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Ask Slashdot: What's the Most Depressing Sci-fi You've Ever Read?
50000BTU_barbecue writes "Usually sci-fi provides adventure with happy endings for everyone. But what story have you read that resonates years later because of some insight about human nature or society that's basically cynical or pessimistic? For me it's Fred Pohl's Jem, with its sharply divided resource-constrained future world driven by politics, and its conclusion that humans are just too destructive to handle contacting alien life, especially if humans have the technological upper hand. I'm wondering what other stories have stuck in people's minds. It can be a short story, a novel or an entire series of books."
Childhood's End
1984
Though the most depressing part is the people who think she had good ideas.
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Absolutely nothing good happens to anyone ever.
I win.
All Summer In A Day (Ray Bradbury).
What do you get when youo combine manic depression, schizophrenia, bigotry, and leprosy, then add in a little literal and figurative rape?
In the end, a pretty good series, but more than anything else I"ve read the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant has the darkest, most depressing prose I've ever read.
There's the famous Star Trek story "City on the Edge of Forever". The original script by Harlan Ellison is even darker, with people in the engineering section of the ship dealing drugs (which is how the doctor ends-up going nutty -- a bad trip).
I just read a story last year in one of Gardner Dozois' Best of the Year anthologies. It involved humans boarding a generation ship that would travel to a new galaxy (50,000 years). The first 1000 years were not too bad but over time the humans became dumber-and-dumber, as they had no more challenging task then to scrub the floors/walls/ceiling and keep the ship clean. After 25,000 years they were walking on all fours & no longer bothering to wear clothes (or speak).
At that point the generation ship was intercepted by a faster-than-light ship that "rescued" the simian-like human beings. I imagine they ended-up in a zoo. (If you have a chance I would recommend buying all of Dozois' annual anthologies. If you like Outer Limits' method of telling a different story each week, you'll like these books.)
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Nevil Shute: On the Beach ... ordinary people doing ordinary things before they all die.
"Usually sci-fi provides adventure with happy endings for everyone."
Depends on which side your on.
The ending is just brutal, I just get the feeling of everyone hating themselves after pushing a boy to commit xenocide, even though they won the war.
please excuse my apathy
The Road
When I was young, I found it depressing because of the ending. Now that I'm older I find it depressing because I've seen it begin to grow in the world around me...:P
I'm honest enough to admit I lie to myself.
Synopsis: Humans are self-destructive, never learn from their mistakes, and are doomed to destroy themselves over and over again.
Mass Effect 3. I was depressed for about a week after playing the original ending. (Hey, you never said it had to be good, just depressing.)
Bergeron
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
"Running MS DOS 3.3" by Van Wolverton.
I had to re-read Peter Norton's massive, "Programmer's guide to the IBM PC & PS/2" two times after that, just to feel better.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
After I heard they cancelled the series.
You know, I read 1984 when I was in junior high (which was in the early 90s), and it was a dark and frightening read. But it didn't really hit me that hard. Then as an adult a few years ago, I watched Terry Gilliam's Brazil for the first time, and it depressed the hell out of me.
1984 is a story about an ultra-competent government that manages to run everything just the way it wants to and convince people to act and think how it wants. Brazil was a story about an amazingly incompetent government that so much fails at it's job as to take society down with it. Guess which one I find more relevant to the current state of affairs?
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
and her ideas worked so well that she died penniless and living off the socialism she so despised (look it up, she did).
Come off it. Ayn was just a scared little woman frightened by dictators. I could spend hours recounting the holes in her philosophy, but others have done it much better than I ever could.
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1. On the Beach all life killed by a nuclear war with the last people on earth just waiting for the radiation cloud to come and kill them or commiting suicide. No escape just a dead earth.
2. 1984. No hope you can not win, nobody can win, there is no hope. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Cultural_impact
3. The The Forge of God. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forge_of_God Only a few humans are saved, the earth is turned to rubble.
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Low-key, and yet just deeply terrified me. Seemed pretty concrete and realistic. It's all downhill. Every hope is dashed.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
God. What a drag.
Hey! Ballard's stuff is bleak! I think someone mentioned James Blish, too. That guy's day job was working for the Tobacco Institute. No wonder...
Then, there is the endless low-level of depression that permeates most Philip K Dick - like a miasma. But he makes you want more, somehow.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley followed by a short story I read which I can't locate right now.
I believe it was called 2439 -- the premise being that in the year 2439 (I might be wrong about the year), the Earth is covered in its entirety with a 700 story building in order to provide for the almost 1 trillion humans that live in it (with only algae left to supply them). The story was about the last man to actually have animals, and the authorities plight to convince him to euthanize them in order to make room for the trillionth human, so that 'perfection' can be achieved. The claim of the authorities was that there was enough color microfiche of all the animals that ever lived so that the actual ones need no longer be around to consume resources.
My paraphrase may seem very silly, but the actual story had enough of an impact on me when I was 15 to change my outlook on our relationship with the environment for good. It'd be great if anyone could point me to the actual story/author.
Brave New World, Aldus Huxley. Perfectly horrible. Stranger in a Strange land was also pretty depressing.
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Nope. We are living Brave New World much more than 1984.
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...
The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Should win this contest by a mile.
The Screwfly Solution by Alice Sheldon. Extinction of humanity in the most horrifying - and horrifyingly plausible - means possible.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
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.
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.
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The story follows a manned mission to Titan. Apart from the very long term outcome, it's a thoroughly depressing read - Hacked from Wikipedia:
En-route, one crew member dies after a solar storm. The use of a CELSS greenhouse for life support provides a continuous food supply, and the astronauts rely on vegetables, grain and fruit from the greenhouse as they travel on. But things take a dark turn as funding and support for resupply and Earth-return retrieval are cut by Maclachlan's administration (proposed and carried out by the very same men that tried to shoot the shuttle down), leaving the team with no hope for survival beyond what they may find on Titan. Once they reach Saturn and prepare to land on Titan's surface, another crew member is lost during the landing procedure with another effectively crippled. Titan is discovered to be a bleak, freezing dwarf-planet containing liquid ethane oceans, a sticky mud surface, and a climate which includes a thick atmosphere of purple organic compounds falling like snow from the clouds; and the only traces of life they find are fossilized remains of microbic bacteria similar to those recovered from Martian meteorites. The remaining astronauts relay their findings back to a largely uninterested Earth.
Meanwhile, the Chinese, in order to retaliate for biological attacks by the US, cause a huge explosion next to an asteroid (2002OA), with the aim of deflecting it into Earth orbit and threatening the world with targeted precision strikes in the future. Unfortunately, their calculations are wrong as they didn't take into account the size of the asteroid which could cause a Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. The asteroid strikes Earth, critically damaging the planetary ecosystem. The Titan team members are presumably the last humans left alive.
As the surviving astronauts slowly die of disease and in-fighting, they decide to try to ensure life will continue to survive: they take a flask of bacteria and drop it into a crater filled with liquid water, in the hope that some form of life will develop.
The novel's final sequence depicts the final two crew members reincarnated on Titan several billion years in the future. The sun has entered its red giant phase, warming the Saturnian system and aiding the evolution of life, in the form of strange, intelligent beetle-like creatures, on Titan. The astronauts watch as the creatures build a fleet of starships to seed and colonize new solar systems before the expanding sun boils off the surface of the moon.
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
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.
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.
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.
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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...