaucratic corporation to exploit for profit. Kind of like real life...
The american constitution...
By Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Not quite as cheerful as 1984.
T.J. Bass. It's not just dystopian, it's squalidly dystopian.
Make Room! Make Room! is depressing in a similar vein, too.
A lot (not all) of John Brunner's work have a very heavy dystopian themes - often leaving the reader depressed at that's the way the world could go. Plus as each decade of time passes, re-reading make the reader more depressed, given that what he wrote about seems even more likely to make the transition from fiction to fact...
Blindsight, besides being the best thing I've ever read, has a rather stark outlook on the nature of consciousness and what that means for us as human beings. I don't consider it depressing, though some might, and Watts calls his portrayal of human nature "almost childishly optimistic."
From Watts' homepage: "Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts." —James Nicoll
Great, depressing SF.
It's depressing because it's so idiotic and yet so many people are taken in by it.
I piss off bigots.
Consider Phlebas, Use of Weapons and Matter. Good though.
If Godzilla did not exist, man would have had to create him.
Then that wins. McCarthy rules.
Also "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream" is depressing.
"The Forge of God" by Greg Bear.
"O Happy Day" Geoff Ryman
"Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand" Chip Delany
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I never actually got through it. When they inform his wife he no longer has any "equipment" for her to service I was outta there. Honestly, where could the book possibly go from there?
The fucking newspaper!
Not necessarily the whole thing, just the picture painted of Herb Asher living in an isolated dome on a remote planet, detached from the world and reality, obsessing over a female singer and resenting the terminally ill woman who lives in the dome next to his when she reaches out to him for help. Everything that follows is unsettling/detestable, but that image stayed with me.
"Running MS DOS 3.3" by Van Wolverton.
I had to re-read Peter Norton's massive, "Programmer's guide to the IBM PC & PS/2" two times after that, just to feel better.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The Forge of God
After I heard they cancelled the series.
My clear winner for most depressing SF: John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up. Mercifully, I've suppressed most of my memory of it, but it starts depressing and just keeps on going.
Spoilers... you knew they'd be here from the question.
The protagonist Audran lives in a Arabic/Muslim slum, spending most of his days scarfing down baggies of drugs and banging his transsexual girlfriend. He gets hired to find a missing prince, and the whole thing kicks off in a bloody mess.
Long story short, they kill his girlfriend, who turns out to have been the missing prince. In retaliation, he jacks in "the black chip," and has no memory of the carnage unleased that followed. It ends in the hollow victory that he massacred the killer, but is now ostracized by the world he knew for having unleashed such unspeakable barbarism on the bodies of the killer and the captive police officer.
At least, that's what I generally recall from 25 years ago when I read it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Gravity_Fails
Hands down. Lent it to a friend of mine and his only comment when giving it back was "Why would you ever want to read something so depressing?"
I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream
reality combined with low margin engineering... very depressing.
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
I can assure you i was VERY depressed by the time i finished that book.
"Stand on Zanzibar" by John Brunner was pretty relentlessly depressing and not just in a worldwide sort of way.
No one in the story was happy or had any reason to be happy or had any hope of being happy. Ever. Till the end of time. Even an end to war turned out to be depressing.
Made "The Road" seem like a carefree romp across the countryside.
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Though Silent Running is a movie that's not even based on a book, it could very well have been.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
Any written work that refers to a Kardashian or a Snooki as admired or celebrity.
His last few SF books have been a lot more upbeat (at least for him) for some reason- Excession is laugh out loud funny in quite a few places, as is Surface Detail. Matter and Look To Windward at least end on happy notes.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Maybe not so heavy on the 'science' part of sci-fi, but the most depressingly dystopian-and-coming-true-now book I've read to date.
You know, I read 1984 when I was in junior high (which was in the early 90s), and it was a dark and frightening read. But it didn't really hit me that hard. Then as an adult a few years ago, I watched Terry Gilliam's Brazil for the first time, and it depressed the hell out of me.
1984 is a story about an ultra-competent government that manages to run everything just the way it wants to and convince people to act and think how it wants. Brazil was a story about an amazingly incompetent government that so much fails at it's job as to take society down with it. Guess which one I find more relevant to the current state of affairs?
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Nightmarish.
more cowbell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sparrow_(novel)
Truly depressing because with the unknown you just never know what you are going to get.
"The Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russell by far. Can't tell you why without spoiling the book, but trust me, it hits hard.
One that's bleak for much of the book is Ursula K. Le Guin's "Left Hand of Darkness."
Interesting, two sci-fi works both written by women are on my "Best Depressing Sci-Fi" list. That's kind of depressing itself, now that I think about it.
and her ideas worked so well that she died penniless and living off the socialism she so despised (look it up, she did).
Come off it. Ayn was just a scared little woman frightened by dictators. I could spend hours recounting the holes in her philosophy, but others have done it much better than I ever could.
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It's a pretty far reaching story and makes you think how trivial actions can have far flung consequences. Between the rise of the religious right in leading the US, the intrigue with the USAF vs NASA, and the degradation of the ability of the crewmembers to work with each other, the story takes some depressing turns. It's quite telling though, and I would highly recommend it. Some consider the last bit of the book controversial, and not fitting with the rest of the story. I found it to be different but it worked. You be the judge.
"When I want to do something mindless to relax, I reinstall Windows 95." - JLG
Talk about depressing. Holy crap!
Felt like christmas getting it in the mail, but then started to read it and understood it was not even close to the other stuff from Vinge. The most depressing part was having to read it cover to cover just in case at some point it got better; unfortunately it's just some kind of bad interlude book where the main storyline (from "Fire upon the deep") doesn't progress at all and nothing of consequence is presented.
Any author considered too dark for the Russians gets my vote. Do yourself a favor and skip his books. Think of the money you'll save on therapy.
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> Usually sci-fi provides adventure with happy endings for everyone.
What?? Seriously? Maybe today, (although I think I could find lots of counter examples) but there was a time when it wasn't science fiction if it didn't make you feel bad. Try Harlan Ellison's "Dangerous Visions" or any issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine from 1967 to the late seventies (after that I can't say). Or anything by Ellison, Phillip K. Dick, William Gibson, a dozen others.
The most depressing scifi would be a multi-way tie, I'm thinking. I'd have to divide it up as "most relentlessly depressing", "most unintentionally depressing", "most depressingly unnecessary twist ending", "most depressing attempt at humor", "most depressingly, distressingly inept" and probably others.
Now, the most *frightening* scifi book I've ever read was Cory Doctorow's "Down and out in the Magic Kingdom". Although I get the impression he did not mean it so.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
2B or 0 2B, short story scifi that leaves the reader far more depressed than when it was begun.
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Childhood's End by Arthur C Clarke
On The Beach by Nevil Shute
The last is a movie, not a novel, and it is not really sci-fi. But I stumbled across it on YouTube the other day so I thought I would mention it: Threads
Some of the later Berserker books were pretty dark and hopeless. I maintain that Star Trek came up with the idea for Borg from Saberhagen's Berserkers.
Some people have already mentioned Childhood's End, which I found almost unbearable to read near the end. I hit a similar level of depression whenever I read Mythago Wood, Lavondyss, the works. Brilliantly conceived, but for some reason these books make me imagine putting my head into a noose and kicking the chair as a more positive and appealing alternative to reading the books and imagining the storyline.
Ezekiel 23:20
Read it? Hell, we're living it.
Just for sneer fucked up characters, Stephen Donaldson's gap series. Morn Hyland, Angus atnermopyle, Nick Siccorso, Warden Dios, et al are all depressingly flawed.
1984, Enders Game, lots of Gibson, some leGuin
Silence is a state of mime.
1. On the Beach all life killed by a nuclear war with the last people on earth just waiting for the radiation cloud to come and kill them or commiting suicide. No escape just a dead earth.
2. 1984. No hope you can not win, nobody can win, there is no hope. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Cultural_impact
3. The The Forge of God. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forge_of_God Only a few humans are saved, the earth is turned to rubble.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream"
Can you imagine being in the control of something with the powers of a God over you, that utterly hates you and has no outlet for its rage but to torture you?
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Of the titles mentioned here (that I've read), none depressed me that much. For example, Jem. Yeah, the people in it are stupid and destructive, but so what? That's what real life is like. You muddle through, you seize what happiness you can, you do what you can to make things, better.If that's not enough for you, you're in the wrong universe.
The SF books that depress me are from authors like Harlan Ellison who wallow in their own darkness and babble profound nonsense. And there I think it's the author that depresses me, not the story.
Somebody claimed that 1984 depressed them because they saw it happening all around them. Really? Nobody's summoned me to viewscreen for mandatory calisthenics lately, and I haven't heard from the Junior Antisex League all week. Yeah, a lot of our political wingnuts (on both the right and and left) sound like they belong to INGSOC, but that's always been true. And contrary to what Orwell feared, they're further from running the show than they've ever been.
I think a lot of this stuff depressed the hell out of me when I was a teenager because TV had trained me to believe that all stories had endings that if not happy, were at least morally satisfying. But as grownups, we need to get over ourselves. Especially Stephen Baxter, you really needs to go cold turkey on the end-of-the-world novels.
Maybe it's more fantasy than scifi though.
Low-key, and yet just deeply terrified me. Seemed pretty concrete and realistic. It's all downhill. Every hope is dashed.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I don't think "usually provides happy endings for everyone" is a very accurate characterization.
It _was_ true for a long time, possibly encouraged by the long-time editor of Analog magazine,
who purportedly insisted on optimistic stories.
Still, the most depressing:
"I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" (Ellison) for abject terror,
"Persistence of Vision" (Varley) for being nearly plausible,
"Press Enter" (Varley) for a rather prescient revelation about computer ubiquity.
It is just a short story, but it was pretty much the last Mars story Leigh Brackett wrote and is beautiful, heart aching and so utterly futile. She is a greatly underappreciated writer from the Golden Age.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
God. What a drag.
Hey! Ballard's stuff is bleak! I think someone mentioned James Blish, too. That guy's day job was working for the Tobacco Institute. No wonder...
Then, there is the endless low-level of depression that permeates most Philip K Dick - like a miasma. But he makes you want more, somehow.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
"On The Beach", by Nevil Shute
No other comes close for me.
That was Zen, this is Tao
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley followed by a short story I read which I can't locate right now.
I believe it was called 2439 -- the premise being that in the year 2439 (I might be wrong about the year), the Earth is covered in its entirety with a 700 story building in order to provide for the almost 1 trillion humans that live in it (with only algae left to supply them). The story was about the last man to actually have animals, and the authorities plight to convince him to euthanize them in order to make room for the trillionth human, so that 'perfection' can be achieved. The claim of the authorities was that there was enough color microfiche of all the animals that ever lived so that the actual ones need no longer be around to consume resources.
My paraphrase may seem very silly, but the actual story had enough of an impact on me when I was 15 to change my outlook on our relationship with the environment for good. It'd be great if anyone could point me to the actual story/author.
Brave New World, Aldus Huxley. Perfectly horrible. Stranger in a Strange land was also pretty depressing.
Real programmers use "copy con program.exe"
Fantasy rather than science fiction, but truly excellent books and rather depressing.
It's easily The Killing Star by Charles R. Pellegrino and George Zebrowski. The earth is destroyed without warning by an alien civilization using relativistic kill vehicles, then they arrive to finish the job. The last two humans are captured as zoo specimens, and we find out the reason for the attack was simply that since we learned to travel at relativistic speeds we had the power to do to them what they did to us first. Nothing personal. Put me off sci-fi for a long time.
"Usually sci-fi provides adventure with happy endings for everyone"
Huh. Most of the books I read, "In the end everybody dies." Not many happy endings.
It was so depressing, I was down for days afterwards. I decided never to read anything by King again. (His Dark Tower series is also seriously depressing, but I wouldn't call that sci-fi.) As for hard sci-fi, I'd say Frederick Pohl's Man Plus.
Back in the day I was a Poly Sci major, (talk about being surrounded by libs). We watched the movie in class and afterwards I asked the professor to draw the comparison between the Communist Russia and the world of 1984. She seemed surprised by the comparison and thought it was a commentary on capitalism. It was at that moment when truth and obviousness to me ran smack up against delusion and bias of my professor when I realized that people can see what they want to see if they believe hard enough.
To state that 1984 is coming true now is a blind and idiotic statement. The abundance around us is stunning. The control of information is SLIPPING away from governments. The freedoms enjoyed by people in the world has never been higher...and yet here you are believing our reality has any resemblence to that horrid book and movie (great, but horrid book). Stunningly depressing viewpoint and one I am glad I. Do. Not. Share.
... the book. Half of PKD stories are depressing. Some are depressing all the way through not just at the end. A Scanner Darkly had a double dose of depressing at the end though because the author dedicates the book to those of his friends — he includes himself — who suffered debilitation or death as a result of their drug use.
Great topic, btw!
My books are packed up from a move, so this is from memory.
On The Beach
The Road (does that count as SF?)
While many will list 1984, I found his other work actually more depressing: Keep the Apidistra Flying and Coming Up For Air
Make Room, Make Room (kind of uncharacteristic for Harry Harrison)
Handmaid's Tale
Parable of the Sower & Parable of the Talents (I wish Octavia Butler had a) survived to write the third book b) was far more better known)
Ted Sturgeon has written many elegant depressing (some in fact heartbreaking) stories, including Saucer of Loneliness. There's an excellent series of his works (example here: http://www.amazon.com/Slow-Sculpture-Complete-Theodore-Sturgeon/dp/1556438346/) well worth reading.
I'm not sure depressing is the word, but Harlan Ellison has written amazing stuff. IMO _Being John Malkovitch_ was a ripoff of one of his stories.
Finally, my google skills suck, but there's a relatively well known SF/mystery story written in the past 10 years where the premise is that Islam is now the dominant force in America. I found that pretty depressing. Anyone know what I'm remembering?
So many bad ones. But the first to come to mind is Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy.
The reason: because after such a good build up from hearing of it from so many people, it was a real disappointment to come to realize that he thought his readers were complete idiots! Really, you couldn't read a chapter without being hit over the head with another "clue" about who the mule was. It got damn annoying. Then, as the book ends, he does his big reveal and tells you the major plot point that you had to have figured out long ago. And then just to be sure that you understood how stupid he thought you were, he goes back and explains all of the painful clues that he kept throwing at you. I could never read another Asimov book again.
Yea, I understand how Slashdot works. I was asked my thoughts, but someone who thinks that Asimov is a God and has mod points will burn my karma rather than trying to discuss this. At Slashdot we just mod people down if we disagree.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I was depressed by Galapagos. (Bad science) I thought Breakfast of champions was annoying, and I thought Night, which is supposed to be very dark, the most enjoyable thing he has written.
... although "The Handmaid's Tale" in particular makes you just want to go and slit your wrists afterwards.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Philip K. Dick's "A Scanner Darkly" has to be one of the most depressing books I've ever read. I read it when it was new and it has stuck with me for all the years since - the film helped refresh my memory of its details, of course, but the novel needed no help in establishing that little pit of despair in my brain.
Mudge
In theory, theory and practice are the same.
In practice, they're not.
Gave me freaking nightmares.
Doesn't get more depressing than the ending/entirety of the story.
I love a good post. apoc. book
"We Can Build You", maybe? I don't remember the plot clearly, but I still remember the depression.
A lot of the best answers have already been given, so to be different I'll add Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother". Technically it's a more upbeat book than 1984, but it's more relevant to today's society, giving it more impact.
It seemed to keep hinting towards clever and cute plot twists and resolutions (which you'd expect since it's pitched as a Young Adults book) but things kept resolving more realistically.
