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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."
1984
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Absolutely nothing good happens to anyone ever.
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.
The Road
Do you make a distinction between depressing and sad? Make Room! Make Room! made me depressed about the future, but Flowers for Algernon made me cry; and yet I think they were two different things.
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Bergeron
No, I agree: Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End" is utterly depressing. I was thinking about it when I read the summary and then was surprised that someone else thought about it as well.
The story depicts mankind's end. No, it's not a new beginning. Our individuality makes us what we are. Humanity ends right there, in some sort of stupid dance. No other Clarke story I know is as dark and depressing. Mankind comes to this pathetic end, not even with some sort of bang, it just gets absorbed, overcome, assimilated.
Stories ending in all out nuclear war or complete annihilation of Earth or mankind are not as depressing as this.
There are two kinds of people who have read Ayn Rand... Those who understand her ideas and see them as value to society... and those who are too stupid to understand.
There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-kld’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs.
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.
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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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.
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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
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.
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"Arthur C. Clakes Childhood's End, that wasn't depressing, certainly not up there with the most obvious example 1984"
1984 is depressing just till you read Huxley' s Brave New World. And the fact that nobody has even mentioned it after well over 100 comments shows exactly why it's so depressing.
Nope. We are living Brave New World much more than 1984.
The problem is where to draw the line between my individual liberty and yours. My fist should experience all the freedom it wants, right up to the edge of your noses freedom to not be bloody. Sadly when people begin assuming that their freedom is a Gawd given right, and continue to take a little more, grab a little more, nudge a little more, we end up with a lot of people who honestly believe that they are entitled. suddenly your continued breathing is interfering with their freedom to use that space you're taking up. This is how wars large and small begin. If you think I'm exaggerating, I would only have to point at the near cratering of the global economy in 2008, and the next one which will be even larger if we don't start limiting the freedom of those who now control our economies. So with individual liberty, must also come personal responsibility, and social accountability. You/They are not the only sentient being(s) on the planet, taking freedom isn't an excuse for not playing well with others.
I value people who care only about their family and friends more than the compassionate types loving everybody. The former are honest, the latter usually are easy to pin down as stinking hypocrites.
There's nothing wrong with valuing your family and friends more than other people. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't put zero value to other people, however.
People are not wired to care about the whole world.
Actually, yes, they are. Well, not about the whole world, but their community (which is certainly bigger than family). Humans are social primates, with all that entails. If you read up on human ethology, you'll find out that a lot of "basic decency" things, and altruism in general, are actually evolved intrinsic behavior, rather than conditioning.
Again, this doesn't contradict caring about yourself/family/friends. In fact, it rather complements it - if the society as a whole takes care about you as a member, it makes sense to ensure its continual existence. That's precisely why these things evolved in the first place - they benefit not only the group as a whole, but (on average) individual members of that group as well.
The problem with all this Randism is that it doesn't account for failure. If the bank where I put my savings fail, my savings are gone, even though I didn't made an error in judgement when I put my money there long ago. If I don't have the resources to diversify my savings enough to put them into different banks, and if not only a single bank but a whole system of banks fails, I lose. Regulation is not primarily about infringment on individual freedom and trade, it is about limiting the effect an error, a fraud, or a failure have on innocent bystanders. Regulations are not primarily about control, they are about the containment of catastrophical events. And moreso: Disincentives are also just another type of regulation. Laws forbidding fraud, murder or theft are regulation. And courts upholding contracts and a police enforcing the court decisions are the judictive and the executive branch of those laws and regulations.