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."

Comments

Easy

[virb67]

Childhood's End

Re:Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Easy

[turbidostato]

"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.

Re:Easy

[dskzero]

1984 is far more depressing than Brave New World. At least there are people out there in BNW. There isn't even a "out there" in 1984.

Re:Easy

[VAXcat]

I dunno why everyone thinks Brave New World was depressing. It sounds like a utopia to me. I figure I'd at least be a Beta, which means I'd get some easy office job. Plenty of casual sex and drugs, none of conventional society's problems - what's not to like? A gram IS better than a damn. Everyone belongs to everybody else - paradise!

What's the Most Depressing Sci-fi You've Ever Read

[Anonymous Coward]

1984

Does Ayn Rand count?

[Anonymous Coward]

Though the most depressing part is the people who think she had good ideas.

Re:Does Ayn Rand count?

[shutdown -p now]

There are two kinds of people who have read Ayn Rand. Those who misguidedly think that they're entirely self-sufficient, and those who understand that human individuality can only exist and prosper in a healthy society.

Re:Does Ayn Rand count?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Does Ayn Rand count?

[RightwingNutjob]

There are two kinds of people who have read Ayn Rand. Those who understand that individual liberty are not dirty words, and those who like to put dirty words in other people's mouths.

Re:Does Ayn Rand count?

[je ne sais quoi]

I love this quote! But you really ought to attribute it to the correct source, which is John Rogers.

Re:Does Ayn Rand count?

[je ne sais quoi]

Oh... and while I'm at it, here's the actual quote:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

-- John Rogers.

Re:Does Ayn Rand count?

[Vaphell]

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.
People are not wired to care about the whole world. Your brain can track up to 150 people at once. If you claim you can't sleep because children in Africa are dying, you are lying. If you say are worried about the living conditions of the guy who assembled your iphone, you are lying.
The only way to make sure nobody is left behind is to follow the rule 'Everyone looks after oneself = everyone is looked after'

we have a decent proxy to determine self-sufficiency score - money. If you are paid a good coin that means you are a valuable member of society. If your score is above 0, you are a net gain for society. Yeah yeah, the rich are mostly worthless but have a high score - nobody said the proxy was perfect (besides the rich were bad guys in the book)
The whole point is that the healthy society you speak of doesn't necessarily mean inducing guilt trips in individuals to look after everybody and their dog. On the contrary, they should be free to excel without being bogged down by mediocrity all around them.
I bet this is one of the reasons why the upward mobility is at all time low - people who are bright enough to bring value to the table are paying through the nose instead of expanding, because everybody is entitled to something and it ain't free. They also can't temporarily cut corners in their own wellbeing to bet everything they have on their ideas, because most likely the govt will say it's illegal in 10 different ways and will find 100 ways to punish them.

Re:Does Ayn Rand count?

[clarkkent09]

There are two kinds of people who have read Ayn Rand. Those who understood it and those (such as yourself) who have not. Capitalism is the greatest example of voluntary human cooperation in history (remember the Freedman's story of the pencil - look it up on youtube). The difference is not between cooperation and no cooperation, but between voluntary and forced cooperation.

Re:Does Ayn Rand count?

[Genda]

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.

Re:Does Ayn Rand count?

[shutdown -p now]

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.

Re:Does Ayn Rand count?

[ktappe]

There are two kinds of people who have read Ayn Rand. Those who understand that individual liberty are not dirty words, and those who like to put dirty words in other people's mouths.

Your post was confusing until I saw your screen name.

Re:Does Ayn Rand count?

[shutdown -p now]

You don't need to care for all the other people individually - that much is, of course, impossible. You can, however, care for the aggregate, especially when you yourself are also a part of it, and its well-being directly reflects on yours.

Re:Does Ayn Rand count?

[garett_spencley]

It's funny because people who come across as entitled to me are the ones who hold the exact ideas that Rand was so strongly against: altruists.

The ideas of social responsibility, duty, innate obligations to "society", "greater good" are the ideas that hold that is reasonable expect individuals to think and act pro-actively in certain ways for the benefit of others. The demand that an individual love everyone equally is making a claim to an individual's most deepest and intimate emotions. That's a sense of entitlement if I've ever heard one.

This is not Rand's definition of the word "liberty" but it is one that I think she would have liked: "Liberty, in a political context, is an environment in which all relationships are consensual."

Here's quote of Rand's on the subject of conflicting interests:

"When one speaks of man’s right to exist for his own sake, for his own rational self-interest, most people assume automatically that this means his right to sacrifice others. Such an assumption is a confession of their own belief that to injure, enslave, rob or murder others is in man’s self-interest—which he must selflessly renounce. The idea that man’s self-interest can be served only by a non-sacrificial relationship with others has never occurred to those humanitarian apostles of unselfishness, who proclaim their desire to achieve the brotherhood of men. And it will not occur to them, or to anyone, so long as the concept 'rational' is omitted from the context of 'values,' 'desires,' 'self-interest' and ethics." - Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness

Re:Does Ayn Rand count?

[garett_spencley]

You don't need to care for all the other people individually - that much is, of course, impossible. You can, however, care for the aggregate, especially when you yourself are also a part of it, and its well-being directly reflects on yours.

That's a selfish idea if I've ever heard one ;)

I am absolutely convinced that the majority of Rand's opponents have never read a single of her books. Rand was once asked to clarify the whole "selfish" controversy on a talk show in the 70's and she said, paraphrasing: "How about I use a different word: self-esteem, would you be more comfortable with that?"

What most people miss is that Rand was just as much against pop-philosophies that she called "altruist" as she was promoting an alternative, particularly the ideas contained within "altruist philosophies" of using selfishness as a scapegoat for all of humanity's ills. Because she saw that most of the prevailing philosophies were not just advocating for benevolence and kindness but were teaching people that they were essentially worthless and needed to submit themselves entirely to something greater than themselves. As evidence I submit any story where the main protagonist achieves hero status by killing himself at the end to save others.