Oh and a some of Bob Shaw's work (particularly short stories) were pretty dark in tone.
"The Sword of the Spirits" by John Christopher.
Your welcome.
Prince of Nothing by Scott R Bakker.
Overall very depressing. Why do I even read it?
I can't find the exact story, but the short stories written by James Tiptree, Jr. and Philip Jose Farmer have both fascinated me and depressed me. One of the two wrote a story about a man stumbling across a new species on Mars, and it being vaguely humanoid, copulated with it. Only it had a different reproductive system than we could even imagine,(ie the embryo had the appearance of a hideous monster by human standards) and our lovely human killed the strange female's child right in front of her. The story ended with the female saying she would forgive him, eventually; but she couldn't understand why he would do such a thing.
That story left me in a depressive funk for days. It was horrible.
All three Manifold books are depressing, but top-notch hard Sci-Fi. If you are into hard Sci-Fi you definitely should check out Baxter.
The three Manifold books are depressing in different ways. I don't want to spoil them, but I'll just say that they are depressing in a "Childhood's end"-kind of way; that is, you can also be exalted in a Zen-like realization.
All three books super-highly recommended. My favorite is "Manifold: Space".
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
by Stephen Baxter.
Veniss Underground. If you havent read it, check it out.
by Barry B. Longyear
I haven't read it in a long while but Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains isn't necessarily pessimistic, but it is very melancholy. I found that most of the Martian Chronicles were similarly melancholy. The basic premise of that period was always that nuclear war was inevitable and Bradbury used the Martians as a good foil to expose the folly of the Humans in his stories. Even then the Martian societies weren't very joyous, they were more mellow and resigned.
The whole story line has stayed with me for many years, but none as well as Soft Rains.
"I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" is pretty darn bleak: a crazed and omnipotent computer has killed off all of humanity except for six people; by the end of the story there is only one left alive, and he has been turned into an amorphous blob that will live forever in torment (with no mouth and yet needing to scream).
Speaker for the Dead is also pretty depressing. After reading it, I was done with Orson Scott Card and I still haven't gone back. Some humans get killed on a newly settled planet, and Ender goes to investigate. Since there is no faster than light travel for matter (only for information), by the time he gets there years have gone by and pretty much everyone's life was ruined by the tragedy. Then Ender's investigation rips open the old wounds. Then he figures out what went wrong and it was all a horrible tragic misunderstanding. I was upset about all this, because Ender was fabulously wealthy and had unlimited access to the "ansibles" (FTL communicators) so at the beginning I thought he was going to play Nero Wolfe, hire someone on the planet to be his investigator, and solve the mystery immediately after it happened and before everyone's lives were ruined. Nope.
Dancers in the Afterglow had such a downer of an ending that it left me thinking "WTF?!?" for days. A plucky female gets captured by bad guys, who torture her, cut off her arms and legs, and put fast-reproducing bacteria in the wounds so they can never be healed properly. At the end of the story she has been rescued, has been given care, seems to be coping and is almost happy again... and then a meteor falls from the sky and kills her instantly. WTF?!? (I don't think Jack L. Chalker hated women... he never wrote anything else like that; and e.g. Mavra Chang found a pretty happy ending in the Well Worlds series.)
There was a short story, "Quietus", where there was some sort of apocalypse and there is only one young man left alive. Against all the odds, there is also one young woman left alive, and he meets her. Through a tragic misunderstanding, an alien who came to help kills the man, and the woman is left grieving over the dead body. The alien then has to live with the knowledge that he had rendered an intelligent species extinct.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Nope. We are living Brave New World much more than 1984.
eom
By Mike Resnik is my most recent. 1984, Childhood's End, and Cat's Cradle were pretty much downer's when I read them.
The last books in the Hitchhiker's series: book 5 "Mostly Harmless", and book 6 "...And Another Thing".
They were both fantastic books, the latter being not quite a good but still a fun read.
As I understand it, Douglas Adams was in a dark place when he wrote "Mostly Harmless", which led to the rather depressing ending.
I don't know if he planned to write a 6th book himself, but he died before he could in any case. Eoin Colfer picked up the 6th book, and made an interesting emulation of Adams writing.
But the bloody endings. Both books touch upon that the universe doesn't always leave a happy ending for the good guy. But the ending of 5 was unfair but clever in that it related back to what had been told to the characters early on. Book 6 didn't teach me squat and seemed rushed at end and left me the feeling he didn't know how to end it, so simply followed the same vein as the 5th book.
In any case, I think the ending of book 6 could do with a rewrite and I'm sure there are some who would argue that the entire book needs a rewrite.
The series was fantastic and I'm happy to have read them, but I still feel things should have turned out better for the late Dentarthurdent.
Need I say more? A series, no less: Hour of Judgement, Prisoner of Conscience, etc. Extra points for trauma.
The biotech-gone-bad corporate-dominated wastelands of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake are the most depressing i have read of, because she writes about precisely the world we are building for ourselves.
The future world she envisioned felt so much like an obvious extrapolation from the world of today. It affected me for awhile afterwards; just kept thinking about it...
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
Truly outrageous.
Also one of the best sci-fi I've ever read. WH40K but the third book has some really depressing moments
Some of these may not be considered Sci Fi, but here you go:
1. Flowers for Algernon
2. On the Beach
3. The Mist
4. Elric Saga (mostly the ending)
5. The Road (haven't read it, but I hear it's supremely depressing)
6. Never Let Me Go (Ishiguro) (haven't read it, but even the synopsis is enough to depress you)
7. All Summer in a Day (Bradbury)
"A Canticle for Leibowitz" : monks in a post-nuclear collapse world illuminating an electronic circuit diagram they don't understand with pictures of angels.
It's a short story by CM Kronbluth. If you've never read it, the movie "RoboCop" riffs on a couple of memes in the commercials. The movie "Idiocracy" owes a lot of its premise to "The Marching Morons".
Samuel R. Delany. I found it bleak and hard to digest.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
I must have been around 12-14 when I read it, but left a pretty deep impression. And I thought the idea of a gravity lens was neat. One of my most favorite authors.
http://www.amazon.com/Space-Tyrant-Vol-Refugee-ebook/dp/B004P8K530/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1344388563&sr=8-2&keywords=bio+of+a+space+tyrant
Hmmm. On a similar note, some movies/anime that come to mind are Akira, Aliens, Bladerunner, Naussica Valley of the Wind, etc. Also, Grave of the Fireflies is just the plan saddest and most moving anime/film period.
by Brian Stableford. Entertaining, interesting stories, but I just wanted to bitch-slap the main character repeatedly.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
I gotta throw Stanisaw Lem in here.
Although he's snarky and funny at times, he can leave you with a strong Kafkaesque aftertaste. Definitely depressing.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Should win this contest by a mile.
Also just read Scalzi's God Engines... the ending is amgibuous enough to be either the doom of men or its salvation.
S. M. Stirling's Draka novels. The evil of the titular Draka (alternate history South Africa with the branch point in the 1770s, turned relentlessly aggressive slave making fascist master race) is the stuff of nightmares. I could not read any of those straight through.
More low key, George R. Stewart's 1949 post apocalyptic Earth Abides. If you've never read it, do.
Every character except one is killed, the survivor commits suicide, and according to the author, everything that transpired in the story ultimately amounted to nothing of any significance.
The Screwfly Solution by Alice Sheldon. Extinction of humanity in the most horrifying - and horrifyingly plausible - means possible.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
by George Alec Effinger. Also maybe 334 by Thomas Disch.
Not because the books say anything interesting or deep, but because so many people *think* they do and have gained positions of power believing in their deeply flawed ideas.
Things go from bad to worse to total extermination. Children of the nuclear age will appreciate its pathos. Surprised it has not been mentioned yet.
n/t
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
... by David Feintuch. Truly dismal.
Also, a special mention for Vacuum Flowers by Michael Swanwick. Not that the story was all that depressing in itself, but he managed to make sex seem so mechanical and automatic that it made me want to chop 'em off.
Jack L Chalker's short novel on what makes us human, the inside or the outside? He wrote later that he'd written this at a very depressed time of his life, and does NOT recommend reading this book if you're depressed and/or high.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War
The middle section, in which the soldier returns home to find the planet he gave up his soul for is now a wretched cesspit of crime and misery that can't even remember his war, was omitted from the original publishing, because "Shit, man, we can't print that."
It's depressing because it's a just a retelling of the author's experience fighting the Vietnam War.
Won the Hugo in its day. Left teenage me depressed for days. Still topical, I think.
The Amazon Review describes it better than I could.
--Greg
Oryx and Crake. The road to hell was never described so well.
The World Inside by Robert Silverberg.
Dismal prognosis for a part of the USA more likely than most to survive a nuclear war.
...for SF/fantasy hybrids. Last Argument of Kings by Joe Abercrombie for pure fantasy.
The windup girl. Resource constrained Thailand, miserable existence for what's essentially a genetically engineered sex toy.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
It's a book about a father and his young son trying to survive in a post apocalyptic world where most remaining people have turned to cannibalism. Scary stuff. Note: I had a typo and my spell checker turned "cannibalism" to "Canadianism". I was inclined to leave it but that premise for a book is just too scary for publication!
Manifold Time, by Stephen Baxter. Most monumentally depressing book I have ever read.
I thought 'Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand', what a great title!
I was right.
A horrible, horrible read.
Never purchased a Sam Delany title again.
I forced myself to finish the book because I could not believe they would publish a hardback book that was this bad.
I was wrong.
Great punch line though, a friend of mine noticed the book title and wanted to borrow it.
I told him he now owned the book and warned him about how bad it was, he did no believe me, untill he read it.
Same result.
Sorry Mike!
Again: Do not read or purchase this book!
Avoid all contact, or at least avoid eye contact.
No brain, no pain.
Solaris
After reading it:
1. came to conclusion that it is human nature to repeat certain actions, even though they might be self destructive.
2. it was probably the best illustration of Freud's - "Death drive" and subconscious
3. There are might be things in space, that we will never be able to communicate with. Sounds childish, but for some reason, it shocks me.
Nuff' Said
John Brunner's "The Sheep Look Up". Keep that old penicillin cold, folks. You may need it.
Steel Beach: In the first chapter the main character commits suicide. And does it again later in the book... To live in a world that Varley describes would drive anyone to suicide when understanding what is going on...
Blue Champagne: A collection of short stories. "The Pusher" is a story that is going to make you feel dirty, and disgusted with yourself for reading. Then to read how a life devoid of friendships drives the pusher to do what he does is eye opening...
"Choices" is a short about just that. Choices in a marriage in which openess and confidentiality can go to far... Where will we be in teh future?
On another note:
Armor by John Steakley. A man stuck in a useless war that consumes him and leads to his and other's demise. This shows the brutality of war and the utter exhaustion that pushes us over the edge... I read this book every year.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
Agree with 1984, Brave New World, The Road, and many others above, but no one has mentioned Stanislaw Lem. Memoirs Found in a Bathtub is pretty dark. The Futurological Congress has a veneer of psychedelic humor in it, but the underlying sentiment is quite grim. Then there's Solaris, so grim they had to film it twice.
http://variety-sf.blogspot.com/2007/11/alfred-bester-adam-and-no-eve-earth-can.html
I know that Brave New World is a dystopian novel, but it's a world where people know what they're really good at, can take happy drugs that don't have side effects, get to keep their youthful abilities and looks for most of their life, and if they really object to the structure of society, they can move to anywhere on the planet that better suits them.
Mind you, I don't know if I'd do all that well in such a society, but I don't know that I'd do all that well in Japanese society, either.
Anyway, since the book focuses on a couple of people who don't like a highly-structured society, and a person who decides that, rather than move to wherever he'd prefer, it's best to whip himself a lot, I can see that it's still a depressing read.
For me, though, 1984 was so much harder to take, as I kept mentally attempting to find ways out for the character and failing.
Gladiator by Philip Wylie (1930) was a very sad novel of a character having a difficult non conforming life. Hugo tries to find his destiny only to find a tragic end. It is said this book inspired Superman and Spiderman alike. Well worth the effort of finding. Gladiator is not full of spaceships or aliens, but human tragedy through experimentation on the betterment of humanity gone awry.
The story follows a manned mission to Titan. Apart from the very long term outcome, it's a thoroughly depressing read - Hacked from Wikipedia:
En-route, one crew member dies after a solar storm. The use of a CELSS greenhouse for life support provides a continuous food supply, and the astronauts rely on vegetables, grain and fruit from the greenhouse as they travel on. But things take a dark turn as funding and support for resupply and Earth-return retrieval are cut by Maclachlan's administration (proposed and carried out by the very same men that tried to shoot the shuttle down), leaving the team with no hope for survival beyond what they may find on Titan. Once they reach Saturn and prepare to land on Titan's surface, another crew member is lost during the landing procedure with another effectively crippled. Titan is discovered to be a bleak, freezing dwarf-planet containing liquid ethane oceans, a sticky mud surface, and a climate which includes a thick atmosphere of purple organic compounds falling like snow from the clouds; and the only traces of life they find are fossilized remains of microbic bacteria similar to those recovered from Martian meteorites. The remaining astronauts relay their findings back to a largely uninterested Earth.
Meanwhile, the Chinese, in order to retaliate for biological attacks by the US, cause a huge explosion next to an asteroid (2002OA), with the aim of deflecting it into Earth orbit and threatening the world with targeted precision strikes in the future. Unfortunately, their calculations are wrong as they didn't take into account the size of the asteroid which could cause a Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. The asteroid strikes Earth, critically damaging the planetary ecosystem. The Titan team members are presumably the last humans left alive.
As the surviving astronauts slowly die of disease and in-fighting, they decide to try to ensure life will continue to survive: they take a flask of bacteria and drop it into a crater filled with liquid water, in the hope that some form of life will develop.
The novel's final sequence depicts the final two crew members reincarnated on Titan several billion years in the future. The sun has entered its red giant phase, warming the Saturnian system and aiding the evolution of life, in the form of strange, intelligent beetle-like creatures, on Titan. The astronauts watch as the creatures build a fleet of starships to seed and colonize new solar systems before the expanding sun boils off the surface of the moon.
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
but... Bruce Sterling wrote a short story "Dori Bangs," it's a quick read with a delightfully depressing impact.
Garden-variety angst, nihilism: pretty much anything by Cyril Kornbluth. Plus points (if that's the appropriate expression) for The Marching Morons and The Little Black Bag.
On a metaphysical level: Stanislaw Lem .... thousands of pages of highly distinctive prose pointing out, no matter our tech or aspirations, how our natures are our own limits.
Harrison Bergeron. Because it's happening. Also 1984 and Brave New World. All eerily accurate & prescient.
One human group using a mindrot virus to enslave and control other humans. A horrible concept and I'm sure we'll see it in the next years. A good book but hard to read.
Phillip K Dick Stories in general are pretty depressing.
"Kalki", by Gore Vidal.
I consider Stanislav Lem the best; I wonder how good he is in Polish (which I cannot read) if he is so dark and funny in translation. The descent through layers beyond layers into the bleakest imaginable reality is something I cannot forget after too many years. A must read if you are into doing things to your mind!
A Scanner Darkly
... it explains how you can't go running from star to star when each one dies, because they will eventually all die. I think it was the story where they keep asking computers for the meaning of life, and each time it tells them there is not enough information for the calculation... until the very end of the story. I remember being really depressed about how eventually all energy will be 'used up' and the universe will die.
People of Sand and Slag. Damn that depressed me. It's like the Ugly Americans x 1,000. The ugly humans. They fuck up everything they touch and don't care or even notice. And the ending... damn... I was hoping the whole story was leading up to them rediscovering their empathy and humanity. Then they * * * I don't want to spoil it...
