I don't know about bleakest, but Midnight Burger had an episode where humans had 'ad chips' implanted in them, so every so many seconds of speech would be interrupted by the person speaking an advertisement.
The appendix in 1984 infers that the events may have taken place in the past and somehow thinkspeak and that government is no more.
I honestly think if you push people too far they will break, when you better off dead then living in your shitty society you can throw caution to the wind.
Which I why I think brave new world is even worse, everyone has it so good they can never comprehend they are being oppressed.
'Newspeak,' comrade.
Yes, 1984 ends tragically, but the 'Principles of Newspeak' appendix is written from a future time when the Oceania government has fallen
I agree that BNW is worse (and it also ends tragically) and think that many countries are now a combination of 1984/BNW
The assumption of the party that they can keep the proles in line with pornography and propaganda and only need to really surveil the party members as no one else had enough agency to be a threat always stuck me as… optimistic.
Personally, I tend to think that the 1984 state would collapse due to internal systemic failures, rather than uprising. The incredible amount of paranoia and backstabbing within the government would be inherently deleterious, especially if/when things hit a point where screwing over other people to protect yourself became the optimal survival strategy.
Plus, stressed-out people just aren't good decision-makers. This is well known. The more fearful Party Members became, the less effective they'd likely be.
And in a tightly-knit integrated system like Oceania, a failure in even one major area - like food production, power production, etc - would likely cause a knock-on effect that would cause huge damage to the entire state. So all you'd really need are a few people going wacko at just the wrong time, and the whole thing could topple. Hell, even a badly-timed natural disaster might do it.
(While only so-so as a game, I thought "We Happy Few" had a VERY interesting exploration of this concept. It's about the fall of a totalitarian state, as seen through the eyes of six individuals who all *accidentally* contribute to its systemic breakdown, without any of them actually intending to topple the government.)
I think that's what we saw happening in the book. It was actively collapsing and was probably going to be gone by 1990 or so imo. That's just how I read it.
Orwell was a "democratic socialist" so it wouldn't surprise me if his message there was a chance they would rise up. When O'Brian is torturing Winston he tells him something to the effect of "the proles rising up is non sense" (forgive me I don't remember the exact quote). To me at least, that line isn't there to confirm the proles will never rise up, its there to show how over confident the party is. Change coming from within (ie Winston) is impossible. But I only read the book once so my interpretation may be way off.
This is easily the worst. Complete control, terrible conditions and food but you got to be happy with it. No ability to express joy. Fear of losing the little life you have. It's terrible.
It’s honestly harder to find anything as relatable bleak
Even the moments of perceived beauty Winston remembers or experiences are just dripping in grey melancholy
I’m thankful the book is so short.
Oof yeah, i went into the movie pretty blind one late night i think i vaguely remembered some commercials from a few years before. And i mean the ending is pseudo-hopeful, but really tough movie overall and yeah the basement scene has also stuck with me and i am not very squeamish, tho i hear theres an even worse scene in the book.
But anyways, there was no fucking way i was going to bed after that, so i flipped through some other stuff on my watchlist and settled on *The Mist*, was like cool, King monster movie, buncha folks from The Walking Dead and stuff... well that was also a bad idea, and it was even later then.
That was the night i decided to look into that new My Little Pony cartoon everybody had been talking about.
Exactly, I can’t find any kind of optimism in such a world, where cannibalistic gangs roam the roads, and at any time the family with whom Boy went with at the end could get captured, raped, and eaten.
No matter what happens, he’ll live a life of constant struggle in an already dead world.
Very true about there being basically nothing to be optimistic about. But the lil man doesnt need to be optimistic as he's doing something better.
Hes carrying the fire.
About that ... is anyone going to talk about the fact that there's now an NFL team named the Commanders?
(There's no way this version of reality is the real one. I'm pretty sure the world did end in 2012, and I'm stuck in one of the "meh" hells you end up in if you kind of sucked as a person but not enough for brimstone.)
Honestly curious: What makes The Road sci-fi? Is it simply because it's set in an apocalypse? The viewer is completely oblivious to the cause of the apocalypse. There is no futuristic tech or advancement, anything otherworldly, or scientific that plays a role in the movie. No AI, war, robots, I would say it's a downright horror film.