You kind of hit the nail on the head without even realizing it. To care about your family, your society, your country, your environment is a selfish act because you are acting for your own individual preservation. It is selfish to love someone because their existence, their virtues, their company gives you personal, selfish joy. It is rational to want your family, your friends and your peers to flourish and prosper because it means a higher standard of living, not just for them but for everyone, yourself included. And Rand promoted rational self-interest (and clarified that all the time: source).

It's altruist philosophies that have equivocated the idea of having your own selfish interests at heart with being incompatible with the interests of others. Rand was very careful to clarify this and the fact that so many people openly attack her using a complete lack of understanding of what she meant when she promoted the idea of selfishness as a virtue is as close to proof as you can get that these people have never actually studied anything she wrote.

Re:Does Ayn Rand count?

[shutdown -p now]

First of all, yes, I have actually read "Atlas Shrugged".

Yes, I do realize that Rand itself saw some manifestations of what is normally referred to as altruism as rational self-interest at work (the book has that, in fact, even in some quite explicit forms, like the rescue of Galt).

The real problem with Rand is that her understanding of what "rational" is, is very much dogmatic, and often more emotional than rational in practice. In other words, what she proposes as rational self-interest masquerading as altruism, does not in fact match the real world. The model of behavior that she proposes and glorifies in the book is not in fact rational - it's way over to the other side from the balance of self-obsession vs altruism which results in the best (statistically speaking) outcome.

In particular, she severely overestimated the importance and self-sufficiency of individual against the society. Her whole model is based on the premise of vast superiority of occasional "heroes" - personal, individual superiority - against the mass of the species as a whole. "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. Rand followed it because it matched her beliefs, but a rational philosophy cannot be based on a belief. An internally self-consistent one can, and Objectivism is certainly self-consistent in that sense, but consistency does not imply usefulness if the initial set of axioms contradicts reality.

The other oft repeated mistake is that such "selfish altruism" is solely a product of rational thought in the first place. In practice it actually arises much earlier than the ability to rationalize, and is seen among many animals. Among some of them it defines some of the crucial traits that distinguish them as species, and humans are in fact one of those species (we are far more "altruistic" than other great apes, and historically our lineage seems to have been more cooperative, judging by anthropological evidence to date). We shroud that in elaborate social rites (itself a result of evolutionary selection of our societies!) that re-enforce and multiply the effect, but that feel of guilt for doing the "wrong thing" at the back of your head is just as much genetics as it is conditioning.

Re:Does Ayn Rand count?

[Havenwar]

This is true, and it's why I posit that the concept of government is flawed. Not any particular system, but ALL of them. Because none of them have the ruling class remaining a part of the group which they regulate...

Sure they might be in words, but we all know that they get treated differently, and we all know that when you are late for a meeting and can take a taxi clear cross country on the tax-payers money, then you're not really living in the same world as most people, who often would be hard pressed to afford a taxi across town even without a life and death situation arising. (Granted taxis are more expensive here where petrol prices are twice what they are in the US, but you get my point, I hope.)

So like you said.. You can care for the aggregate, when you are a part of it, and its well-being directly reflects on yours. Since leadership is so far removed from normal people this is not true for them, thus they can not care for the aggregate, can not care for the individual stranger that to them is just lost in a faceless mass of "other" people.

So if your latest law happens to cause severe problems for a few hundred or thousand of them, it's not your problem. It'll solve problems for some others, and hey, none of the people affected actually live in YOUR world... Your friends and family and social circle will be fine.

Re:Does Ayn Rand count?

[shutdown -p now]

This is an argument for a more localized government (which directly translates to leadership being less removed from normal people), not necessary against a strong government.

That said, a government is effectively inevitable. By definition, a government is an organization that holds the monopoly on legitimate violence over a given territory. If you remove that, what follows is a struggle for power between various interest groups; the ones that win, become the new government. So, flawed or not, the best thing you can do is shape the government to have the most beneficial effect overall.

Re:Does Ayn Rand count?

[Forty Two Tenfold]

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Re:Does Ayn Rand count?

[Forty Two Tenfold]

Capitalism is the greatest example of voluntary human cooperation

What the hell are you smoking?

Re:Does Ayn Rand count?

[Count Fenring]

The ideas of social responsibility, duty, innate obligations to "society", "greater good" are the ideas that hold that is reasonable expect individuals to think and act pro-actively in certain ways for the benefit of others. The demand that an individual love everyone equally is making a claim to an individual's most deepest and intimate emotions. That's a sense of entitlement if I've ever heard one.

Wow, if that in any way actually described social responsibility, you'd really have a zinger there. Unfortunately, social responsibility doesn't remotely mean loving everyone equally - or even loving anyone, particularly. It involves acting responsibly within your wider community, and providing for common infrastructure and safety nets. It's about very practical considerations that deal with external realities. Defining it solely in terms of internal emotional construction is stupid. But, then, as a Rander, you're basically a solipsist anyway - who cares how the external world actually functions, when it can all be about ME ME ME.

This is not Rand's definition of the word "liberty" but it is one that I think she would have liked: "Liberty, in a political context, is an environment in which all relationships are consensual."

But somehow all her sex scenes are basically rapes. Hmmm.

Re:Does Ayn Rand count?

[geekoid]

Did you hear the entire speech, or just the out of context part Fox and Romney spread?

IT's a correct statement. Everything you DO is dependent on the people before you to able you to do it.
It's a fact. Hell, it's a maxim. It's only controversial for people looking for any excuse to bring up some hate.

Steampunk in general

[Telvin_3d]

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.

Re:Steampunk in general

[cpu6502]

How about "modern SF" in general? I spent some time reading the Hugo nominees and most of the stories were depressing. I couldn't decide if I should vote, or just say "Why bother? It's all pointless anyway" like Marvin the Depressed Robot.