Full story is found here
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Or, at least, for elements thereof.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
All My Sins Remembered, by Joe Haldeman. About an idealistic young Anglo-Buddhist who joins the galactic version of the UN because he believes in the duty of protecting humans and other sentients. They turn him into a deep cover spy by changing his appearance and implanting different personalities and memories in him. He doesn't handle it well during his debriefings.
Fairy tales are different from science fiction; and Fairy Tale is a generous classification of his typing.
I'd add Frankenstein to the list. Everybody dies in the end, because one man couldn't handle what he had done. And the "monster" couldn't handle being alone.
Very depressing stuff.
21st Century Renaissance Man
The mode series is also very depressing. The end of the last book, maybe not so much. But the other three are.
21st Century Renaissance Man
I'd forgotten how unlikable one of the primary protagonists was but the description of the oceans dying has never been far from my thoughts since I read this over a decade ago.
By Charles R. Pellegrino and George Zebrowski
Not technically a horror but scared the crap out of me with its description of the death of the human race.
by Fred Hoyle. The Stupid is Repetitious and Inevitable. Cyclic collapse and rebuilding. The only cure is societal stasis. The story is a little dated, but the main point is spot on.
Multitasking: Just Say No
Oil in a pristine environment. What could go wrong?
The one that best fits, I think, is The Genocides - Aliens come to farm earth and humans are just vermin to be exterminated.
Depressing because after you plow through the whole dull thing in the anticipation of some interesting conclusion, you just get shat upon by an author without an ending.
Maybe it was just because I ended with Farnham's Freehold
This is about Science Fiction. Most depressing SCIENCE FICTION books/stories you've read.
Yet, most of you idiots are going on about non science fiction books.
There is a difference between science fiction and non science fiction, yet most of you do NOT understand that.
This is depressing because I came here to hopefully learn about some new books that would be good to read, and I get stupid peeps talking about normal fiction books.
seriously peeps, science fiction. not fucking fiction.
Be seeing you...
Also very dark in tone is the thought-provoking short story Hardfought, also by Greg Bear, well worth a read.
War Against the Chtorr series by David Gerrold. I haven't even gotten to book 4 of the as yet incomplete series, because I find it so depressing. And yet so compelling at the same time. :S
The Black Corridor by Michael Moorcock.
Noir by J W Jeter. Imagine if the *AA organizations got their way, and made copyright infringment a capital offence...and the people who police IP law are like Bladerunners...it's a very good book, both a satire of Cyberpunk/Bladerunner, and RIAA/MPAA rhetoric....but it is TANJ DEPRESSING!!!!
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Level 7, by Mordecai Roshwald: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_7
Z For Zachariah (young adult), by Robert C. O'Brien: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_for_Zachariah
A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz
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But Steel Beach has the worlds weirdest/most disturbing opening sentence....'In five years the penis will become obsolete'
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
I've read many of his stories years ago. I don't recall any his ending with an upbeat unicorm farting rainbows (although a harlequin spraying jellybeans might be close). One that comes to mind is "I Have No Mount and I Must Scream". The Deathbird Stores has some depressing stories as well. I think it is "Pain God" that has an alien take control of a man and forces him to do all sorts of cruel acts for a day on fellow citizens. Then the alien releases the man's mind and sends him out to visit his victims so the alien can experience the emotion of pain and remorse.
But the one that always get me is "The Deathbird". Not the story itself, but the short aside that Ellison includes about his dog. If you've ever felt worried that you'll be old and alone, this bit will cut to your heart. Even worse than the Futurama episode with the dog.
... the excellent A Grey Moon Over China by Thomas A. Day. A tale of the life of a futuristic soldier who escapes Earth in a colony ark to a far away system. There his group attempts to colonize while dealing with their own internal politics and a non-human threat. The mistakes and triumphs of a lifetime really add up, and the ending left me with a sense of sadness that I strongly remember now, a few years later.
Wonderful book.
Okay, dropping my view down to zero, I found Level 7 and Canticle mentioned. That's just depressing.
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...by Trevor Hoyle made a big impression on me back in 1984 or so. Pollution poisons the seas and then the air we breathe. Supposedly based on a fair bit of research, although reading the reviews on Amazon makes me think that might not be the case after all!
Also another vote for Forge of God, after reading it I gave up on Greg Bear thinking "What was the point of that?". Call me fluffy, but I kept waiting for the twist in the plot that meant we (the human race) saved the day after all... but no.
Childhood's End just made me wistful rather than depressed. 1984 and Brave New World I just found fascinating, although how elements of both are coming true is depressing. I also suspect that if I'd first read them as an adult rather than a precocious kid, I might have found them bleaker than I did.
1984 and/ or Soylent Green. The movie was so depressing. Would never bother to read the book. Was there an actual novel ?
Clive DaSilva Email: clive.dasilva@gmail.com Ubuntu 18.10 Kernel 4.18
The problem with our current system is that the government creates an environment for the corporate raiders to prosper (deregulation, protectionism, laws favoring large corporations against smaller ones), gives them incentive to do underhanded tricks (forcing them to loan to subprime borrowers), and then bails them out when they fail. They don't suffer the consequences of their actions because of an overly-powerful government.
On a smaller scale, you don't have to worry about taking a mortgage you knew you couldn't afford, betting everything on the value of the house rising, because the government is going to come in and crack down on the banks, providing mortgage relief. You can easily go bankrupt, leaving the lenders to suck it up for your poor life choices.
IOW, the recent cratering was decidedly non-Randian in nature.
They're Made out of Meat - Terry Bisson
I'd have to go for "The Ugly Little Boy" by Asimov (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_Little_Boy). It's sad in an unexpected way for a Sci-Fi story that's not easily forgotten. Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 are also good choices, but I wanted to add something unique.
Just finished reading Sky Crawlers. It's a beautifully crafted film (really not for kids, despite being anime), but I just feel depressed after watching it.
Very depressing book, could not finish it.
Stranger in a Strange land was also pretty depressing.
Then, you didn't finish it. When you get to the end, you find out it was actually pretty boring. The whole thing is basically mock-religious award bait with a scifi book jacket.
Let me spoil the ending for you:
It turns out he's Jesus. It turns out everybody is Jesus.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Total bummer ending. Most downer sci fi book that I can remember reading.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
SCO Group Files For Chapter 7
-- Sig under construction...
"Light of Other Days" by Bob Shaw. The concept of slow glass was excellent science fiction, while the story line was heartbreakingly sad. I read this in an excellent collection which included Godwin's "The Cold Equations" mentioned earlier, as well as the great Asimov story "Nightfall."
Michael J.
Root, God, what is difference?
Most of his books - His Masters Voice on the failure of science, Solaris for just being Solaris - The Tarkovsky film version managed to be even more bleak than the book (I choose to deny the existence of the later George Clooney version)
Yup, that's about the most depressing thing out there.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
By John Brunner. And in general the associated quadrilogy ("on the shockwave", "stand on Zanzibar", "the shockwave rider", "the jagged orbit" and "the sheep look up").
Love them, but definitely depressing.
The 9 Billion Names of God (A C Clarke)
Running Man by Richard Bachman (Steven King). Not like the movie at all--no mass market appeal. But the development of the main character and ending left me dazed for days.
A boy and his dog.
OK obviously not science fiction. But I remember reading "Civilization and its Discontents" for a philosophy class in college (basically, Freud's theory is that all of civilization is a massive defensive adjustment to control man's chaotic sexual impulses) and thinking, this must be the last important book ever written.
In the House of the Worm takes place in a far future where the few people left live in enclosed stone fortresses in a vast desert. They live on worms and bugs caught in the underground catacombs. They never leave the stone fortress, have no knowledge of anything outside or underground. The entire story reeks of decay and a slow death of the human race without any awareness of what they once were or what is happening.
Very depressing.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
1984 and/ or Soylent Green. The movie was so depressing. Would never bother to read the book. Was there an actual novel ?
"Make Room! Make Room!" by Harry Harrison.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
A Canticle for Liebowitz
Yep. "make room! make room!" by HH and "with folded hands" by Jack Williamson.
You were rooting for Winston? I'm going to put the same question to you then that O'Brien put to Winston:
Paraphrasing, I don't have the exact words, so I'll ask in my own words
What makes you think the proles will ever overturn our rule?
We have been farming you for millenia, but the fruit we are after is not your meat. We want your tears, we want
your screams and your wails for those are the things that delight us. From the beginning, we have allowed your
numbers to swell and gave you cities to despair and sicken in, and we have torn these same cities and empires
down whenever it pleased us and built anew and razed over and over through all time. You are all sacrifices
and there is nothing new under the sun and no recent atrocity you may have become aware of, that wasn't visited
on your kind thousands of times before.
For who controls the past controls the future, and who controls the present controls the past. The future is
indeed a boot crushing a man's face. You see we have been controlling your present for such a _very_ long
time.
There was no hope for Winston from the outset, just as there was no hope for the cow you ate last night.
For you as well, for you there is certainty, but with certainty no hope.
Title pretty much sums up the plot. One of my favorite books when I'm in a really dark mood.
By Kazuo Ishiguro. You might not have heard of him as he's not really a SF writer, but this particular novel is a SF dystopia that is pretty good and oddly disturbing / depressing.
The men in the jungle , by Norman Spinrad.
About 20 pages in, the hero of the story eats baby meat. And it just gets worse from there. a bunch of humans stuck on a planet with nothing to eat, devolves into a place that you just try and expunge from records, in the hope that noone goes there.
Chapterhouse: Dune
There is a genre known as "fantasy" which somehow is mixed-up with some element from "scifi" and then marketed as "scifi"
I find those being the most dull - If I want to read scifi I do not need to read a story about "Ghengis Khan" or "Middle Age Worlds" with horse riding knights and all, with spaceships
It's dull, it's uninteresting, it's stupid, and totally un-entertaining
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Definitely a tragedy... I heard there was a movie, but I don't believe that anyone would have wasted their time on such terrible fan fiction
The world goes from a functional civilization to tiny tribes of people speaking different languages and worshiping different gods in the space of one generation. No science, culture, art, or knowledge beyond what's needed by a hunter-gatherer society survives.
Probably not the most depressing, but a downer underneath all the snark nonetheless.
The short story "Dogfight" from the Burning Chrome collection has a young street criminal discover that he has a talent that could bring him a legitimate source of income and friends.
Since it's my answer to the title question, you can guess that it doesn't end well. The whole story's online here and a couple of other places.
Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health
That's got to be the most depressing book ever, in any genre!
Does the fact that I've read and enjoyed the endings of most of the books listed here make me a depressive person?
Oh, wait, I've been married 21 years...
"We Who Are About To..." - Joanna Russs
Whip-smart feminist science fiction author from the '70s (deserves a wider audience). A good writer. This book is super-depressing. Can't really describe how w/out giving things away. But I've read every book listed so far, and this one is definitely in the running.
Similar to that was "The Sheep Look Up" by John Brunner. Oh, and most of the stuff by Ursula La Guin.
Phil.
John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up - very depressing dystopian Sci-Fi. Most depressing book ever though for me was Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward. A men's cancer ward. In the 1950's. Int he Soviet Union. In Soviet Central Asia. Talk about stacking the decks.
The forge of god by Greg Bear.
I kept expecting it to have a happy ending, but no.
"The Late, Great Lanet Earth" by Hal Lindsey.
In short, the collapse of society as engineered by a brilliant, emotionally conflicted genetic engineer. Quite chilling, left me thinking more than any recent book, but it could have been that I was lonely at the time.
Mark Geston,criticizing technology worship. The cover blurb:
"The ship was to be seven miles long, a third of a mile in diameter and have a wing-spread of three and a half miles. It would take two and a half centuries to construct. Its announced purpose: to carry humanity away from its ruined world, from the world that had become a perpetual purgatory.
To build this vast ship would require the undivided activity of an entire nation and would mean carrying out a ruthless program of war and conquest, of annihilation and reconstruction, and of education and rediscovery.
But was this starship really what it was claimed to be? Or was there a greater secret behind its incredible cost -- a secret so strange that no man dared reveal it?"
Most of the culture series that I have read (I only read 5 books so far) have pretty interesting and sad/unexpected endings. I found first book Consider Phlebas to be really good, and particularly depressing.
In the future, there is only war. Take away the awesome Space Marines and even the Imperial Guard and you get the most depressing warmachine ever concieved to fiction. 1,000 Psykers sacrificed every day to keep the Emperor "alive", weapons cannot be made anymore, engineering has been replaced by religious rites and invention is all but gone in religion to the Emperor. That's real depressing.
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
Ridiculously funny, and depressing that people actually believe it.
1984 and/ or Soylent Green. The movie was so depressing. Would never bother to read the book. Was there an actual novel ?
"Make Room! Make Room!" by Harry Harrison.
Which was more depressing than Soylent Green, at least the film had solved the 'how do we feed the increasing population?' issue, the book just painted the picture 'we're fucked..'
In my opinion, Rand's destructive philosophy urges people to live the life of a psychopath. Here is a quote from George Monbiot in the Guardian:
...Her psychopathic ideas made billionaires feel like victims and turned millions of followers into their doormats...
It has a fair claim to be the ugliest philosophy the postwar world has produced. Selfishness, it contends, is good, altruism evil, empathy and compassion are irrational and destructive. The poor deserve to die; the rich deserve unmediated power. It has already been tested, and has failed spectacularly and catastrophically. Yet the belief system constructed by Ayn Rand, who died 30 years ago today, has never been more popular or influential.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
When I finished reading this book, I was pretty down for a few days. Even now, 20 years later, it brings on a touch of melancholy. I enjoy Wilson's work (Chronoliths was good), but this one fits the bill for the topic.
No
she required a lot of convincing to take aid late in life, and left alone she probably would have died in a gutter. Literally. Her friends intervened and convinced her to accept what help there was. That's sort of the trouble with people like Ayn. Very low self esteem, they feel they deserve what they get, and in their favored economic systems that's less than nothing unless you're 1%...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Solaris - no matter how hard we try and how hard the alien with godlike powers tries the differences are so huge that there is no clue how to communicate even after more than a century.
I would say the two most depressing I have read are "The Alien Years" by Robert Silverburg and "Xenogenesis" by Octavia E. Butler.
In "The Alien Years" we are invaded, and have no clue why or what they want. All we know is that they aren't doing what we would consider conquering us.
In "Xenogenesis" we are saved from ourselves by rescuing what is left of humanity after a nuclear war. But those that have survived aren't going to simply be returned to the world the aliens have spent so much time and energy cleaning up.
Both are great reads.
"Revelation Space" series by Alastair Reynolds.
Make Room, Make Room! -Harry Harrison (You know this book by the movie title: Soylent Green)
Ursula K. Le Guin:
The Lathe of Heaven
The Dispossessed -
And of course, HP Lovecraft:
Herbert West, Re-animator.
The Whisperer in Darkness
Shadow out of Time
The Colour out of Space
Someone mentioned Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany...
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Well that cuts out Anne Rice then.
Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Also, Beggars in Spain.
Entropy just isn't what it used to be.
it's actually science fact (which makes it that much more depressing).. brilliant book, but I felt like utter shit when I read the last chapter. humans fucking up the world..
(watching the Curiosity landing the other night restored a little faith)
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Short_History_of_Nearly_Everything
buy a copy - the illustrated version is handy - every time you pick it up you'll learn something new.
My vote is for All Summer in a Day , a depressing little tale by Ray Bradbury. I first encountered this short story when I was a kid, and it really messed me up.
http://www.amazon.com/Count-Geigers-Blues-A-Comedy/dp/0312890087
Way to take every boy's dream of becoming a superhero and throw a cold bucket of reality on it.