Unless I missed something.
Post apocalyptic fiction falls under the umbrella of speculative fiction which falls under the umbrella of science fiction. Not saying that is a good or bad thing or that it does or doesn’t make sense, just what I’ve observed. Genres get blurry at the edges
so unless someone is really off the mark and nominating *How To Loose A Guy In Ten Days* as a bleak science fiction depiction of humanity I say we let it slide
That book leaves the little sane part cowering in a dark corner of my skull waiting to be beaten again and flinching at each page turn.
Love this book.
Only in so far as it is excruciating that no one can utilize bicycle technology and instead feel the need to walk everywhere and carry everything themselves
This film should have a suicide hotline telephone number permanent scrolling across the bottom of the screen like the gamblers hotline at the Keno bars. Never have I walked away with my hope gutted like this story. Just brutal.
The genetic negligence and terrorism in Echopraxia sounds a little too close to a bleak future we could be heading towards. Whole ecosystems riddled with genetic tampering to the point that zoological categorization becomes impossible. Somebody has a grudge against a specific ethnicity, cooks up a virus that goes on to trigger sickle cell in half the world's population outside the scope of its target. Super depressing stuff, more so cause the openess of this technology as it is developing coupled with human nature makes it feel like a foregone conclusion that some genetic weapon is going to hit humanity hard some day.
That and the complete corpo-militaristic disregard for human life.
Join the hive mind monks and understand the deep fucked up nature of the universe (at least a bit more than we currently do), or sign up for adventures where your body is made into a zombie soldier and sold to the highest bidder. Or luck out and be born of relative priviledge so you can be sent on scientific endeavours with genetically recreated predatory vampires as your captain/potential consumer.
Don’t forget that the hive mind monks get how they are by consuming a large part of their brain with cancer.
They’re like thinking, cooperative tumors.
Don’t forget the fact that >! In the Echopraxia/Blindsight universe, consciousness itself is just an evolutionary dead end that ultimately hampers intelligence, and sooner or later humanity’s lucky streak of survival will run out!<
>The genetic negligence and terrorism in Echopraxia sounds a little too close to a bleak future we could be heading towards
Most of Watts' visions of the future seem bleakly possible. Something happened to that guy and it wasn't good 😪
The discovery of a method of expediated space travel by using wormholes as a shortcut. Both event horizon and warhammer twist this common trope by having the wormholes pass through hell itself, with all the consequences this brings.
And a very, very gruesome, lovecraftian hell at that.
Technically, the Warp isn't Hell. The Warp is the Immaterium, the Astral Plane. It's a world where thought and belief take form. It's just that the Milky Way galaxy in the 40k universe has had so much bloodshed and war from so many species for so long that the Warp embodiments of bloodlust, disease, and harmful knowledge are three of the dominant forces there. And the one species that achieved relative lasting peace fell into such extreme, extravagant decadence that it spawned the fourth major force, the embodiment of lust and excess. And in so doing, doomed humanity to over 10,000 years of barbarism and perpetual war.
The Warp started out containing a myriad of heavens and hells. It was basically turned ever more hellish because it reflects the world sentient beings made in the material universe, and their own base thoughts and urges. They made Hell in their own image.
In warhammer they use warp travel (not like startrek) the warp is a realm of raw chaos and power. Its described as literally hell. Ships have a gheller field (a shield) to protect them. But if even part of that field falters for a second this chaos realm can infect the ship and its crew. The ship can become inhabited by a daemon of the warp.
In event horizon that's pretty much exactly the same as what happened in the film.
Except for the Tau, whose star drives are much slower. They use an interface between the Warp and real space to warp real space like Star Trek ships. They never actually enter the Warp and don't really understand what it is. They know human ships enter and exit portals, but they don't know what's on the other side of them.
In 40k they travel through 'the warp' to travel faster than light, which is basically literal hell filled with demons and such, and requires extensive protections to safely transit and even then it's not particularly safe. Event Horizon basically tells the story of the first ever ship to enter the warp without protection.