One older SF writer (sorry forget who) actually wrote an essay encouraging authors to write something CHEERY for a change with a positive outcome. The magazine which published the esaay is runing a contest around that theme.

Re:Steampunk in general

[Telvin_3d]

The uplift books have some very amusing moments but are explicitly genocidal. It's a six book series that involves the death and destruction of a huge portion of the human race. And the protagonist space ship crew repeatedly solves problems by abandoning large chunks of the (ever shrinking) crew, never to be seen again.

I mean, great series, but I think you may need to recalibrate your definitions for emotional content.

inane subject here

[Anonymous Coward]

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Absolutely nothing good happens to anyone ever.

Re:inane subject here

[3nails4aFalseProphet]

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is definitely on my list. For those that haven't read it, I would describe it as equal parts a continuation of WarGames (if they didn't avert nuclear war), Paranoia (the RPG), and Saw. Shake well. Others that deserve a mention that I haven't seen yet:

Living Will, by Alexander Jablokov. A man diagnosed with Alzheimer's creates an A.I. preserving his own personality. You know pretty early in the story what the A.I.'s final duty to it's creator must be, which only makes it more heartbreaking when the time finally comes.

The Nine Billion Names of God, by Arthur C. Clarke. Techies are hired by a cult to build a computer system to document all the names of God. The cult believes when all the names are recorded, the universe will end. The techs are convinced they need to get as far as possible from the cult before the final name is recorded and their belief system is shattered.

What Eats You, by Norman Spinrad. Absolutely trippy first-person debriefing of a cop after a horrific "incident" in a brutal future L.A. where personalities are injected like drugs. Did I mention the cop telling the story is Joe Friday? Then again, ALL on-duty cops are injected to be Joe Friday. Like I said: Trippy.

The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman. The ending may be "happy" for a couple protagonists, but damn... what a depressing way to get there.

Re:inane subject here

[neglogic]

I second "I have No Mouth and I must scream". I always thought it would make a great movie.

Flowers for Algernon

[danimalx]

I win.

Re:Flowers for Algernon

[ChrisKnight]

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.

Bradbury

[frisket]

All Summer In A Day (Ray Bradbury).

Re:Bradbury

[readin]

All Summer In A Day (Ray Bradbury).

Wow thanks. I had successfully repressed memories of that story and you just brought them up again.

You're right of course. It's an very painful story.

Jem?

[Millennium]

I don't know if I'd call it depressing. I found it outrageous, myself. Truly outrageous.

Heinlein!

[Niris]

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.

Re:Heinlein!

[Elgonn]

I'm not sure I'd consider The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as depressing. I'm still sad for Mike but I'm not sure how you'd find the story depressing.

Re:Heinlein!

[cpm99352]

Interesting discussion. I read the series numerous times when I was approx 10-14. I'd have to say it was a bittersweet ending, not depressing per se...

Now what is really depressing is the complete lack of progress in getting off the planet we've made since the story was written (ok, that's hyperbole) - since Challenger.

Stephen Donaldson - Thomas Covenant

[Roarkk]

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.

Re:Stephen Donaldson - Thomas Covenant

[John Bokma]

Wouldn't call Thomas manic depressed, nor schizophrenic, nor a bigot. Depressed, sure. Probably clinical depressed. Not a big surprise if one is diagnosed with Hansen's_disease, wife leave, taking only son. To me, this is the only fantasy I've read that's [b]realistic[/b] regarding the transfer to a fantasy world. Would you believe it if you "woke up" in a magic land where loam cures your leprosy and impotence? Or would you consider it just a dream?

Re:Stephen Donaldson - Thomas Covenant

[DamienMcKenna]

Donaldson's "Gap" series was pretty depressing too - lots of anti-heros, a leading lady who spends half of the series being raped, etc. Yes, the series did get to a point in the end, but it's like wading through ten miles of sewers just to find an exit.

Re:Stephen Donaldson - Thomas Covenant

[Lotana]

Compare to Baxter's Titan. How about taking a bunch of angry social misfits who are patently crazy from day zero and launching them on a one-way trip to a faraway moon of a faraway planet, with no means of return and with no purpose in any of that?

And on top of that the descriptions of the living conditions, deaths of all the main characters and the humanity purposefully redirecting an asteroid to hit the Earth (Misscalculation. Supposed to have fractured and only a piece to strike the USA as part of a war) that ends up wiping out civilization.

Titan was a very depressing novel. Publisher forced Baxter to add another part on the end of the book which magically resurects two of the main characters and describes how Earth and Titan life spreads to other solar systems.

Given how jarring and tacky the fairy tail addition was, it is much better to skip it: Book ends when Benecraff freezes herself in the water crater on Titan. I guess the publisher wouldn't agree to publish such a downer of a novel.

Re:Stephen Donaldson - Thomas Covenant

[esteban_sosa]

Agrred! The first book is absolutely depressing. But the story eventually gets sooooo good.

Where to start?

[cpu6502]

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.)

depressing becuase it's so accurate

[Covalent]

1984 Second? Fahrenheit 451. Same reasoning.

Re:depressing becuase it's so accurate

[Elgonn]

Can we even nominate those two? At this point they're practically Sci-Non-Fi.

Re:depressing becuase it's so accurate

[uCallHimDrJ0NES]

Covalent's entries win by my reasoning. 1984 should win on multiple fronts. Orwell is strangely neglected by the social tribe that goes under the banner "science fiction fan". So is Vonnegut. Why are Orwell and Vonnegut not considered science fiction? Because they're good? Many of the entries being posted are so entertainment-oriented, I'm baffled how anyone can consider them depressing. "City on the Edge of Forever"? What was the happy ending supposed to be? Edith Keeler in space?