The Audacity of Hope
Use of Weapons was very very sad
Permutation City endlessly depressing
Jem I wouldn't ever read based on the premise alone a few amazon reviews I just browsed through
Read it 30 years ago, it still haunts me. Here's the wikipedia synopsis (spoiler):
The story is about a class of school children on Venus, which in this story is a world of constant rainstorms, where the sun is only visible for two hours every seven years.
One of the children, Margot, moved to Venus from Earth five years earlier, and she is the only one in her class to remember sunshine, since it shone regularly on earth. She describes the sun as "a penny", or "like a fire in the stove", and the other children, being too young to have ever seen it themselves, refuse to believe her accounting of it. Out of jealousy, she is bullied and ostracized by the other students and finally locked in a closet during the time the sun is due to come out.
As the sun is about to appear, their teacher arrives to take the class outside to enjoy their only hour of sunshine, and in their astonishment and joy, they all forget about Margot. They run, play, skip, jump, and prance about, savoring every second of their newly found freedom. "It's much better than sun lamps!" one of them cries.
Suddenly, a girl feels a raindrop on her. Thunder sounds, and they run back inside. Then, one of them remembers Margot, who is still locked in the closet. They stand frozen ashamed for what they have done, unable to "meet each other's glances."
The precious sun has come and gone, and because of their despicable act, Margot has missed it. They walk slowly and silently towards the closet, and let her out.
Not THE most depressing sci-fi I've read (I'd put 1984 on the top), but it was short, powerful story that deserves to be remembered. And as a curiosity, IIRC, Isaac Asimov was granted a raise in his pay from Astounding Science Fiction magazine because of it. After that he started to get the maximum value John Campbell payed for a story.
The book "The Killing Star" by Charles R. Pellegrino and George Zebrowski.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Star
One of those "first contact" novels, where "first contact" is by relativistic weapons slamming into Earth wiping out every living thing. All to the tune of Michael Jackson's "We are the World" warbling over every RF frequency.
The aliens then go on a hunt chasing down any last remaining vestige of human society, with possibly the last breeding air of humans captured and kept as zoo specimens.
And there's even more to the ending, and it's depressing too.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
Bergeron
I'm not sure if this counts as a SF novel or not, but The Giver depressed the hell out of me
And most of Dick's other stuff is pretty depressing too ( A Scanner Darkly, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? etc) ...
The Road
I endorse this choice
I regret watching the movie after reading the book. I had pretty high expectations because the big screen version of 'no country for old men' turned out so good... ah well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huddling_Place
People stop communicating with other people in person (preferring via telescreen), develop Agoraphobia, senseless death.
See also: Social Media
I always have difficulty reading through the descriptions of culture that I personally experienced knowing that it was all senselessly destroyed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Next_Door
Nutrition labels on processed and fast food read like science fiction and have pretty depressing effects given what they do to a human body. That people continue to eat such "food" as their primary source of calories is just gravy.
The one that inspires brave fiscal visionaries who have given us today's economy, and the other that sends a pal to collect her welfare cheque.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
It just goes on and on with the relentless conflict..
P.C. Jersild, "After the Flood" and Dénis Lindbohm "The Roots of Doom", "The Bewinger" are two of the most depressing authors I have been reading.
On a side note - I have actually performed computer support to P.C. Jersild when he lost his book on his computer once.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Grave of the Fireflies is just the plan saddest and most moving anime/film period.
Damn you, you would have to mention it. Even thinking about that film causes me to well up, and I've only ever watched it once, about three years ago..
no matter how dystopian SF writers get, they'll have to go some to truly equal how fucked up we've *really* been
Piers Anthony was a huge pedophile. Nearly every story included a nubile young man lusting after nubile young females, and even some of the titles were terrible (The Color of Her Panties). I liked some of his books until I was old enough to realize he was a pedo.
Though Updike is rarely considered in this genre, his "Toward the End of Time" is very much sci-fi and without question rather dark. It's a story of mortality and decline, set in a post-apocalyptic environment in the near future, following a nuclear war. The US has fallen into anarchy; men are no longer able to reach orbit. No grey goo, but nanotech run amok.
Most of the comments here are related to sci-fi stories, sorry to spoil your rant.
But I do take issue with this statement from the summary:
"Usually sci-fi provides adventure with happy endings for everyone"
Bullshit. Sci-Fi does not require adventure, and often does not include it at all, but it does usually have somewhat bleak visions for the future, not "happy endings for everyone". It should be a list of happy sci-fi stories... it'll be a lot shorter.
Orwell's "B-side" -- Animal Farm.
The Long Afternoon of Earth
http://www.amazon.com/Computer-One-Warwick-Collins/dp/0714530336
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Read it over 20 years ago in a sci-fi anthology, no idea who the author was or the overall title of the short story collection.
It began with an agent being sent out to deal with a new street drug that turned people permanently catatonic as its withdrawal symptom. Of course the agent ended up being drugged with a dose of this stuff by the bad guys. At first he thought he'd survived it... until at the end of his life, he woke up from the hallucination. And lived a whole other life. And then woke up... and lived another... and woke up....
So by the time the drug really wore off, he'd lived so many different lives in his head, he was in a mode where he didn't believe anything anymore and was totally non-responsive and catatonic like all the other victims.
Once you have read enough of it. How can you not be amused by putting a pretty young girl to death in the Cold Equations.
How can you not enjoy America Nuking itself in the the war against the Chtorr to defeat the alien ecology to find out
that it just grows faster.
Or the beautiful drama and pointless achievement of Dogfight in Burning Chrome.
Everyone who said that "Childhood's End" is depressing (including tvtropes.org) is suffering from a profound lack of imagination. The end of civilization as we know it may not be a bad thing if it is replaced with something infinitely better. The author left that part up to our imagination. How one interprets this book speaks volumes about our ability to imagine a better existence. A pessimistic interpretation indicates an inability to conceive of a posthuman future in which consciousness exceeds its current limitations. Isn't the title of the book enough to make the point that humanity is leaving the cradle? Or is growing up a bad thing, and we should all pine for the nostalgic days of infancy?
Some background.. I read... a lot. 200-300 novels per year.
When there's a series, I finish it, even if I didn't much like the first. I'll re-read them every year or other year.
For this book, I won't be reading it again, nor will I buy the 2nd (much less the 3rd) in the series.
Directive 51 terrified me. The concepts in it are just too close to reality; the political machinations; hell those damn near happen now.
It's a book about a worldwide biotech attack that renders all petroleum-based products into goo, combined with a nanotech attack that attacks any metal with electricity present. I won't spoil the rest, suffice to say the attack on our modern technological civilization was complete. It was a book that wouldn't leave my head for several weeks.
-- CyberTech
oddly not the first time I read it, but the re-read really bummed me out.
But especially Titan & Evolution. Books in the Xeelee sequence mostly have negative endings, but at least some humans thrive in it. Read Stephen Baxter sf (not the alternate history novels) when you want a downer. Nice if you're a teenager, but as a grownup (haha) I want some more positive, nicer, books.
I know it has a happy ending but the mad desperate dash to suicide and the unwillingness to accept that cheap, plentiful energy might power the economy now but can destroy the world later mirrors so closely our addiction to oil and our willingness to spend trillions defending our sources of oil but only spend peanuts researching alternatives.
Tim.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream ~ Harlan Ellison. By far the scariest (and depressing) SciFi ... EVER!
Sure that was depressing. However I was really depressed when I read I am legend. How can the writer get the movie so wrong?
I mean come on. The movie had a completely different ending.
Doesn't the writer watch its own movies? Luckily there are things to protect the copyright holder and if I was the copyright holder, I would sue Richard Matheson for clear copyright violation and theft or even rape of a great story by Will Smith.
Because of this, I think we must give movie companies more power. They clearly have not enough to say in the copyright matter.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
"Heroes" who single-handedly guided and caused progress by act of their sheer will and ingenuity, pretty much regardless of the environment, and in fact often directly against it. That is essentially what the book is all about. The problem, again, is that there's no evidence really backing that premise.
Are you serious?
The history we learn is chock full of such people. Joan of Arc, Einstein, Roosevelt, Churchill, Steve Jobs, Darwin, etc. etc. etc.
The list is endless. There are countless individuals who have affected how the whole world turns, for better or worse... in fact if anything history shows us progress does not really happen until such people come along, because otherwise the world simply sits forever in a plodding state of status quo, or in fact slips backward into chaos.
The other oft repeated mistake is that such "selfish altruism" is solely a product of rational thought in the first place.
Of course it's not, but the innate sense of wrong is not powerful enough to really stop people from doing the wrong thing. It's only discipline to reinforce that natural instinct that makes it powerful enough a force to have real impact.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Vilcabamba by Harry Turtledove.
It's a short, good read. Made me think for days. It's analogous to the Europeans finishing the conquest over South American Indians.
"The story is set sometime in the 21st century, 50 years after an alien race called the Krolp conquered and occupied much of planet Earth. The story is told from the perspective of President of the United States, Harris Moffatt III, who rules a rump United States and Canada that runs along the Rocky Mountains. Moffat's father and grandfather were also presidents."
The online text is here.
THE MACHINE (Industrial Edition Re-edit)
Odd, weird, fits the bill and is wonderful.
Memoirs found in a Bathtub, it just keeps resonating with my life...
Memoirs found in a Bathtub ~ Stanislaw Lem
The Futurelogical Congress ~ Stanislaw Lem
Scanners Live in Vain ~ Cordwainer Smith (do read the Instrumentality of Mankind!)
The High Castle ~ Phillip K. Dick (and just about anything by him)
It is in fact in our evolved nature, and in our "unmediated" self-interest to "injure, enslave, rob or murder others"
If you don't see that unbridled capitalism/liberterianism/whateverism leads to the oppression of the weak by the strong, well, you simply arent't paying attention.
Everyone else is over-thinking this.
this society created free individuals
Absurd, free individuals exist DESPITE society, not because of it. Society as a whole acts as a force of conformism.
A free individual without society is a solitary animal, not a creator.
Also absurd, a single individual alone can be a creator. Would not a sole man trapped on an island building a raft be a creator?
The creator is anyone who can take whatever is around him/her and shape it into something greater than what it was.
Society is irrelevant, except to the extant that it tries to stop them.
The source of you confusion is that one of the things people can shape is society itself, and there you "need" society to the same extent the man building a raft needs wood. Society is simply the raw material of creation, but you should never think that society was the reason for existence of the one who would seek to shape it... it's being worked because it is there.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The premise is a future in which copyright has expanded even further, and they're on the brink of â€oein perpetuity." Along with automated testing for matches within the entire existing corpus of art and music, the race is rapidly approaching the point where all combinations playing to humans are already known and protected. Forever.
fencepost
just a little off
I have never met anyone that did no regret reading it afterwords. Not to mention the readers notes at the end suggesting parallels with today.
It is exactly because of people like you, that 1984 will never come to be...
You want it too much.
PS - Kittens! Ha!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I can't help but think, virtually all of the SF and fantasy I have read has generally been pretty grim.
What on earth leads you to think most stories have happy endings in SF? It seems like you have been watching too many movies, where that practice is commonplace. Books? Not so much.
I mean even Hitchhikers Guide is funny while reading, but the earth is destroyed...
So what really happy rainbow ending SF is there? It seems a much harder question to answer than "find me something depressing".
My only answer would be Laumer's Retief stories. And even THAT doesn't count much since Retief never gets credit... but like Hitchhikers, it's amusing to read.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Most of the sci-fi from behind the iron curtain was pretty bleak (and quite deep).
Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers and His Masters Voice by Stanislaw Lem are two great examples of that. Highly recommended.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/08/07/2242245/this-is-what-wall-streets-terrifying-robot-invasion-looks-like
'nough said ...
Government fiscal reports and plans.
By peter watts is up there. Dysfunctional crew and highly claustrophobic atmosphere in a first contact story that's original and terrifying. Especially the ending, which is a profoundly depressing view of life in the universe.
And the gap series by Stephen donaldson is hard to beat for relentless abuse of and by just about every character on every page of the series....
"This Is the Way the World Ends" by James Morrow. It's a book about the aftermath of a nuclear war.. yeah I know there are lots of those, but this one is so incredibly bleak that it makes Neville Shute's "On The Beach" look upbeat..
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
A Scanner Darkly by Phillip K. Dick (The afterword made me cry)
Gateway by Frederick Pohl (The final implications of the book turn the main character on his head)
Ward Moore: Bring the Jubilee, or Greener than you Think. In the latter, the world is brought to an end by a feckless fool, in the former, one man's world is ended when he fouls up a critical historical event and winds up creating an alternate. Tucker's Year of the Quiet Sun, a very lonely ending. Greg Bear's Forge of God gave me actual nightmares over a period of weeks. The utter inevitability of the ending of the world (the Neutronium/Anti-neutronium timer) gave me the notion of what it'd be like to have untreatable cancer.
Fiasco, by Stanislaw Lem
By Andreas Eschbach. The end is simply grandiose and terribly sad. I really encourage you to read it.
A Maze of Stars by John Brunner was a bit depressing, although quite good, when I read it. Which, even more depressingly, was 16 years ago...
People can care for somewhere under 200 others
People can TRACK IN THEIR MIND, without external aid such as paper or computers, ~150 to ~230 other people and their mutual relationships.
It has nothing to do with caring (as in liking) - you keep a mental record of your bullies just as you keep a record of your buddies.
People care for other beings they find to be sentient. I.e. Things that are like "us".
Because, when we recognize (consciously or not) that something or someone is in some way "like us" - our brain tells us that IT IS US.
Brains are crazy like that.
So, you may not care for whales, or pandas, or people in far off lands, or mentally deranged beggars in the streets or your next door neighbor - until it kicks in that they are like you.
And it makes no difference if they are 7, 7 billion or 70 billion of them.
Once your brain realizes the similarity of "them" to "you" and they stop being the "others" - you can't help it anymore.
They are you and you are them, and on some deep buried level you know it.
That does not mean you will instantly like "them".
You may actually end up hating those people or animals you were ambivalent about.
You'll actually hate the aspects of yourself which you don't like and all - but you'll be caring.
Hating is caring too, just not the good kind.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I got some bad news for you about I, robot....
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
... I forget which one in particular, but there's an appendix with a timeline of events in the universe. After the events of the book, the timeline is extended to a point containing something like "baryonic life in the universe becomes extinct". So not only am I *personally* going to die, and the human race become extinct, and the solar system be destroyed when the sun dies, and what replaces us become extinct (ad nauseum) - but it's all ultimately in vain because everything that we can possibly identify as life will eventually die.
For fuck's sake, I didn't need *that*.
Vonnegut's take about the purpose of humankind http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sirens_of_Titan
The Demolished Man
Sod the novel itself, just the fact that that heap of junk won awards was enough to depress me.
by Harlan Ellison.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
http://www.good.is/post/conservative-darling-ayn-rand-died-loving-government-handouts/
And more in depth:
http://www.patiastephens.com/2010/12/05/ayn-rand-received-social-security-medicare/
The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin. Still depresses me only thinking about it.
by Nigel Kneale of Quatermass fame. 30 years before it actually happened he nailed the whole concept of reality television. Only a B/W print survives due to the BBC being a cunch of bunts, but it almost works better that way. I've seen shooting stills, and the 1968 day-glo colours on everything might make it look dated. The shots of the sniggering proles when it all starts to go pear-shaped are still disturbing to this day.
