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

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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.

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.

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).

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

[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.

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.)

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.

On the Beach

[bvdp]

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

[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.

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

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

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.

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

[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

[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.

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.

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

[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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: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.

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.

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...