Re:depressing becuase it's so accurate

[Spritzer]

That's exactly the response I had planned. I remember the first time I read 1984, pulling for Winston and hoping for a story where the people succeed in overthrowing or subverting the regime. Oh, the let down, followed by the realization that this is a story about our world, our society.

I'm going to go curl up in a ball now.

Make Room! Make Room!

[The Archon V2.0]

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.

Re:Make Room! Make Room!

[Lotana]

Now you are making me hungry. Will never eat human though: Have you seen what kind of horrible, horrible crap they are fed with?!

Here's a couple.

[Robotech_Master]

Destination: Void by Frank Herbert. (Or as I like to call it: "Destination: Avoid".)

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke.

Re:Here's a couple.

[sludgeman1]

I find Frank Herbert's view of humanity, as in "God Emperor of Dune" very pessimistic around human nature, requiring a 3000 years tyrannical ruling to save humanity from its own destructive and short term thinking. Havent read Destination: Void but seems like Herbert didnt hold fond of humanity. Most civilization is based on cowardice. It's so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the children to breathe slowly. You tame. The Stolen Journals and my favorite: When I set out to lead humankind along my Golden Path, I promised them a lesson their bones would remember. I know a profound pattern which humans deny with their words even while their actions affirm it. They say they seek security and quiet, the condition they call peace. Even as they speak, they create the seeds of turmoil and violence. If they find their quiet security, they squirm in it. How boring they find it. Look at them now. Look at what they do while I record these words. Hah! I give them enduring eons of enforced tranquility which plods on and on despite their every effort to escape into chaos. Believe me, the memory of Leto's Peace shall abide with them forever. They will seed their quiet security thereafter only with extreme caution and steadfast preparation. -The Stolen Journals

On the Beach

[bvdp]

Nevil Shute: On the Beach ... ordinary people doing ordinary things before they all die.

Re:On the Beach

[sir-gold]

This definitely has my vote.

You can't get much more depressing than a book about people who are basically waiting to die of radiation poisoning, with no hope whatsoever

Re:On the Beach

[Grayhand]

Nevil Shute: On the Beach ... ordinary people doing ordinary things before they all die.

Also the most depressing film ever made. It should be the acid test for any world leader. If you can read it or watch the movie and you'd still launch nuclear weapons you are by definition insane.

Depends

[Osgeld]

"Usually sci-fi provides adventure with happy endings for everyone."

Depends on which side your on.

Ender's Game

[malraid]

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.

The Road

[Anonymous Coward]

The Road

Re:The Road

[Anonymous Coward]

I read that book once. Once is enough.

Watching the movie made me want to slit my wrists just to see color.

Re:Short Story

[kat_skan]

The movie was plenty depressing, just in that "O God Ashton Kutcher is trying to act" kind of way.

When sysadmins ruled the earth

[dns_server]

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

Humanity grokked in fullness

[mycroft822]

Stranger in a Strange Land. Our cultures tend to want to kill anyone that is too far from our version of normal.

George RR Martin

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

My company's marketing copy

[Anonymous Coward]

Just saying'

Nineteen Eighty-Four

[avatar139]

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

Thomas Covenant

[DoofusOfDeath]

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.

Re:Thomas Covenant

[kulervo]

Yeah, I had a semester where I read Thomas Convenant for fun/independent report, then I read The Bluest Eye and The Things They Carried for class. The name of the class: Evil in American Literature.

I still say Thomas Covenant is worth reading though, lots of great moments for the other characters, lots of great other characters. Foamfollower particularly.

Childhood's End By Arthur C. Clarke

[Anonymous Coward]

...the human race just ends with a whimper.

Re:Childhood's End By Arthur C. Clarke

[jamstar7]

Actually, the human race goes on to something better. We just can't get there from here.

A Canticle for Leibowitz

[Yunzil]

Synopsis: Humans are self-destructive, never learn from their mistakes, and are doomed to destroy themselves over and over again.

Canticle for Leibowitz

[Niris]

Very interesting story, but an ending that I still think about.

Re:Canticle for Leibowitz

[drkim]

So right about the Philip K Dick...

Ubik, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Man in the High Castle, Three Stigmata were just horrifying - but wonderful.

I think while it's fun to read his stuff, no one would actually want to live in his worlds...

Re:Canticle for Leibowitz

[WalksOnDirt]

I have to agree about Canticle, although I really don't remember whether I finished it or not.

If I'm going to read something depressing, at least it should be short. Each an Explorer, by Isaac Asimov, was pretty depressing, but at least it was short.

Re:Canticle for Leibowitz

[theshowmecanuck]

I didn't find Liebowitz all that depressing. At least we're told that there are colonies in space where man still survives.

How about On The Beach by Nevil Shute. Written at the height of the cold war, it starts at a point in time where everything in the world is dead or soon to be because of a nuclear war, except Australia, South Africa, and Southern South America. But that is only because the wind patterns haven't brought the fallout there yet. The story takes place in Australia and everyone is just waiting for the seasons to change when the weather patterns will bring the radiation south and kill everyone there too. It follows several people and through them looks at how people live knowing it is just a matter of time till everyone is dead. The author maintains that where they can, people just try to live normal lives because that is all their they can do without going into overload. Some do lose it becoming alcoholics and extreme risk takers, etc. Some are in complete denial. Some like an American sub commander, internally can't accept his family is dead and buys things for them for when he goes home. Rationally he knows they have to be dead, but can't help but deny it inside.

The commander is in charge of a nuclear submarine that was docked in Australia at the time all the hostilities literally went ballistic. They go to Puget Sound because they hear intermitant transmissions from a short wave transmitter using morse code. While up there they determine radiatin levels aren't dropping. After someone goes ashore in air tanks they find the transmission was a broken window and a curtain brushing the sending unit. Power is on because the automatic systems haven't crashed yet.