Most depressing story I ever read, I can't remember the title of - maybe someone can help. Short story, being written from the point of someone who is Atoning. What is she Atoning for? Well, humanity found this abandoned world. All beautifully laid out, slightly odd architecture, but ready for humans to just move in. And food in abundance, with the most delicious vegetables. Who turn out to be the inhabitants, who go dormant every so often, like 17-year locusts. They wake up to find this strange alien race camped out on their planet, chowing down on their unborn children. Worse than that, they're such an advanced species, they forgive us. We weren't being evil, just very stupid. So the human race Atones by returning parts of their body to the biosphere of the world, and the reveal is that this person is largely artificial now, because she'd been on-world for so long, that she was mostly composed of local proteins.
Cracking story, totally alien aliens, and the idea that we hadn't invaded, or attacked, we'd just buggered up the evolution of an entire species that would take generations to fix, because we got it horribly wrong.
A short story I read once was set in a universe experiencing the big crunch. Humanity sent out a lifeboat that was designed to leave the boundary of the universe and therefore survive the end of everything.
Outside the universe, it turns out there is nothing to do but watch stars and galaxies shrink down until they are shorter than the Plank length and drop out of existence. No-one else has escaped, just the one city-sized ship. Everything had to be completely recycled if the inhabitants were to survive. Political tensions arose between two factions - one objecting to the loss of energy from the ship's windows and running lights, and the other hoping that there might one day be someone out there to see them.
The two protagonists leave the escalating civil war in a shuttle. They search for another universe they theorize might have sprung up in the blackness...
I liked the beginning of Stranger in a Strange Land. But, as the book progressed it just started mirroring silly male fantasies about fucking.
To me that was depressing as I liked the beginning and was waiting for something more than some intellectually-masked wank fantasies.
I've made this observation with other books too. Once the storyline sort of dies, the author regresses to more primal insticts and starts writing about people fucking all the time in some kind of free orgy for everyone.
An exception is Philip K. Dick. He's hardcore. He really fucks with your mind, and he doesn't regress to those fuck-fantasies. He's on point all the time, and he'll leave you if not depressed, wondering what the hell you just read (in a good way, mind you).
A more modern one:
Ben Elton 'Blind Faith'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Faith_%28novel%29
One of these 'it could so easily happen' stories. Everything gets put on YouTube. If you dont you are weird and hounded out of society 'What do you mean you dont want to put your first time out there, are you embarrassed of who you are?'
Also People embrace democracy, but remember people are stupid and impressionable. They end up passing a law that 'everyone is famous' Tell me that is unbelievable?
Actually there was a short story which I read in middle school that got me into distopian fiction.
It was about a boy (I'll call him Peter, even though it probably isn't his name in the story) in the future where everyone wore grey jumpsuits (color was not allowed) and was told what job they would have and at the beginning of the story a teacher showed a dream like a movie to the classroom they took from a bully of him beating Peter up and then punishing him for having the dream in the first place.
So Peter finds this girl named Zoe wearing a (red?) dress and I don't really remember the rest of the story, just that it ends with Peter and Zoe getting chased and they end up going back to the 1970's.
The ending wasn't depressing, but the tone of the story was.
Now for the life of me, I can't remember the title is. Maybe someone here read it and might know?
Flowers for Algernon is quite depressing to be honest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon
My father-in-law is a well-published author and he delved into science fiction a few times (along with stories set in WW2).
Apparently, when he was having a bit of a rough time, he wrote three stories. In the first, the Earth was wiped out. In the second, the Galaxy was wiped out. In the third, the whole Universe was wiped out.
But he had some interesting ideas and never managed to get them published (he was very close once, but his agent and publisher were in the World Trade Center - he was in the US and due to visit them on 9/11).
The most horrible one was about a group who, I think, crashed their ship onto a planet/planetoid. The problem was that the planet had a "hot" side and a cool side. You could survive on the cold side, but the hot side was virtually instantaneous death. That's not so bad, until the plot introduced that the planet had quite a fast axis-spin. Without the aid of modern vehicles or shelter, you had to keep walking. And walking. And walking. Or you would die. Throw in a lot of extraneous drama and a pregnant woman and it was quite a good story idea.
At what point do you give up and STOP walking and leave everyone else to cope without you, when rescue could be just around the corner?
The ending was terribly depressing, but very good.
It's depressing because it implies that we can't go. A lot of books which end in human elevation or utopia tell the reader that they could make it, they might live to see that. Childhood's End was explicit in that you can't go.
Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. There's a whole laundry list of depressing things, despite it being a good read. Namely, a young couple in love, convinced they could avoid their pre-determined fate as unwilling organ donors, get denied.
The three books composing the Second Commonwealth War series are the most depressing stories I have read in over 60 years of reading science fiction.
I fought in Viet Nam, and then went freelance, fighting for various groups and causes through Africa and Asia. On occasion I've read the same book several times in succession simply because it was the only damned book I had or could get. I know war fairly well from a ground-level perspective.
Rick Shelley appears to know war quite well, himself. He has certainly captured the essence of war in these books. The whole "we won, but at what a cost" syndrome is laid out for everyone to see.
You can "win" any war. But at what cost to your own side?
"I have no mouth, and I must scream" if short stories can be included.
Blind Faith was one of the more depressing novels I've read recently. Although it wasn't 'science fiction' per se, it did predict a technological near-future that seems to be getting closer by the second.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
On religion :"The Streets of Ashkelon" by Harry Harrison. On a planet where lives natives with no concept of religion or belief, one person tries to teach them the scientific method while a missionary tries to convert them.
I cried like a baby at the end of Silent Running. But then, I was only about 7 the first time I saw it.
Iain M Banks' "Against a Dark Background" is pretty bleak as well, not just for the fact that most of the characters get killed, but because it is basically a story about the themes of infertility, mortality and the sheer, utter pointlessness of doing anything at all in a lifetime/ world/ star system/ galaxy/ universe that is ultimately and inevitably destined to end.
Almost anything by James Tiptree, Jr. AKA Raccoona Sheldon AKA Alice Bradley Sheldon.
Later learning that she shot herself (after shooting hear "84-year-old, nearly-blind husband" in his sleep), leaving a "suicide note... written years earlier, and saved until needed" came as no surprise.
A personal close second is a funny one. Literally. "Bill, the Galactic Hero" by Harry Harrison.
Not realizing at the time that it was satire it just came out depressing as hell, even a bit scary.
I was nine or ten when I read it, lying sick in bed, running a high fever.
A brain which is not fully functional has "issues" with grasping satire.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Modern society has always been about the Brave New World. Huxley wasn't writing a futuristic dystopia, he was writing a contemporary parallel. From the Roman games to Marx's "religion is the opiate of the masses" to Garfield's "television is the opiate of the masses", as starving or freezing to death become less of a reality, we create a new reality. Mainly by hiding from reality...
Kinda depressing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_2033_(novel)
Like a John Wyndham novel but with no hope, no possibility of salvation or a return to normalcy. It's fascinating to see 60s British society crumble so thoroughly and inescapably. Read that and then watch Threads and When The Wind Blows.
Oh god. I saw Grave of the Fireflies when I was a teenager straight off of Battle Athletes and Card Captor Sakura.
I think I cried for a week.
(Thanks for sharing your opinion, and bringing back the memories.)
Read "I have no mouth and I must scream." Probably one of the most nihilistic Sci-Fi writers I've ever been scarred by. Bit of a jerk, too.
Try not to slash your wrists.
I found stephen r donaldsons gap series more depressing than his thomas covenant series
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro doesn't fit the profile of most science fiction, but it highlights the reality that humans are quick to dismiss the humanity of anyone who is different. This is the core of racism, ageism, sexism which will most certainly be extended to other sentient life. I think it was the Guardians by John Christopher which stuck with me from childhood, the idea that the protagonist discovers that others are the builders and that they themselves are eaters of the world. It fits well into all dual mode societies where some are the poor producers and others are the wealthy consumers. H.G. Wells "The Time Machine" takes this relationship thousands of years into the future where it reaches its logical conclusion of two species of humans. Neither of these books has an adequate Hollywood adaptation but our vision of Frankenstein's monster has been distorted through theater and cinema into something which barely resembles Mary Shelly's novel. The lesson that the evil in Frankenstein's creation is our own hatred and predjudices reflected in what began as a restored an innocent life was completely lost.
Orson Scott Card: "Songmaster"
Incredibly sad. One of the few books that has made me cry.
Ubik - Philip K Dick
High Rise - JG Ballard, if that counts...I still feel disturbed even now when I think about that book and I read it a long time ago
by Will McIntosh. The slow death of society. Some staggeringly depressing reading at times. Great story though.
Do you think that more people are reading books that used to in the past? Honestly, while I read heavily and my wife reads twice as much as I do, almost no one else I see on a regular basis reads all that much. Only 1 out of about 20 coworkers reads when he has a break at work.
I have no evidence, but it seems to me that literacy is plunging dramatically, and the most challenging thing that most people read is the text of instant messages on their phones, most of which is likely misspelled :P
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Most of these mentioned are in the Clute/Nicholls Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
Except the Tolkien (a fantasy about the advent and impact of the Industrial Revolution on the idyllic bucolic English yeoman). And the computer manuals.
I read the question as being about Tragedy vs Comedy, or the Tragic vs the Romantic. On the Romantic side, Brian Stableford has rightly pointed out that SF is the only literature in which the author can complete the novel with "and the whole world lived happily ever after."
On the depressing side of things, I recommend The Puppies of Terra by Thomas M. Disch, also 334 by the same author, and Fritz Lieber's "A Bucket of Air" is wrist-slitting stuff.
Robert Sheckley sometimes makes explicit the existential terror that underpins his humour, as does his acolyte Douglas Adams.
In Lord of the Rings, the core of evil is external. In Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy, the evil dwells within, a far more realistic and disturbing worldview.
I'd second "On the Beach" as being right up there on the list. And while I have not had time to read through all of the comments, and I'm not sure if it quite qualifies as "sci-fi" but has anyone mentioned Cormack McCarthy's "The Road"? Talk about depressing...
I think you are confused. As I've already posted above, the "outsiders" in BNW get sent to islands full of other highly intelligent people; it is a reward rather than a punishment.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Herbert's White Plague was much more depressing than his others.
When BNW was written, corporal punishment was rife in most schools across the developed world. At Eton, you could be beaten with a stick by a boy two years older than you were. This was all part of the conditioning to put up with arbitrary punishment and maltreatment in future, and led to a number of upper class men with very kinky personalities. In BNW, much gentler conditioning is used early on so that corporal punishment isn't necessary. It is much kinder than the social norms when Huxley was writing.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Bickering away to an apocalypse with someone actually prepared to press the button. For 99% of the book it seems possible that sense will prevail, and then the light - as in the title - is seen.
Specifically, Stand on Zanzibar (overpopulation leads to massive increase in violent crime as aggression levels rise, along with mega-corps basically enslaving entire African countries) and to an even greater extent, The Sheep Look Up (ecological catastrophe in slow-motion, domestic terrorists dose municipal water supply with psychotic drugs).
Both actually highly enjoyable, especially Zanzibar with its spy story, fast pace, and mod, proto-MTV style jump cuts.
Journey onward.
The Norwegian trilogy Lushon-trilogien by Andreas Bull-Hansen really deserves a larger audience!
http://www.bull-hansen.com/styled-15/index.html
If you're a publisher, deeply consider this trilogy!
Grim, disturbing, well-written.
...and if you happen to read Scandinavian, and haven't read this series yet: do so!
Level Seven, Mordecai Roshwald
"Thomas Disch is pretty depressing, but he's got nothing on Silverberg when he gets his grump on" *
*unkown
Does Frankenstein count as science fiction? I know it's older than most other works in the genre, and the science is significantly more primitive, and it's not set in space, but in other respects it really feels like it ought to belong in the science fiction genre. Some people classify it as horror, but I think that's only because many of the half-baked movies extremely loosely based on it are horror. The book itself does not have any of the usual elements of horror. (Okay, yes, it has a "monster", but he's not a monster in the usual horror-genre sense of the term. If anything, humanity is the monster, which is much more typical of sci-fi.)
It is also categorically the most sorrowful book of any kind that I have ever read. It could almost be called a study in sorrow.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Great books but Thomas and Linden are so depressing...
Fucking fiction, however, would be a good list too...
Level Seven, Earth Abides, On the Beach.
I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
I haven't read it myself, but my uncle once told me that when my dad read The Death of Grass as a young man, he was so freaked out that he spent all his free time for several weeks wandering the fields of the semi-rural area where they lived, planting potatoes wherever he went.
Heh. Reading. *blank stare*
Not a book but a movie (from a script by the Yorkshire writer Barry Hines).
I read a review of Threads one time which said "it will darken your world." That's true. It will also probably change the way you think about humanity. Do not watch it at night by yourself.
One of the greatest films of all time.
a list of books to avoid at all cost.
On a related note: how does one manage a list like this, e.g. when on the hunt for books at the bookstore or library? I've got some index cards with a list of books/authors I want to read, but adding the negatives would make for a large and unwieldy list.
A movie, not a book, but the ultimate downer. US and Russia have a nuclear exchange. Civilization wiped out. A woman watches her kids die slowly of radiation poisoning. She rounds up her last child and a mentally handicapped neighbor sits them in the car in the closed garage and is ready to turn the engine on but changes her mind.
A Canticle for Leibowitz
We blew ourselves up, we'll do it again, forever and ever.
Didn't think I'd post here because even though I I know many of the ones mentioned here, they've all kinda have worn out their scare to me.
Then I just remembered the 80ies German teenager novel "Die letzten Kinder von Schewenborn". There's a UK edition called 'The Last Children'. It's like 'On the Beach' but like 10 times as much. A young teenager and his family experience a nuclear holocaust during a trip to his grandparents. The children born in the months and years after are heavyly mutated and handycapped. He's basically the youngest remaining 'normal'. The story is open ended and grim beyond anything else I've read.
The book is written as a cautionary tale and is an expression of the german environmentalist movement of the 80ies and later. Today it is part of the regular 8th grade German curriculum reading list in Germany.
Definitely the most realistic nuclear holocaust scenario I've read to date. I do not want to read again. Seriously.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
This is only slightly worse than seeing how the money is spent
ooops sorry was to be supposed a fiction book
Then the government plans to bypass our financial crisis.
1984 depressed the hell out of me for a couple of weeks. I think it affected me so much because I can see the beginnings of such a world happening all around. Currently, language is a weapon. Your own speech is being used against you to control you. "Politically correct speech" is nothing more than a tool for political ideologies to control what you say, how you act, what you do. If you control the language, you control the debate.
You must gather your party before venturing forth.
If you haven't read it, you should. It's the literary predecessor to 1984 and Brave New World. It's also incredibly bleak.
Well the only two that are debatable (in my opinion) are The Road (which reads like sci fi even if it isn't) and 1984 (which is definately sci-fi).
The fact that there are strong political overtones in 1984, and that there are not ray guns and cat like aliens in The Road, does not disqualify them.
Incidentally critics also vacilate on whether or not these works are SF.
Use of Weapons by Iain Banks. The ending just killed me.
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
...but I'd go with Atomised by M. houlebecque (or however you spell his name - can't be bothered to google it )
Bleak, real, chilling to the bone, and the latter part of the book set in the future, with dehumanisesd society, feeding on its own excrements is just a real downer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio_of_a_Space_Tyrant by Piers Anthony
Book 1 "Refugee" is amazingly depressing. The main character is a refugee floating in a space bubble, and most of the adults are raped, killed, or kidnapped by the end of the story.
Also, Machine Man by Max Barry. Augmentation gone wrong, with a focus on the evils of mega-corporate middle-management.