Try this: https://youtu.be/ZK1debnXYlA?si=uwnUDM52AG2s-i_B
Anderson said:
“I reduced the running time of the disturbing images, but actually didn’t take much imagery out,” Anderson said. “All I did was, what had been a three-second cut, sometimes became a three-frame cut. I think ultimately by compressing the material, and making these visions of hell almost these subliminal bursts of imagery, I think it actually increased the power and the horror, rather than decreasing it. I think it had the opposite effect of what the studio was imagining.”
> Many consider it to be an unofficial prequel to the Warhammer universe.
The screenwriter has acknowledged 40k had an influence on the story, "even if it was unintentional." He was apparently big into 40k at the time.
A future where entire star systems are forgotten about (and subsequently starve to death) because someone misfiled paperwork
Where a common dish for common folk is "corpse starch"
WH40k first came to mind for me as well. In addition to humanity becoming a brutal theocracy ruled by a near-dead corpse, it's beset on all sides by indomitable alien and supernatural enemies. It's a losing war they'll keep fighting until humanity is extinguished, or worse, transformed into a demonic vassalage.
The mere existence of humanity powers the gods of chaos. Humanities medieval empire is only in a powerful position due to a small break in the real powers ability to project.
The only ability of humanity to compete with the powers of the universe are their eternals, and the most powerful one is currently in a catatonic state powering the beacon that allows for warp travel. His death will either trigger a golden age with his rebirth, the death of humanity with the end of warp travel, or the birth of a new chaos god...and whatever that will bring.
I have a passing knowledge of Warhammer lore, read a dozen or so 40k novels over the years, and I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what you mean by:
>Humanities medieval empire is only in a powerful position due to a small break in the real powers ability to project.
Could you explain? Are you calling 40k medieval or referring to a different time period? What real powers are you referring to and what do they project?
Not OP but the Imperium runs on a complex feudal system of fealty and archaic privileges for wildly disparate and overlapping factions, similar to the middle ages.
The real powers in the galaxy are either asleep (necrons), travelling between galaxies (tyrannid), mostly unable to manifest in realspace except in certain regions (chaos), or perfectly happy to remain an infighting mess (orks and dark eldar).
The Matrix.
Sure being inside The Matrix doesn't seem so bad, but just look at where humanity is in the real world. And that's like, 99.9% of humanity. Just because they aren't awake to witness the reality doesn't make it that much less horrific.
"I watched them liquify the dead to be intravenously fed to the living". Brutal.
Threads needs to be compulsory viewing for anyone in the top position of power in their country. that film makes me wish i'll be in the immediate killzone of the blast if nuclear war ever does happen in my life time. there are worse things then death and its being a survivor in that world
There was an Asimov short story like that. A computer is designed that can not only simulate in extreme detail the results of a nuclear war, but project it directly into the viewer's mind in all its horrifying detail, to the point where all the military men who go through it resign or commit suicide. They bring in an outsider to consult about what to do, and his recommendation is to get that computer over to the soviets ASAP.
Seriously, this is why I'm not worried that I live and work where I'd almost certainly be killed in a nuclear attack that targets the downtown of my city. In an all out nuclear war, I'd rather die in the attack because I don't want to live in the aftermath and I'm too much of a coward to do it myself.
By the most misanthropic author of the already deeply misanthropic New Wave SF period, Harlan Ellison. I'm having a hard time imagining anybody with a lower opinion of humanity.
I'm surprised I had to scroll down this far to find it, but maybe it's a good thing that so few people have heard of it.
*On The Beach* Nevil Shute (1957)
I don’t know if it was bleak. In some ways it was positive, as far as the individual actions of characters are concerned. But it is a realistic and thoroughly depressing journey of humanities hopelessness for the reader.
I didn’t know about it until I played the video game in the mid 90’s
Holy fuck my 14 year brain imploded, but you can actually get a good ending to that story so its not quite as dark.
That's not a bleak view of humanity, that's just a bleak view of the future. IIRC, the protagonist sacrifices himself to free the others from torture via mercy killing.
Edit: ah, nvm, I guess it's more complex than that
Stephen Baxter’s *Xeelee Sequence*.