They go back to Melbourne and the government there starts handing out suicide pills so people don't have to endure radiation poisoning before finally dying. The book ends with all the characters including a young family with a baby born just before the war, killing themselves as the radiation in the area reaches leathal levels.

I read the book once. It was incredibly well written. One of the best I ever read. I can't read it again. It is way too depressing. WAY too depressing. I tried once and before I even read a page I had a sort of reaction to it. I had to put it down. There was no way I could read it again. I've read Liebowitz a few times and will probably read it again some time. Not anywhere near the coefficient of depresivity that On The Beach puts out. FWIW I read it in the 70s as a teen, when you could still see B-52s routinely flying north from SAC bases in the U.S. on training runs and patrols. Back when 747s were still fairly rare you could still tell the B-52s apart by how damned high they were flying and the contrails. You could tell they had a massive number of engines by the contrails. Different time.

Re:Canticle for Leibowitz

[Phrogman]

I gave up about halfway through because it was so *boring*. It was always listed as a classic masterpiece, but I just don't see it. Its nowhere near the worst I have read (Frank Herbert's The Green Brain comes to mind there) but it sure was not engaging at all. Either time I tried to read it.

Re:Canticle for Leibowitz

[jgrahn]

How about /On The Beach/ by Nevil Shute. Written at the height of the cold war, it starts at a point in time where everything in the world is dead or soon to be because of a nuclear war, except Australia, South Africa, and Southern South America. [snip]

In the post-nuclear holocaust genre, Edgar Pangborn's /Davy/ cycle needs to be mentioned. New England pushed back to the Middle Ages, with witch-hunts, slavery, religious fanaticism and everything ... and no way out because the natural resources were used up in the 20th century, and anything which has to do with science or technology (like medicine, or glasses) is banned. The protagonists in his story tend to be poets and artists, and they are always crushed in the end, with whatever they had to say forgotten.

Swedish writer P C Jersild wrote a similar story, "Efter floden". Also detailed, and depressing as hell.

The Forge of God - Gregory Bear

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Hugh Howey's Wool

[wintersynth]

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 Canticle for Liebowitz

[overshoot]

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.

Most Depressing Sci-Fi?

[Mystiq]

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.)

Harrison

[crow_t_robot]

Bergeron

Harrison Bergeron

[amanaplanacanalpanam]

By Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Not quite as cheerful as 1984.

Blindsight, by Peter Watts

[Bobtree]

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

Ian M. Banks

[sonofepson]

Consider Phlebas, Use of Weapons and Matter. Good though.

Re:Ian M. Banks

[RivenAleem]

Surface Detail too. The Hells were pretty depressing, and finding out who the soldier was at the end, and knowing that he's still fighting wars after 600 years.

Is "The Road" sci-fi?

[gatkinso]

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

Re:Is "The Road" sci-fi?

[echusarcana]

The Road is sci-fi, certainly. And it definitely is an order of magnitude more depressing than most things mentioned here.

Most Depressing?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

"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.

Firefly

[exabrial]

After I heard they cancelled the series.

Stand on Zanzibar

[arpad1]

"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.

or Brazil

[twoallbeefpatties]

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?

Re:or Brazil

[marcosdumay]

Brazil was a story about an amazingly incompetent government that so much fails at it's job as to take society down with it.

Doesn't matter what is more depressing. The question was about fiction, your book is out of scope. The judge is still out about 1984, but Brazil clearly can't participate on this contest.

Re:or Brazil

[cpricejones]

I always thought A Brave New World was the much better dystopic novel, which is a pretty depressing genre as a whole. The world portrayed in BNW was more real to me, and the writing was a lot better, in my opinion, approaching literary science fiction. For example, I really liked the use of The Tempest throughout. You could definitely make the argument that 1984 was more depressing because the writing was worse and the book was less interesting though (i.e., it was depressing to read, not just the content).

I don't know if The Magus by Fowles would exactly qualify as science fiction, but that was another book that was a great read in the same way (depressing yet very well written so that it was still enjoyable).

Then there are the more common great scifi books that are depressing because they are so good that you dont want them to end. I remember feeling this way at the end of Snow Crash.

Re:or Brazil

[Nyder]

Maybe it is me, but I don't really consider 1984 nor Brazil to be Science Fiction.

Not really much science in those fictional stories.

When I think of SciFi, I think of stories where science plays the dominate role, like space travel, advance techonology, and of course, shit with science in it.

Brazil is about Governments. Not science, but about political issues.

1984 is about Governments. Not science, but about political/social issues.

they are Fiction, yes. Science Fiction? I don't think so.

Re:or Brazil

[dadioflex]

Not really much science in those fictional stories.

When I think of SciFi, I think of stories where science plays the dominate role, like space travel, advance techonology, and of course, shit with science in it.

By your definition most SF wouldn't be SF then. In fact very little SF would be SF because most of the "science" in Science Fiction is inaccurate and thus not actually science. 1984 and Brave New World do in fact both include plenty of science, in the background. Pervasive surveillance, socio-political engineering, pharmaceutical engineering, artificial birth - it's all there. I would assume you never actually read either book.

Re:or Brazil

[deimtee]

But to prove you have the power, you must inflict the suffering. The inner party (1 or 2% of the population) exercised this power over the outer party (about 15%).
The proles were generally ignored, unless they became noticable, in which case they were inducted into the party, or disappeared.
The Party won't be overthrown or defeated. They are basically in collusion with the other power blocs to keep things balaced, as evidenced by the shifting alliances.
"Picture a boot, stomping on a human face, forever".