I remember a book called Nightfall by Isaac Asimov that was an incredibly cool premise. It's set on another planet in a trinary star system (if not more stars). As a result, the "humans" on the planet never had darkness. There was constantly at least one sun up, and as a result their culture and scientific belief never got past a geocentric model.
(Spoilers below, I highly recommend anyone interested go and read the book).
The "radical" scientists in the book realized that the orbits of the suns and their planet could be explained with the existence of another nearby sister planet (though impossible to see as it was always in the glare or blocked by the suns) which contradicted the commonly accepted religious doctrine. They hypothesized that if another planet existed, well there was no reason the universe couldn't be even bigger than that and accommodate dozen's of other celestial bodies, possibly even other entire star systems.
They also realized in a short amount of time an alignment of the stars in their system would give them a true nightfall and would allow them the darkness to see out into the universe. Prophecies and religious beliefs told them that this would be the end of the world and indeed it turned out to be as when their population was confronted with how insignificant they were compared to the vast universal expanse, their society essentially broke down into anarchy as everyone went completely bat shit insane.
On one hand it is a depressing and unhappy ending. On the other, some could possibly find humour, if not a little quasi-sadistic pleasure at the fate of those in the story because their society proved inferior (or at least less fortunate).
This standalone book walks the reader episodically through the history of man from a proto-mammal surviving the K-Pg mass extinction event 65 million years ago, through the evolution of primates, to the modern day where mankind dooms itself, and then through the future in increasingly depressing steps while our decendents are farmed like cattle to the far far distant end of life on Earth.
"Evolution" is a great cautionary tale but the finale where our descendents and the planet are literally unrecognizable is depressing and continues to haunt my immortal imagination.
The Books of the Wars-I've never managed to actually finish it. It's basically the ending of every hope I have for humanity. Humans have reached out to the stars, and ventured far and wide. An evil rises on Earth and seduce the colonies to rush back one by one to Earth (to save it from the evil)-only to be ground down and reduced to nothing. http://www.amazon.com/The-Books-Wars-Mark-Geston/dp/1416591524
That's just what Big Brother wants you to think.
that image haunts me to this day, I read it (once) late in the last century...
I think it's you who doesn't understand what science fiction is and is not.
Titan, by Stephen Baxter sticks in my mind as being incredibly, irritatingly depressing. Despite the "uplifting" epilog tacked on at the end, it's the story of an expedition to Titan that goes utterly, horribly wrong in every possible way that will prolong the suffering of the protagonists. It's not a novel, it's a torture fantasy that ends [spoiler alert] with the deaths of all of the characters, but only after author has exhausted all of the possible ways of degrading and abusing them. Ick.
Try "Now and Then, Here and There" for even more depressing anime.
Most people don't have the intestinal fortitude or inclination to face unpleasant truths. "Canticle for Liebowitz" suggests that we will never learn from our mistakes, just like the evidence of the Romans, Mayans, Sumerians, Easter Islanders, et. al. would suggest. "Breakfast of Champions" rubs our noses in the unpleasant aspects of modern existence. It challenges the reader to recognize these facts and perhaps even do something about them. And *that* in a nutshell is what annoys some people. They don't want to think about anything bad. They don't want to do anything about anything bad. They don't want to think ahead to what bad things that look likely to happen. They want to be entertained. They want books and stories to be somewhere between candy and masturbation. They want unthinking optimism. They want Pollyanna.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
The bad guys take over the whole world and turn it into one big plantation worked by slaves. They genetically engineer everyone else using viruses so that they will never be any rebellions against their rule. They take over alternate timelines and other planets and do the same thing there. The whole thing seems to be written as an ironic reference to Fukuyama's idea that history will end with Liberal Democracy.
Apart from 1984 it's one of the gloomiest views of the future I've ever read.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
The Bible.
For me, probably Children of the Mind, the last book of the original Ender's Game series.
;-;
I wrote about several moments, but they're all spoilers. So I'll just include this one, as generic as I can make it. This scene was so hard to read, I had to stop and put the book down for awhile.
A man has to convince the woman he truly loves that he doesn't love her at all, so that she'll be willing to sacrifice herself to save the lives of a planet.
I'm tearing up just thinking about it.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
Giles Sans Pitié is a spinning wheel,
With the eye of a hawk and a fist made of steel.
He'll drink a whole gallon while holding his breath,
And wherever he goes his companion is Death.
There never was a history written about the Inner Frontier, so Black Orpheus took it upon himself to set one to music. His name wasn't really Orpheus (though he was black). In fact, rumor had it that he had been an aquaculturist back in the Deluros system before he fell in love. The girl's name was Eurydice, and he followed her out to the stars, and since he had left all his property behind, he had nothing to give her but his music, so he took the name of Black Orpheus and spent most of his days composing love songs and sonnets to her. Then she died, and he decided to stay on the Inner Frontier, and he began writing an epic balled about the traders and hunters and outlaws and misfits that he came across. In fact, you didn't officially stop being a tenderfoot or a tourist until the day he added a stanza or two about you to the song.
Anyway, Giles Sans Pitié made quite an impression on him, because he appears in nine different verses, which is an awful lot when you're being the Homer for five hundred worlds. Probably it was the steel hand that did it. No one knew how he'd lost his real one, but he showed up on the Frontier one day with a polished steel fist at the end of his left arm, announced that he was the best bounty hunter ever born, foaled, whelped, or hatched, and proceeded to prove that he wasn't too far from wrong. Like most bounty hunters, he only touched down on outpost worlds when he wasn't working and like most bounty hunters, he had a pretty regular route that he followed. Which was how he came to be on Keepsake, in the Tradertown of Moritat, in Gentry's Emporium, pounding on the long wooden bar with his steel fist and demanding service.
Old Geronimo Gentry, who had spent thirty years prospecting the worlds of the Inner Frontier before he chucked it all and opened a tavern and whorehouse on Moritat, where he carefully sampled every product before offering, it to the public, walked over with a fresh bottle of Altairian rum, then held it back as Giles Sans Pitié reached for it.
"Tab's gettin' pretty high," he commented meaningfully.
The bounty hunter slapped a wad of bills down on the bar.
"Maria Theresa dollars," noted Gentry, examining them approvingly and relinquishing the bottle. "Wherever'd you pick 'em up?"
"The Corvus system."
"Took care of a little business there, did you?" said Gentry, amused.
Giles Sans Pitié smiled humorlessly. "A little."
He reached inside his shirt and withdrew three Wanted posters of the Suliman brothers, which until that morning had been on the post office wall. Each poster had a large red X scratched across it.
"All three of 'em?"
The bounty hunter nodded.
"You shoot 'em, or did you use that?" asked Gentry, pointing toward Giles Sans Pitié's steel fist.
"Yes."
"Yes, what?"
Giles Sans Pitié help up his metal hand. "Yes, I shot them of I used this."
Gentry shrugged. "Goin' out again soon?"
"In the next few days."
"Where to this time?"
"That's nobody's business but mine," said the bounty hunter.
"Just thought I might offer some friendly advice," said Gentry.
"Such as?"
"If you're thinking of going of to Praeteep Four, forget it. The Songbird just got back from there."
"You mean Cain?"
Gentry nodded. "Had a lot of money, so I'd have to guess that he found what he went looking for."
The bounty hunter frowned. "I'm going to have to have a little talk with him," he said. "The Praeteep system's got a Keep Out sign posted on it."
"Oh?" said Gentry. "Since when?"
"Since I put it up," said Giles Sans Pitié firmly. "And I won't have some rival headhunter doing his poaching there and picking it clean." He paused. "Where can I find him?"
"Right here."
Giles Sans Pitié looked around the room. A silver-haired gambler on a winning streak, decked o
I used to read at least a book a month, but now, most of my reading is done on the Internet. In fact, I probably read more now than I ever have before. I also find Kupfernigk's comments on BNW to be insightful, at least in the face of common misperceptions of BNW, which is often taught as a dystopia in school. When you consider the implications of his comments, you will realize public schools teaching BNW as a dystopian example (contrasted and compared with 1984 usually), you can see this is completely without irony. It is the school's interest to teach BNW this way (self esteem, information control etc).
Back to your comments, I think the question here is the quality of what we are reading, for which only the reader can be responsible.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
Then you definitely don't want to read Firefly by him as well. (sexually molested 5 year old)
http://www.amazon.com/Firefly-Piers-Anthony/dp/0380759500/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1344435434&sr=8-1&keywords=firefly+piers
And avoid Nabokov's Lolita. (Pedophile and 12 year old)
http://www.amazon.com/Lolita-50th-Anniversary-Vladimir-Nabokov/dp/0679723161/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1344435597&sr=1-1&keywords=lolita
On a slightly different note, guess how old Mary was when she gave birth to Jesus!
12-14! Does that make God a pedo? Of course girls were usually married off by 12 or 13 then. Imagine an ethereal force impregnating underage girls... Anyway, I suppose we were all born from pedophiles and all Christians worship a pedophile deity by your logic. Oh, and a jealous mass murderer too! (Noah's ark and all that) Anyway, I digress... :)
Hey, if God were an alien (any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic/miracles of course), then I suppose you could argue that the Bible is a work of SciFi. And definitely depressing too! *ducks* :)
Apples makes me sick (allergic)
There was a very depressing book my parents made me read a little bit of as a child, but I can't quite remember the name. It was kind of an odd fantasy/sci-fi hybrid. It had interweaving plots between characters in a bit of a primitive culture. The societies were superstitious and would perform acts of mutilation on newborn babies, sacrifice of their own children, offering of animals, etc...fearing punishment otherwise from an unknown entity. Some characters would perform magical feats of an elemental or physical nature. I do remember one of the primary characters was killed then reanimated as a zombie, but I have to admit, I had to put the book down at that point, even as a 7 year old I could tell GI Joe had a more coherent plot on a weekly basis (plus no one ever got hit by the laser shots from the guns which was more age appropriate). I do have to admit i'm still fascinated it was so popular. I remember them referring to it something like Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth, but I can't remember the true title. If I think of it i'll update my post.
Sad. Grim. Misleading. Full of lies and deceit. An uncaring attitude that finally drives the reader to unending despair and dark madness.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Red Mars. The reason is because of all the legitimate issues the astronauts had to face and the problems that could/will occur. It turned me off of wanting to go into space until we have something closer to Star Trek.
Cage of sand or Voices of Time by Ballard. The entropy of the universe in short story form.
http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/13-TheBalticWarCD/TheBalticWarCD/The%20World%20Turned%20Upside%20Down/0743498747__19.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cold_Equations
By Tom Godwin
Probably the story that has had the most emotional impact.
Stephen Baxter's "Evolution."
"Hellstrom's Hive" by Frank Herbert
The 'Stumps": Disturbing and both societies are very depressing.
See amazon entry. It's quite a fantastic read although very bleak.
Funny fact: they play around with things reassembling ipads in the book
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
Who hands this book to middle schoolers? Seriously?
"Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood offered a rather bleak look at humanity. Both well written.
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At the end of the book, the protagonist is standing outside the window of the woman he loves, in the snow, utterly broke, and it can be inferred that he freezes to death ala the little match girl. Verne was pretty spot on considering he was predicting 100 years in the future, but the depressing ending was just too sad. This was his last novel, and wasn't published until the 1990s.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
"Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death" from "Warm Worlds and Otherwise"
Apart from the Xeelee Sequence books, most everything written by Stephen Baxter is depressing as fuck with a mild silver lining.
Evolution was going great till it got easier for humans not to be intelligent and we went back to the trees.
Manifold Space was going great till the paranoid government nuked the kids.
Manifold Time was going great till the super intelligent squid decided they didn't need us anymore.
Manifold Origin.. fuck, I don't even know.
Titan was going great till the Chinese dropped the rock.
Exultant was reading a lot like Hellstrom's Hive and that just sent chills down my spine.
Moonseed was going great till OOPS!
So, while I love his work, I tend to stick to the Xeelee Sequence books unless I'm really in that place where I can take casual discussion of the end of the entire planet.
I second that and recommend the followup "The Year of the Flood" by Margaret Atwood I also enjoyed "The Windup Girl" by Paolo Bacigalupi "Canticle" was very good too, but it seemed more into the politics of the future than the science.
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By Asimov. Not necessarily depressing per se, but definitely sad.
Actually while the war itself is depressing and the cultural changes that the main character experiences divorces him from the culture and reason he is fighting - it has an upbeat ending and message. Society has passed through good and bad cycles and reached a stable equilibrium - ironically the kind of society they were fighting in the first place, just didn't understand. The individual characters end up happy because in such a society they hedge their bets and recreate a set of "baseline cultures" just in case they need to go back to first principles. Good stuff.
Bordered in Black by Larry Niven. An entire planet of humanoids grown to be food for some other species and the implications of that.
Your "fair share" is NOT in my wallet.
"August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains"
The idea of an automated house that just goes on living after humanity has vaporized itself in a nuclear holocaust is just sad. Dead dog included.
Memoirs found in a bathtub.
The Sparrow. Seriously. It's one long bleak chapter after chapter.
i know not what weapons the next world war will be fought with, but world war IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
Richard Matheson's "I Am Legend" deserves to be up there... and I mean the book ending... not the hopeful movie ending.
I'd also add "The Lathe of Heaven" by Ursula LeGuin.
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
Threads, a 1984 BBC TV film docu-drama giving a reasonably accurate account of a nuclear strike on the UK, from the point of view of residents of the country's fourth largest city and their next two generations. It includes the "Protect and Survive" real-life instructional videos, realistic Regional Seat of Government setups and gives an extremely unpleasant account of exactly how useless such preparation would be. It is both clinical and graphic, and ends on a stillbirth. It is extremely science and thankfully fiction... so far.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
"I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream"
Does anyone know of a story where a man is depressed and finally decides to kill himself and then he learns that he is actually a member of an alien race, where constant suffering is the norm and they "jack-in" (The original Matrix!) to experience life as a human on Earth, which is a relief from their torment, but they are only allowed one human lifetime... and they don't remember their alien existence until their human life has expired? The man who killed himself as a human then remembers who he really is and what he just lost and is tormented because of it. Talk about regret! I might be getting parts of this wrong, but I remember this one being hugely depressing when I read it once upon. Anyone know the title?
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
Read it as a kid, depressing as it gets.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Pretty much everything by John Brunner will bumb you out. Stand On Zanzabar is my favorite. Sheep Look up is excellent, and Shockwave Rider is also. The rest of his stuff is pretty much pulp, very obscure and hard to find. I spent years collecting his books, he has well over 60 that I found, lots published in magazines that I never got my hands on. Very little online about him. Really classic sci-fi, I highly recommend it.
It has to be "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" from Harlan Ellison. It is really disturbing.
Soylent Green
Ray Bradbury's story from The Illustrated Man about kids reprogramming their holodeck-style home entertainment centre. Very grim: Still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
It has a nasty ending that's incredibly sad and is based on an alternate future that would be roughly now. And if you think about how war is conducted and has been conducted since it was written, the basic idea isn't too far-fetched, but was outre when Blish wrote the story. It's in a collection called "Galactic Cluster". I've claimed to various people that this story is basically cyberpunk despite predating cyberpunk by roughly 30 years, and not because of the goggle, by the way, but rather because of the tone and sensibility. I'll lay odds that Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, W. Jon Williams, and others may have read it. I'll assert that if they haven't then they should, dammit. Oh, and another selection by Blish: A Case of Conscience
Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi is taking me longer to finish than expected because of its bleak outlook and lack of tech, but the story is great.
Probably not the most depressing story ever, but it took me a few days to recover from.
Yes ! Braver and newer ! Some would say we are as new as 2012
Yes, the difference is that pure fiction takes place in the cosmos the author lives in.
Fantasy takes place in cosmos that have magic active in them.
Science fiction is fiction that explores the implications of different possible worlds of humanity based on the way we use technology, or what technology can allow us to do. Sometimes this means space westerns (Serenity! EESmith etc) and sometimes its deeply profound sociological exegesis. (LeGuin). :)
It does not have to have rockets or space lasers in it. In fact the best SF I have ever read didn't (and yes, despite that, I loved EE Doc Smith's Lensman series,
Responding to your inside reference; I am not a number. I am a free man. Hah, we wish. Which was the entire point of the conclusion of that series.
No. You won't.
J. hand me that flashy thingey.
Pull out sunglasses.
I think Lost in the Cosmos is intended to depress us about being human in a "wherever you go, there you are" sort of way.
That should be
"Nineteen Eighty-Four"
My fellow Pedants must all be asleep to miss that one.
All that needs to be said about this story:
Mandatory ethical birth control, which makes people numb from the waist down and takes every pleasure out of sex.
Harrison Bergeron by Vonnegut, 1961. Set about 70 years from now (120 years in the future from when it was written,) the intelligent people are dumbed down to the lesser IQ'ed population by concentration interruptions from implanted ear devices that sound various loud sounds at erratic intervals. It's a good short story read and interesting plot, so I won't spoil the ending. But, oddly enough, a few years ago when I watched my children study with the TV on the background, multitasking on the computer and Instant Messenger sounding different sounds when a friend entered IM, left IM and sent messages, it occurred to me that we have done to ourselves what Vonnegut envisioned a future government to do. "We have met the enemy and he is us." Pogo 1970.
J
P. S. Humans CANNOT multitask (in the truest sense of the word.). Brain Rules. John Medina.
http://brainrules.blogspot.com/2008/03/brain-cannot-multitask_16.html
Harrison Bergeron
full text easily found in a Google search
Ark (Stephen Baxter)
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell)
I just finished re(re-re-...) reading Gibson's Neuromancer, but I can also think of William's Hardwired, or Sterling's stuff, and there aren't a lot of "happy endings". Of course, the OP asked about "scifi adventures", as though they were all adventure movies....
The really, really unpleasant part is how close we are to Gibson's world of Neuromancer....
mark
By far it is: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant Stephen Donaldson, anti-hero, miserable SOB, with leprosy....who could enjoy that?
Just... Damn...
Bambi!
Yes he grew to be a fine Buck, but you just know that hunting season is just around the corner!
by Paolo Bacigalupi :
http://windupstories.com/pumpsix/the-people-of-sand-and-slag/
I don't even like to think about it, it's so so horrifying, in a deep psychological way. It strikes at the heart of what we all hope for the future and for technology.
Time - Stephen Baxter
Turns out that the surviving sentient species that makes it to the end of the universe and then starts tinkering with the manifold, are a bunch of squid we uplifted and sent out to do asteroid mining, but human's stayed behind and died out cause we couldn't stop being cunts.
Obama's plan to turn America into yet another European-style socialist state.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
Margaret Atwood paints a picture of a future America that is horrifying, depressing, and more plausible with each passing day.
"God emperor of Dune". depressing. all religions have been eliminated for the sake of the big worm that all of humanity must worship. At least it ends on a high note....
Adam and No Eve: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Bester#Notable_short_stories [wikipedia.org] Guy invents a rocket powered by a catalyst that causing fission in elemental iron. During takeoff, as warned, a bit must have leaked and it causes a chain reaction that wipes out all life on earth. Post-crash landing he is dying, but drags himself to the ocean, continually fending off his dog which went with him in the rocket, and is now trying to eat him because there is no food. He dies there so the bacteria within him can be reestablished in the ocean and maybe start life over again. Also No, No, Not Rogov! is a story I always enjoy re-reading, despite the sad ending. It's not world ending, or anything like that, but it's just a mournful short story.
"The Sparrow", by Maria Doria Russell, is the most heartbreaking first contact story I've read. Summary: we are just about guaranteed to do it wrong, with tragic consequences, because aliens will be, y'know... ALIEN.
"Feed" by M T Anderson is the third side of the 1984/Brave New World triangle, and the one I see as most likely to describe our future:
1984: government controls all information.
BNW: nobody has to control information because no one really cares about it.
Feed: there's so much information (85% of it BS) that it's impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff.
"A World Made By Hand" by Kunstler is pretty bleak. Pretty much a story that takes place a decade or two after the oil runs out.
Stanislaw Lem has some great and exceptional works. In fact, I think Cyberiad (whose naming predates any 'cyber' hoopla, harumph) is such an interesting piece of fiction that if you haven't already nibbled at it, you should consider adding it to your reading list now.
Fiasco, though. Wow, what a dark storm of a work. We finally encounters extraterrestrial life and sally forth to the planet containing said life to try to engage in communication with them. Not only do the planet's denizens not really want to talk to us, but also they appear to be in the midst of some kind of ongoing cold war that's divided the planet. Determined to get some type of communication going with the species below, the representatives of Earth decide to blow up the planet's moon: a first contact fireworks celebration that leads to mass depopulation in the planet below.
Lem wrote his novels in Russia-occupied Poland during the cold war and in no other place does this fact ring like it does in Fiasco. The novel is grim, fatalistic, nihilistic and riveting. It's a haunting work that leaves lasting and vivid impressions.
Final note: although I've been reading Slashdot for years, this is my first post.
Orthe by Mary Gentle - most depressing book I have ever read.
Besides A Scanner Darkly, I'd say A ClockWork Orange (the book) was very depressing. Its a good read, if you can get past the hybrid lingo of Russian/English slang.
1984 is not even fiction anymore - let along Sci-Fi.
I won't enjoy it.- Marvin, the Paranoid Android
It's Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.
Did you hear the entire speech, or just the out of context part Fox and Romney spread?
You obviously didn't hear it. If you had you'd not be trying to make people listen to the whole thing, because the context made his remarks FAR WORSE than just that simple quote would imply.
Everyone - don't listen to this simpleton parroting liberal talking points about about the "context" alleviating what Obama said (note HE didn't link to the whole thing, not wanting you to actually know). Watch the whole thing as he asks you to and then decide for yourself.
Obama should not be elected based solely on that interview. Green, Libertarian, Republican - vote for ANYONE else, but not someone who firmly believes people are simply wards of the state, incapable of creation without a hand from the federal government.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129324791
I never get more depressed than when I read this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_universe
I certainly would rather read comedy sci-fi or fantasy than depressing stories. Tales like "The Cold Equations" make me angry... I'm sure that is why Kirk cheated on the "Kobayashi Maru" in Star Trek. Even depressing morality tales like "The Red Balloon", "Flowers for Algernon", "A Summer in a Day" and a story about a polluted world where the last gardener tends the last plants in a greenhouse that a mob destroies (Sorry I can't remember the name). As good as the stories get, even "Slient Running", "Soylent Green" and "2001: a Space Odessey" can be depressing. Thankfully there are writers like Pratchett and Adams that don't depress me.
Do Good, Annoy Evil!
definitely.
The start is imaginative, but it goes rapidly downhill, and doesn't end well for anyone.
The most depressing Sci-Fi I've read is what History writes herself right now. Who would have thought a couple of decades ago that we would spend trillions not to build some huge projects that are beneficial for the human race, but on bailing out banks? BANKS?! Who would have thought just after 9/11 that we would support a radical Islamist takeover of Syria by Al Qaida and hteir ilk, just because we dislike the local dictator there? If that's not depressing fiction becoming true, I don't know what's more depressing than that.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
seriously peeps, science fiction. not fucking fiction.
So no Heinlein then?
The climactic horror in the book is when the male protagonist murders his beloved daughter because the parasite irresistably compells him to.
This was the "Gimme a *deleted* BREAK (book impacts far wall hard enough to leave a dent)" moment in the story for me. The parasite, as described, would no more have irresistably compelled him to murder his daughter than he would have been irresistably compelled, minus the parasite, to rape her.
If the parasite could have just overridden all human will and compelled a human to do anything, then, hey, presto, make everyone kill themselves, much quicker solution.
To me it would be Stanislaw Lem's Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, but I would give honorable mention to 1984, The Dark Tower, and the Thomas Covenant Series.
One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces. - PF
I, too, came here to mention IHNMaIMS. It's one of two works I've read only once because I'm too scared to go back.
The other is Dracula. I started it one evening and finished early the next morning because I was literally too scared to put it down unfinished. I'm thinking that after ~40 years, maybe it's worth a re-read. I Have No Mouth..., never.
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
The Road
How exactly do you know that those people have really "moved the world" by their sheer will, rather than being flesh and blood manifestations of the coming change, suffered by society as a whole that spawned them - zeitgeist, if you want?
Because all of them went against the zeitgiest in order to change things.
As I said, there are countless people noted through history that made whole populations change course wildly.
THAT IS HOW YOU KNOW.
And that is why they are remembered.
To claim otherwise is madness, madness a child can see through knowing the example of even only one of these rare people.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin. Having to make a choice who should die, a young girl stow away just wanting to spend time with her brother, or the colony they are headed to.
try "The Windup Girl" or "Execution Channel"- will make your day...
I agree absolutely with previous posts mentioning "1984," "The Road" and "On The Beach." Also wanted to add "The Hunger Games" trilogy, which I found incredibly depressing, with the descriptios of a society so oppressive that young people are forced to fight to the death. Also, the heroine, Catniss, has to constantly think about what she's saying and doing at all times so as not to give the ruling regime the excuse to torture and/or execute her or those she loves.
by Eric Frank Russell written in 1941 pre-sages self-replicating mechanical automata. As Bill Joy has noted, one can see clearly now that this could lead to the entire planet being completely covered by a seething dust of all-consuming mindless nanobots.
This isn't so much about any particular story line as much as with the author itself. I had great hopes of getting lost in the visionary books of the man who created 2001: A Space Odyssey which I finished reading the car on the way to the theater back in high school. In later years as I was reading 2010, 3001 and whatever other books are in the series, I started to become aware of a disturbing undercurrent to his writing. There was a very distracting dimension of the self promotion of his view of the future as the only logical future outcome. I wanted to slap him upside the head as I read so I could just enjoy the story whatever its relationship with the actual future. Isn't that the purpose of science fiction? To get lost in alternate-certainly-possible-but-not-necessarily future conditions? His arrogance was unbefitting of an open minded yet imagineering weaver of possibilities. Yet, may he rest in peace. Maybe he's in some remedial creativity school on some mystical invisible planet from one of his books that he didn't even realize existed at the time he wrote it.
Trouble on Triton
After all the changes enabled by advanced technology, nothing changes.
A Boy and His Dog Harlan Ellison.
Both interesting and horribly depressing at the same time. Also made into movies.
I chose to end my comments, not with a rim shot, but a long decaying F#7sus4
"Her Smoke rose up Forever."
A man is trapped to remember all the worst times of his life, for eternity.
Also, for another, something I read that talked about the insects and other beings eating the last man on earth.
There are many more choices than 1984 and BNW. There was that Asimov story about the single human who helped the Androids/Robots achieve freedom by committing Genocide on the whole human race. At the end, he is the only human alive and his supposed girl friend reveals she is an Android.
Then there is John Brunner's "A Jagged Orbit" which was good, but depressing.
Then we can stray into Fantasy with Stephen R. Donaldson and the Thomas Convenant series. I could not get past the second book. It was too depressing.
Then finally, one of my all time favorites that was kind of depressing. "The Siege of Wonder" by Mark S. Geston. It details a war between Science and Magic. You can't help but root for Magic. Science discovers that all of Human behavior, even love, can be modeled by Mathematics. People who fully understand the math, tend to all commit suicide. Science wins the war, but nobody seems to be all that happy about the victory. Very good book, but leaves you depressed at the end.
I have one question. If the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture is not in charge of Gundam, then who is?
I remember reading this short story when I was a kid and it stuck with me. It's written in cold war era, and reflects the worry of nuclear bombs being dropped. The story is basically about a robot standing at the front of an amusement park, trying to entice people to come in. Unfortunately as the story goes on, you realize that there is something wrong. At the end you realize that the bombs have dropped, and there is nobody around to go into the park. The robot is talking to itself, because everyone is dead.
"I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison.
Against a Dark Background
Consider Phlebas
Use of Weapons
Matter
Player of Games
The first is very depressing, set close to the heat death of the Universe. The other four are part of his Culture series. 'Consider Phlebas' and 'Use of Weapons' are both extremely dark. 'Matter' is one of my favorites and although I came to a different conclusion, my wife and one of my Brothers thought it was horribly depressing.
I would also recommend 'A Plague of Angels' by Sherri S Tepper. I won't spoil the ending, but it was severely depressing.
I'll put in a vote for "Great Sky River" by Gregory Benford. This was a nebula award nominee I picked up about 10 years ago and gave me nightmares ever since. The background is a small group of humans on a planet which has gone "mech". To try and survive, they have increasingly replaced their bodies with robot parts. It's not enough: the machines are faster, smarter, and their motivations largely incomprehensible as they hunt the survivors down. Eventually, they come to understand part of the reason they are being hunted, cut to pieces, and brain dumped. It's not because humans even matter anymore, they are shown the museum full of deconstructed and "reinterpreted" human components they are to become a part of. This was a very believable "hard sci-fi" novel which laid out a quite convincing and bleak possible future.
Samuel R. Delany's "Dhalgren" was the most depressing Science Fiction Novel I have ever read. Very dark and a bit confusing. But despite this, I really enjoyed it. I first read it in 1974, and I just purchased a new copy. Maybe the second time around I will get even more out of it.
A movie with the submarine's name for title (instead of the book's) in many countries has been made in 2000 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0219224 - reminiscent of The Day After http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085404 (no, this one ain't no Emmerich, and definitely without any Tomorrow). Both as bleak as it gets on TV too.
Can't believe no one has cited this one by John Brunner. I'm not going to spoil it but seriously, after reading this prescient and utterly pessimistic evisceration of Westernised industialisation and the corporate sodomising of our planet you might want to read Childhood's End or 1984 just to cheer you up...
1984
A close (or multiple) reading of 1984 shows it not to be depressing but hopeful because in the end, it is revealed that The Party fell.
It fell despite its ability to control information and mass consciousness and language; with the ability, through the telescreen to have an audio-video bug in every house; despite a constantly vigilant secret police that sat above all, turned children into informers against their parents and crushed whomever it liked into powder in (obviously) Stalinist show trials, the Party Finally fell.
The thing that is brilliant about 1984 is not it's immediate reward of a happy ending but its precise evocation of a world that is an extension of Soviet-Style, Cult-of-personality communism, and in that ability to evoke what you found in that state on such a visceral level that parts of it become permanent experiences for the reader.
Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
Nope. We are living Brave New World much more than 1984.
Split the Hegelian difference and go for fusion. Both books can be said to reflect the age we live in.
Reading a history of the FBI and other intelligence agencies operating against communist subversion and popular movements by planting intelligence agents, wiretapping and other forms of domestic surveillance reveal aspects of Orwell's "brute force of the state." While what is described about Brave New World is also present and pervasive in our culture, from a twenty-four-hour news-cycle that leaves us in a permanent state of information overload, erasing remembered history, to proles who live in sedentary bliss in front of the warm glow of The Mentalist, eating themselves into clinical obesity.
Both writers are winners.