Re:or Brazil

[plover]

Thanks. I did like Zodiac, but it kind of reminded me of the same ending as Cryptonomicon. Both of those novels seemed contrived, and to me they read as if he had followed the trademarked Neal Stephenson Story Writing pattern:
1. Think of some tricky, cool mechanical ideas, like using salad bowls to plug holes in a pipe, Van Eck phreaking, or diesel fuel to melt inaccessible gold.
2. Think of a somewhat plausible setting to place the idea in - polluters, prison, jungle island.
3. Write a plot line where the main character ends up arriving at these ideas in the final chapters.
4. Add additional story arcs, characters, and other flourishes around the base plot.
5. Profit!

They all seem driven to get to the end and to the big reveal of the clever idea. Driving to the end of a story works for a mystery - solve the caper, dispense dose of appropriate justice, meddling kids. But when he gets to the mystery's end, it's more about the clever trick, and less about the people.

Snow Crash was different. It was an amalgam of crazy from start to finish - crazy setting, crazy government, crazy people, crazy religion, and crazy ideas. And he glued them together in a vat of somewhat plausible foreshadowing technologies like the web, gargoyles, scanner evading glass knives, all those kinds of things that were somewhere on the horizon back when he wrote it. It didn't follow his trademarked formula, because the fun ideas just kept coming from start to finish: an Inuit biker who is his own nuclear power, a pizza deliverator for the mob, the metaverse, Snow Crash, falabalas, etc. The people made it interesting, the tech made it cool. It came together in something ineffable that he's just never repeated.

And for some reason I liked Anathem. Perhaps because it didn't closely follow the formula, or that one of the cool ideas (the time-based monastery) was a setting element he introduced from the start, and didn't need the big reveal.

Re:or Brazil

[Nevynxxx]

Pervasive surveillance, socio-political engineering, pharmaceutical engineering, artificial birth - it's all there. I would assume you never actually read either book.

I wouldn't assume that. I'd assume the reader is young enough that they don't realise that those things didn't exist when the book was written.

Sci-Fi that's good enough that when the science catches it up, it looks just like fiction. Now that's a skillful writer!

I have no mouth and I must scream

[wonderboss]

Nightmarish.

Yep,

[rsilvergun]

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.

Robert Holdstock

[K. S. Kyosuke]

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.

Number one. On the Beach.

[LWATCDR]

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.

You guys are easily depressed.

[fm6]

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.

Earth Abides

[dcollins]

Low-key, and yet just deeply terrified me. Seemed pretty concrete and realistic. It's all downhill. Every hope is dashed.

Canticle for Leibowitz

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

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.

Brave New World and a short story

[cowtamer]

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.

Re:Brave New World and a short story

[safetyinnumbers]

I believe it was called 2439 -- the premise being

This, maybe? I still think of it whenever I hear mention of population growth predictions.

Re:Brave New World and a short story

[blind monkey 3]

It sounds like 2430 A.D. by Asimov - a short story. Both your choices are good, still think Earth Abides was more depressing.

Brave New World

[Darth Muffin]

Brave New World, Aldus Huxley. Perfectly horrible. Stranger in a Strange land was also pretty depressing.

Re:Brave New World

[fm6]

What, you read a novel about a guy transcending death and you're depressed because the guy dies? I think you're missing the point!

Re:Brave New World

[catchblue22]

Yes, Brave New World. Especially since Brave New World seems to reflect our current cultural situation in much of the west.

I have heard Huxley's Brave New World compared and contrasted with Orwell's 1984. In 1984, the powers that be manipulate the public's opinions to believe that, in essence black is white and 2 + 2 = 5. In Huxley's Brave New World, the public simply doesn't care about the reality of the world. Most people are simply interested in what is in front of them, their desires, their fears, without any real concern about society as a whole. That sounds a lot like the current corporate state.

Re:Brave New World

[catchblue22]

If I may contribute an addendum, here is the quote to which I was referring, by Neil Postman in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death (pdf). It compares Orwell's 1984 to Huxley's Brave New World:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.

Re:Brave New World

[turbidostato]

"So, on the one hand, we have a government trying to emulate 1984. (China). On the other, we have a thriving Brave New World."

But our Brave New World leaders, clever as Mustafa Mond, adapt to new times and added a bit of 1984 salt to the equation: we've been always at war with Eastasia (so we never gave weapons to Al-Qaeda, and Donald Rumsfeld never shaked his hand with Saddam Hussein); it's obvious what a fine Emmanuel Goldstein Osama Bin Laden did (I was quite surprised when they killed him, but they are fast at finding substitutes); with regards of Newspeak and the Ministry of Truth, it's not only that, say, Julian Assange makes for an almost perfect Winston Smith -sex included, but that "political correctness" is pushed to absurd levels; countries like UK are not so far from the cameras everywhere distopia; and CIA doesn't even hide the fact that they play Brotherhood's O'Brian role as needed. Finally, just compare USA's current sociopolitical situation with the central 1984 motto and cry: "WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH".

But all this formal/tactical similitudes are just superficial because deeply is the Brave New World pilosophy. As such, is not that say, photographs of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Hussein are forbidden and destroyed, or that the massive destruction weapons issue is not known to be fake, it is that it really doesn't matter; it is not that the Big Brother prosecutes critical thinking, it is that people, all by themselves, choose religious crooks for presidents; it is not that the national lotto is faked but that people really believe that working hard and adapting to the "true way", they'll reach to the 0.01% status.

In the end, I find Brave New World much more depressing than 1984 because for 1984 world to work, the stablishment is forced to always be on top of everything, always watching and the coertion is too visible and the obvious target to figth against. Brave New World, on the other hand, is self-stabilizing: people voluntarily choose it and the government doesn't need to search and destroy the outsiders, society itself does it.

Re:Brave New World

[Kupfernigk]

In fact I don't find BNW scary at all. It is a utopia. Most people are happy and well-adjusted, there is no crime, very little illness. When people emerge who don't fit and are intelligent, they simply get sent off to a community of other intelligent people so they don't upset the sheep. If you're a Bernard Marx, you'd really like to live in a world like that. The prize for not fitting in is to be sent to the equivalent of an Ivy League university. As Mustafa Mond points out to Helmholtz, Marx thinks he's being punished but in fact he is being rewarded. The rulers of BNW, in fact, are Platonic philosopher-kings, and they recognise that they must allow the gene pool to throw up exceptions because it is from those exceptional people that the rulers of the world will be drawn. They are altruistic, and the system is designed to ensure that they stay that way. It is only depressing if you believe that there are sky fairies who make rules for humankind.

Re:Brave New World

[Kuroji]

Fifty Shades of Gray.

The debate starts and ends RIGHT FUCKING THERE.

My list

[cpm99352]

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?

Re:My list

[unitron]

Don't know about past 10 years, but M. J. Engh wrote a book called "Arslan (a.k.a. A Wind from Bukhara)" back in '76 which was pretty much a downer. Think "Red Dawn", but the troops are Islamic and the American civilians aren't as resourceful or well-enough organized.

A Scanner Darkly

[Mister Mudge]

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.

A 1984 for the modern day.

[safetyinnumbers]

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.

Stephen Baxter's "Manifold" trilogy

[blind biker]

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".

Sea of Glass

[wrf3]

by Barry B. Longyear

It's a tie

[steveha]

"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

Re:Most Depressing Sci-fi You've Ever Read

[turbidostato]

Nope. We are living Brave New World much more than 1984.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

[Leomania]

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...

I read Jem

[machine321]

Truly outrageous.

a few

[buddyglass]

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)

Bio of Space Tyrant: Refugee by Piers Anthony

[ed1park]

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.

The Road

[echusarcana]

The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Should win this contest by a mile.

Draka novels, and Earth Abides.

[lee n. field]

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.

Gotcha beat.

[Dr. Manhattan]

The Screwfly Solution by Alice Sheldon. Extinction of humanity in the most horrifying - and horrifyingly plausible - means possible.

The Forever War, Joe Haldeman

[metrometro]

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.

Re:Mission Earth

[AaronW]

I'll second this. Anything by L. Ron Hubbard. Mine ended up in the recycling bin since I couldn't bring myself to give them to a used book store to put anyone else through that agony.

Probably

[nelsonal]

The windup girl. Resource constrained Thailand, miserable existence for what's essentially a genetically engineered sex toy.

The Road

[Troyusrex]

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!

Stanislaw Lem

[gnetwerker]

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.

Brave New World was a utopia

[Paradoks]

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.

Stephen Baxter - Titan

[Flere Imsaho]

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.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

[thomasw_lrd]

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.

Dark/depressing books by Greg Bear

[Dr_Banzai]

Forge of God by Greg Bear could be considered depressing as it involves the destruction of Earth by inscrutable aliens. Its sequel Anvil of Stars is also rather dark in mood, involving an army of children on a long-term mission to find and take revenge on the Earth's unknown destructors.

Also very dark in tone is the thought-provoking short story Hardfought, also by Greg Bear, well worth a read.

There are three that I haven't seen mentioned yet:

[Snarfangel]

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

Re:Liberty is supposed to come with accountability

[EvolutionInAction]

Sure, but if I understand 'Randism' at all correctly, the banks shouldn't be regulated because that would interfere with the liberty of the lenders. Somehow the threat of collapse would keep them from making poor choices. Of course, it makes more sense to think that the owners would run it into the ground, make out like bandits, and leave the ashes of a company while they moved on. Because that's what happens now, even with regulation.

Running Man

[Cogline]

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.

Re:What's the Most Depressing Sci-fi You've Ever R

[incy_webb]

Yep. "make room! make room!" by HH and "with folded hands" by Jack Williamson.

Re:Liberty is supposed to come with accountability

[garett_spencley]

Sure, but if I understand 'Randism' at all correctly, the banks shouldn't be regulated because that would interfere with the liberty of the lenders.

Rand advocated for the complete separation of economy and state for the same reasons as a separation of church and state is necessary. She saw it as two sides of the same coin.

If it is wrong to dictate to an individual what he/she can think it is equally wrong to dictate to an individual what he/she can eat. There are also a lot of overlaps. Just as individual chooses what to think he/she also chooses who to associate with and trade with and under what circumstances. If individuals require the freedom think and act in order to make decisions regarding their life then that extends into producing the material means of survival: producing material goods for consumption and trade.

In other words: if politics involves itself in what is proper to worship and believe in then the result is telling us what to think. Conversely if politics involves itself in production and trade the result is telling us who we can trade with, what prices we must accept for goods we produced, what kind of toilet we can put in our own bathrooms and what kinds of food to eat.

If it helps you, stop thinking about "corporate welfare" and think of your own, because all trade is a two-way street. Keep in mind that the government doesn't just regulate the banking sector at the moment, it's basically nationalized. Yes, private banks still exist but every single loan and transaction occurs with government-issued fiat currency, which means they're setting terms on every single transaction that occurs during their jurisdiction. Not just between banks and consumers but between little Joey and Mrs. Potter when they trade $5 for a lawn mow. People don't seem to get that. That is the most fundamental hardcore regulation of the economy you can possibly have... the central bank gets to decide, by meddling with the supply of currency, what your savings are worth, what interest rates for loans will be, the value of what people who have bad loans will collect and so forth. It's even thought by one popular school of economics to be the cause of the boom/bust cycle.

Re:Liberty is supposed to come with accountability

[Quila]

And when ripping off the customers, those in charge would be held accountable. Thus they have disincentive for fraud. Freedom stops at fraud, in which case you are infringing on the freedom of others.

But under our system the frauds get bailouts if their political connections are good enough.

Dogfight by Gibson and Swanwick

[Pantero Blanco]

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.

Re:Mission Earth

[the_Bionic_lemming]

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?