For readers who were impressed by Blindsight, I'd like to recommend William Barton's When Heaven Fell. There are some similar themes, including the enslavement of humanity (and most sentient species in our corner of the galaxy) by a race of Eusocial aliens who are non-sentient (but unlike your typical SF example, there apparently is no Queen to assassinate or negotiate with, nor any hidden hive-mind who just happens to mis-understand humanity). Despite being non-sentient, their co-operative efforts allow them to build advanced weapons and AI servants superior to anything humans have.
I remember debating this novel with members of my old SF club, and one of the objections a friend had, was the number of gratuitious sex scenes in the book. I thought that the emptiness and gratuity of the sex scenes was actually an important but subtle point, although I couldn't quite explain it to him, until I realized the problem was that my friend was a History major, while I was a student of Biology; not too spoil too much, but if you read the book, think about what are the selection dynamics that lead to the evolution of Eusociality.
Das Kapital by Karl Marx. It's a poorly written (though may be it was the translation I read) diatribe about a utopian world free from capitalist overlords. It wasn't so depressing in and of itself, just it's implications, knowing what it would do over the next century to civilized cultures.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
It's a short story, but The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin. I remember being pretty upset about the outcome when I read this in junior high (surely there HAD to be a better way of handling that).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cold_Equations
I found "Snow Crash" to be depressing. A broken world of dog eat dog.
The Forge of God by Greg Bear
Get the genre right, it's Fantasy, not Science Fiction.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
I waited for years as those books dribbled out, and each was worse than the last.
He needs his balls kicked in...
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Anything in the 'Tales of Thomas Covenant' series.
Level 7 by Mordecai Roshwald
The storyline of the anime Southern Cross -no NOT the dubs, please- always struck me as phenomenally depressing.
There are literally no happy endings in that series. Two different species reaching the ends of their lines and nearly every character ends up dead. Those that don't die are left to a rather unpromising fate with no hope to speak of. Nobody wins. Both sides collapse. It's a grim outcome.
The show got canceled in part because it was just such a hopeless story. Yeah it had other issues too.
Other than that, Niven and Pournelle's Footfall struck me as depressing. Not only does humanity get wiped out, it's freaking elephants who do it. I really hated circuses after that.
Sig for hire.
1984. Who wants a lobotomy after being caught having sex....wooo.
Peter Watts' Blindsight has resonated with me since I first read it. It is a raw, intensely in-depth, hard core science fiction story that (amazingly) includes everything from genetic vampirism to astro-spectroscopy. Not only is it good SF, it delves into the human psyche and provides a chillingly realistic portrayal of how a first encounter would probably be handled by our race. For those of you that enjoy your SF served with a piping hot bowl of reasonably-good-scientific-explanation soup (but not too reasonable... then it would be work, not play), then I suggest taking a gander at Watts' website where he allows the free download of the ebook in many formats. [http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm]
One is depressing, in a good sense. There Will Come Soft Rains by Bradbury. Its haunting, a small tale after the end of the world. The other is depressing and just boring. Galactic Odyssey by Keith Laumer. Maybe I missed it, but I just wanted him to have his Lady Raire back already. Which is sad, because I love the Retief books, and feel that while they are not appreciated as they should be. Guy's got a great sense of humor.
Not precisely a sci-fi, but the saddest story I've ever read. The ending is worse than I could imagine.
I was emotionally traumatized for reading that.
BNW is an utopia?
BNW is a dystopia; it has widespread violations of human dignity.
Everyone who believes in natural law and universal human rights is shocked by your post.
And the purpose of life is not to be happy through blissful ignorance. This would horrify the ancient Greek philosophers who wrote
"The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being."
Donaldson's Illearth Wars 3 Vols. or was it four.
If you haven't read any Clifford Simak, PLEASE DO.
One of the BEST, without a doubt.
1984
Under the spreading chestnut tree, I read you, you bored me.
"The Road" by Cormac McCarthy. Not really "science-y", and has what I perceived as illogical leaps, but oh-so-dreary.
"The Light of Other Days" by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee. Scientific advancement commoditized and abused to no end results in a society where there is no privacy. At all.
"Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood. Scientific advancement without control destroys civilization. (No, I haven't read the sequel yet.)
Let's play Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I'll be Pestilence.
The Fifth Head of Cerberus is by far the most difficult book I have ever attempted to read, taking 3 months before I finally cracked the writing style and mood. By the end of it, I just wanted it over... I felt dirty, as though a part of me had been removed that could never be returned. My naivety died in reading that book.
Even now, just thinking about the book brings a darkness back into my spirit, which I cannot bring myself to look at. I feel hopeless and numb.
Such a profound and lasting impact I've never had from any other author. His words spoke directly into my soul, and I identified with - no, became - his characters in subtle yet powerful ways. I hope never to read his works again, but now they are a part of me.
If the book does not affect you, either you have not read the book, or your spirit is already broken.
With each breath in, a flower somewhere opens; with each breath out, a flower withers away. In between lies beauty.
"On the Uses of Torture", a short story by Piers Anthony. A sadist is recruited to establish contact with an alien society where no envoy has ever returned, and experiences some pretty gruesome torture. The ending is just sick and depressing.
Anybody who uses the Internet should read E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops. It is a chilling, short story masterpiece about the role of technology in our lives. Written in 1909, it's as relevant today as the day it was published. Forster has several prescient notions including instant messages (email!) and cinematophoes (machines that project visual images).
-Paul Rajlich
THE MACHINE STOPS
by E.M. Forster (1909)
I
THE AIR-SHIP
Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk-that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh-a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.
An electric bell rang.
The woman touched a switch and the music was silent.
"I suppose I must see who it is", she thought, and set her chair in motion. The chair, like the music, was worked by machinery and it rolled her to the other side of the room where the bell still rang importunately.
"Who is it?" she called. Her voice was irritable, for she had been interrupted often since the music began. She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.
Full story:
http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html
Charles Stross has a talent for apocalyptic endings. In that particular case you can understand why the acting president of the US gave that apocalyptic order.
The announcement of the cancellation of Firefly.
Pro Tip: don't search for Anthonology (the collection of short stories including On The Uses of Torture) on Google's Play store. It isn't available in digital, and Google assumes if you're searching for Anthony you must be a perverted freak of the highest order. It's hard to explain to your wife why an anthology of yaoi is in your search history. "No, honey it's OK... I was really just trying to find a short story on the uses of torture." Yeah... saying you were looking for a torture story doesn't really make things better.
/*Insert boring sig here*/
Why The Night's Dawn Trilogy, you ask?
Because anyone who's read Peter F. Hamilton knows he's wordy-as-fuck and his books span a thousand+ pages.
I took a chance on "The Reality Dysfunction" as my first Hamilton experience, and after a couple months of pain I finished...only to discover that the damn thing was a trilogy, and the story completely left me hanging. What pissed me off most was during those months of reading, there was *barely* anything interesting happening in the book, and it *barely* kept me going. I finished that book from sheer determination, and then when I found out it was a three-part torture set, I lost my will to continue.
I'm not enough of a masochist to finish that trilogy. The Reality Dysfunction was my first and last Hamilton experience.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Ah, Steakley. He's depressing, but he's *good*. The grittiness is at least balanced by a vivid intensity of action and a fantastic sense of humor. It's very sad that he died before he could write a sequel to Armor - or any other books, for that matter. I found him first through 'Vampire$' which I like even more, but I've read both books several times. I admit, though: after the second time through (apparently didn't remember it well enough the first time), I simply skip the 'puppy in the well' section because it's some of the evilest few pages in literature.
Curious fact for people who may not know him: 'Armor' is basically set in the same background universe as Heinlein's 'Starship Troopers.' I think I remember seeing Steakley quoted as saying, "I wouldn't have had to write this book if Heinlein could write action."
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Two of my all-time favourite SF writers from pulp-fiction days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CM_Kornbluth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lester_Del_Rey
You never hear their stories any more, nor their like, really. The pulp fiction of their time always gave me a sense of wonder in the same way that the movies of the time did. Newer stories are so often wrapped up in the opera and tend to forget the space part.
I understand that our current batch of science fiction is beholden to our times. We live in a land of risk-management, and budgetary analysis. These authors came from a time before there was a sticker on the top step of the ladder that told you not to go there. their fiction assumed a race of people as adventurous as they were, and openly mocked those that would have them take shorter strides.
Have you noticed that science fiction to the common audience is nothing more than comic-book superheroes and fantasy? I like junk food as much as the next guy, but ever-so-often I long for something better.
It is only a short story by Jerome Bixby (1953), but
It's a Good Life portrays a truly hellish psychological environment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_a_Good_Life
Greg Bear, City at the End of Time http://www.amazon.com/City-End-Time-Greg-Bear/dp/0345448391
Talk about no hope when space time rips itself apart.
I just watched the first episode, and wouldn't even put in the same ballpark as Fireflies. Can't stomach the over the top action sequences. I'm sure it's a very sweet and touching show, but strictly for kids. I'm more inclined to watch Naruto. Thanks for the suggestion though.
That reminds me, Galaxy Express 999 is another great and old anime series that is like Twilight Zone with a Sci Fi twist for kids.
And Robotech is another great one. A cartoon ahead of it's time with feminist themes and gritty depictions of global war and alien invasions. First cartoon I watched as a kid where a main character actually died from battle! (Roy Fokker) Meanwhile on the other channel GI Joe characters were shooting lasers and missiles all over and not one fatality. Bleh
I read this short story in The Year's Best Science Fiction: 22nd Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois. Frankly, it broke me. It's about a moment that defines the point at which our humanity is lost. Not a moment of evil, just a moment of losing what makes us human... and how easily it can slip away. I was upset for months. And I'm not even a dog lover.
Asimov's foundation is depressing for several reasons. It glorifies Socialism as a political mandate when it has failed everywhere. It makes no attempt to understand economics. It is so long and so vague that when you read it and turn the last page you realize you've been fucked by wasting precious hours absorbing historical twaddle, not to mention the hard earned shekels shelled out. The worst part is that Asimov has many excellent novels. Like many PhD's and MD's he thinks he is an expert in everything cause he is so fucking smart becuase he got a few letters after his ame.
Foundation just sucks, the mule the intellectual genius janitor to rule the cosmos? Spare me.
How about The Dark Tower series. Now EIGHT books thousands of pages, and if you have read them the end is incredibly depressing (but its the right ending!). I met Stephen King and told him I loved the ending even though it is a total downer.
They are altruistic, and the system is designed to ensure that they stay that way.
Growing people up in severe environments of torture, so that they behave a certain way as adults and are happy is NOT altruism. I'm currently reading BNW and the sheep are not given a choice about how they live their lives. They are manipulated from before birth, and tortured after birth to achieve certain responses to given stimulus. Not only is this different from how we experience freedom (different is fine) but it is the exact opposite of freedom because the people being raised in this system aren't given a choice until well after they have been subjected to its influence. And after such an extreme indoctrination, it is the rare individual indeed who slips the training to experience their lives in their own fashion.
In chapter 2 they zap, surprise and play terrifyingly loud noise at babies. The flocks of people in the book are created to be consumer whores without a choice in their lives.
Zenith gives an alternative idea of the same principle being applied in a different way (the population is drugged into happiness via the water supply).
Being forced to be high, being forced to feel a particular way is not a utopia. Just because the littlest elf is smiling on the outside, doesn't mean he isn't dying on the inside.
All that being said, I am seeing large parallels with today's world compared to BNW more than '84. I think we're already partly towards are terrible blend of both of them. We are being fed a medicated diet of media designed to keep us scared but just happy enough, but the people who have the power absolutely are not doing it for our benefit. They are operating purely for their own benefit and that's what's pushing us closer to conflict. The stupid thing is that if the CEO's would have stopped bottom-lining everything, they probably could have kept going near indefinitely. Personal greed at the highest levels has led to society wide distrust of any power figure and a general sense of helplessness. It's the helplessness that is presently keeping people passive. However that will only last so long before people start getting really mad. In many cases I think random gun violence is a sign of this despair (pure pornographic hypothesis).
The World Inside by Robert Silverburg
Martian Chronicles. Ray Bradbury brilliantly presented how the banality of evil could be exhibited wherever mankind ended up. The minor mundane awfulness of humans, even in what should have been fascinating circumstances, was depressing as all get out.
chick-in-charge at Blue Blood
I think it's Hellspark by Janet Kagan. Why? Well, it shows that humans can't recognize other sentient species, so how on earth (ha ha) would we be able to populate other planets once we can travel without decimating those worlds. On the other hand, it is my alltime favorite Science Fiction book.
I once read that they were canceling Firefly...
for me it was very depressing having just returned form Vietnam!
Roger Zelazny's _Dalhgren_
I'm armed and I haven't changed my patch, so don't start with me -- you *know* how I get!
Children's book my aching proboscis. But, like Brave New World, for some collectivists this is a utopia, not a dystopia. Only in a free world can both exist as micro-climes.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
Back in the 70s a local bookstore had an entire wall of paperback sci-fi.
Somewhere in the 90s it seems that sci-fi book offerings went into decline. Sure there were still the republishing of 'classics' (dune and such), but not too many new works for sale.
My most recent trips to a bookstore seem to indicate that sci-fi is still in decline, if bookshelf space is a fair indicator. (I am not including manga or other derivatives)
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
*raising hand* I now use my phone's web browser to catch up on http://news.google.com/ and facebook... guity as charged.
But I do remember I used to have a paperback book I'd take to school or work, yeow.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Since it all is based on pure fantasy.
I just hat the contamination of sci-fi with fantasy.
How about the sci-fi novel "Make Room! Make Room!" and it's movie counterpart "Soyland Green"? I think we are on the path now to that horrible near future - global warming, nuclear disasters, the dying oceans, and corruptions all over the world by the powerful.
"Never let me go"
An alternate reality where artificial insemination brings about Human donors; living a life of cattle like acceptance of fate; whose sole purpose is to provide organs/blood/marrow/plasma until they are used up & left to die.
The 1951 movie made with the usual Hollywood edits from the short story "Farewell to the Master," by Harry Bates...http://thenostalgialeague.com/olmag/bates-farewell-to-the-master.html
Don't you think...? Or don't you?
Frankenstein is really depressing. I couldn't eat or sleep for 1 months after reading it.
the road....
Most people think it's just about government taxation. No, it was about crony capitalism, since the purpose of the tax was to funnel money into the influential East India Company.
Very depressing...because Orwell's novel was so prescient. "1984" is almost here...in America...in the year 2012!
I read a book, back in the 70's, and would like it if someone can come up with the title. It's about astronauts travelling to another planet, which is totally run by machines. Ultimately, the main character is cornered in a cave by a large robot, so he threatens to hit another robot with a large bar or stick. Turns out, the robot he's threatening to hit is "pregnant".
(Spoilers) Buffy gets yanked out of heaven by her best friend who gets addicted to, um, drugs so to speak who ends up going all end-the-world-crazy (with veins to boot) when her girlfriend is killed by a stray bullet (meant for Buffy) while Spike finds out that it doesn't matter how much you love. I mean, c'MON.
I know, not sci-fi.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
1984 (Orwell) or We (Zamyatin). Those are my nominees.
Not a book, but depressing none the less.
Depicted a horribly powerful state government, ineffective against the nightmarish dream moths in a depressing Ankh-Morpork like city sans humor. Many protagonists die or get brain-wiped - dreary stuff.
The sequels were even more depressing (Iron Council as well).
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The Star, by Arthur C. Clarke (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_(short_story) ) At least, if you believe in Christian mythology you will find it rather depressing that god chose to let the star of such a great civilization go nova just to generate the star of Bthlehem.
Inconstant Moon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inconstant_Moon ursula l guinn called it most depressing.
The end of both TV series shows the aliens win. Humanity is reduced to the status of cattle. The resistance is well and truly crushed. How do you get more depressing than that?