All news articles about man made global warming
.
.
.
.
.
{ducks}

Re:Ayn Rand's Manifesto for Psychopaths

[shutdown -p now]

Selfishness, it contends, is good, altruism evil, empathy and compassion are irrational and destructive.

In truth, this isn't actually what Rand's philosophy is about. The book does show numerous examples of empathy and compassion - the catch is that they are only directed at certain people who have specifically earned them by virtue of being of importance to the one directing them.

Re:Liberty is supposed to come with accountability

[number11]

If it helps you, stop thinking about "corporate welfare" and think of your own, because all trade is a two-way street.

I could stop thinking about "corporate welfare", if the very existence of corporations wasn't a government-granted privilege that shielded the owners (who will reap the profits) from personal responsibility. But since it is, it would seem that they should be subject to the control of the greater society. "Corporations" have no natural existence, no natural rights, they're a creature of government, a special privilege granted to a group that should be expected to act in ways that will benefit all of society, not just their shareholders. If they don't like that, let them return to being partnerships, as they were before the invention of the corporation.

Re:The Isaac Asimov short story where...

[Lotana]

The story is called "The Last Question" and it is in my personal opinion the greatest science fiction short story ever written. I do not believe it is suited to be called "Most Depressing" because it has a really up-lifting ending. I would recomend you read the last part: The whole short story is available free here:

http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html/

Though perhaps some may see the re-birth to still be a downer, it is still much more cheerful than other stories mentioned in this Ask Slashdot.

Re:Liberty is supposed to come with accountability

[Sique]

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.

Evidence abounds

[SuperKendall]

"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.

Re:Evidence abounds

[shutdown -p now]

The history we learn is chock full of such people. Joan of Arc, Einstein, Roosevelt, Churchill, Steve Jobs, Darwin, etc. etc. etc.

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? Their existence doesn't really prove anything by itself.

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.

Can you give an example of such 'status quo' or 'slipping backwards into chaos', and demonstrate how either happened specifically because such people didn't come along? Or perhaps they didn't come along precisely because the society at the time was not able to foster such people?

the innate sense of wrong is not powerful enough to really stop people from doing the wrong thing

It is, actually, otherwise various small-scale experiments in anarchy, or other schemes that seemingly are inherently flawed due to tradegy of the commons (e.g. Mincome) wouldn't be so successful. Most people will in fact do the right thing when left to their devices. The reason why we need laws and governments is because the minority of people will cause harm, and that harm is disproportionately affecting all of us. In a sense, anarchy is tyranny of the (armed and willing to use said arms) minority.

Re:Spoiler.

[neyla]

Also, it turns out there should be a lot of orgies - it tends to turn out that way in Heinleins books, particularly the books he wrote as a older guy - in those books it turns out the world would be a better place if hot young women would have more orgies with old guys.

The converse is not true

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:Liberty is supposed to come with accountability

[Anonymous Coward]

Here here. I confess ignorance about what Ayn Rand actually said or offers. (Is that a good word). But, setting her aside, I see a disturbing trend. This trend is the idea that anything that is 'for the common good' is to be distruted, or at the extreme, to be rejected out of hand. This is coming from the conservative side of our body politic. Part of this is due to over reaching and extreme idiocy and sillyness on the part of some in the Liberal side of our body politic. (And both sides are guilty of only hearing the scariest voices on the other side).

But part of the conservative rejection of things 'in common' is I think a false belief that everything is a zero sum game: if there is more Welfare, then me and others who produce wealth will have less to pay for it. That is partially true. Giving some people welfare also can stimulate the economy, so it is partially a mixed bag.

But, limiting air and water pollution, the 'ecological real estate,' benefits everyone. Or rather protecting air and water from pollution does. But many conservatives only look at the costs to business or the economy.

Re:Spoiler.

[The Rizz]

it turns out the world would be a better place if hot young women would have more orgies with old guys.

I don't agree that would make the world a better place, but ask me again in a few years and I might have changed my mind...

Re:Reading...

[Phrogman]

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

Threads.

[detlefvonberg]

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.

Re:Blood Music by Greg Bear

[malkavian]

"Forge of God".. The latter books kind of dilute the story somewhat.. But that book as a standalone.. Very gritty and probably exactly what would happen.

Threads

[evilandi]

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.

Re:Liberty is supposed to come with accountability

[geekoid]

" the recent cratering was decidedly non-Randian in nature."
Are you high?
removing regulation is what caused it and it is very Randian in nature. I could site examples through all of history where laissez-faire capitalism type ideas destroy the vast majority of peoples lives.
However I think the most telling piece against her overall philosophy* is the interview she did with Donahue in the 70's.

What she is getting at makes sense in the context of what was happening in the Soviet Union during her youth.

*Most people don't read past the part where all knowledge is based in reason(para phrasing).

"is that the government creates an environment for the corporate raiders to prosper (deregulation,"
Do you read what you write? so now removing regulation is government control? I spent 2 years studying Ayn Rand, and I can say, for certainly, that you are an idiot.

Deregulating is as "Randian" as one can get.

Re:Liberty is supposed to come with accountability

[geekoid]

You should receive 0.00000001% of the blame and resulting judgments.

"Unless you think that the ability to gather is a special privilege granted by the government your argument has a huge flaw."
BY pooling that many resource, it does give corporation undo influence over the government.

And this isn't new. There was as serious debate by are founding fathers as to whether or not to specifically disallow corporation. Corporation ran amok in England then. When a system emerges to remove responsibility from the owners, why would they act responsible?

Re:Liberty is supposed to come with accountability

[Quila]

Would you rather a few fat cats to get away, or do you want the entire economy to implode?

The economy wouldn't have imploded, but it would have taken a bigger short-term hit. But by softening the hit, we've prevented a truly healthy rebound. The market needed to correct, but we didn't allow it to do so, and we incurred tremendous debt in the process. We got screwed twice just so politicians can get reelected.

Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

[Amelia G]

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.