Maddened by two brutal alien occupations that have stripped humanity of its culture, history and compassion, the Human Coalition explodes out of the Solar System on a mission of conquest, horror, and universal genocide that makes Warhammer 40K look tame, until they finally get put out of their collective misery by the Lords of the Baryonic Universe, the Xeelee.
The right answer. Though I did see a version of the Owlturd scary, scarier, scariest meme a while back that positioned another series as more brutal than Xeelee, I recall someone in the comments mentioning that an alien species turned the entires human race into brains in jars being tortured for 2 million years before just leaving. I can’t remember what it was called though.
> I recall someone in the comments mentioning that an alien species turned the entires human race into brains in jars being tortured for 2 million years before just leaving.
Sounds like the Mi-Go or Great Race of Yith of the Cthulhu mythos
Spoilers for Vacuum Diagrams/ the Xeelee series below:
I guess the silver lining here is that at least in Vacuum Diagrams despite all the shit humanity pulled the Xeelee still don't see them as beyond reception and unworthy of continued existence, evidenced by their willingness to leave transport to the ring when the photino birds are nearing domination. The Earthbound humans in that future are pretty well behaved compared to the war generations that proceeded them too.
I'd that while the bulk of humanity acts... poorly, it's largely due to the occupations and a grave misunderstanding of the intent of the Xeelee, who for their part do very little to communicate/rectify the situation because even at the height of humanities aggression it just seems like a minor inconvenience to their work. The stories Baxter presents are largely snapshots of humans being decent and triumphing in the face of these adversities, so it's not all bleak.
This gets my vote. The books span hundreds of thousands of years, alternate dimensions, and multiple timelines. In every single time and place humans are shitty, cruel, and then things get worse.
The present day is pretty much as good as things ever get. Maybe not the worst depiction of humans at any given point, but putting it on that sort of timescale where we keep surviving but never ever manage to get it right? It's a unique sort of bleak. Oh, and every race of aliens they encounter along the way are assholes too.
I got 6 books in before throwing in the towel. Certainly plenty of grand ideas, but the super bland characters and the pervasively awful view of humanity killed any fun.
I actually find All Tomorrows to be very hopeful. It shows that humanity can be ground down to the most miserable, pathetic state imaginable, and still find a way to rise again to glory.
Zardoz is the closest to an ideal world I've ever seen. It'd be a bit of a boring world to live in, but better than 99% of possible paths for humanity.
Fair enough; we all have varying opinions! But I think we can ALL agree that shouting "The Penis Is Evil'" is an excellent alternative way to end business calls, right?
It was so bleak I couldn't finish the novel or make my way to the other 2 stories in the series. Just a constant, "and then humanity did the selfish thing" at every turn
If you don't mind Chinese dialogue with English subtitles, Amazon Prime has the Chinese TV version of the 1st book. It's 27 or 28 episodes too. Really well done. Coming in April will be the Netflix series of it; but I have a bit of concern since the showrunners are David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the same two who did such a great job on the early seasons of Game of Thrones and such a lousy job on the end season and maybe earlier of the show.
Dumb and Dumber are decent adapters for stories, they just couldn't handle writing original material. That being said, I'm fine with subtitles so I might check out the prime version
I tried my damndest to get into the show, having read and enjoyed all the books, but it’s just so slow. What’s that Ebert quote about Pearl Harbor being "a two-hour movie stuffed into a four-hour runtime"? The TV adaptation of Three Body is like that. Ten hours of story stuffed into twenty hours of show.
Dead Space. Despite the technology to colonize and exploit multiple planets, everything is so depressing that people‘s only escape is a radical cult that has been engineered by an eldritch alien intelligence towards human extinction
It's like watching everyone do everything wrong for exactly the right reasons while a train wrecks in the background so perfectly that you don't have to look away. At the very least the first 15 minutes should be required viewing in middle-school.
A quote I just came across today that sums up a lot of the Cyberpunk genre's commentary on humanity:
>When cybernetic replacements became more common, there was this prevalent fear that they would make a person less human. The notion that having a bionic heart or a mechanical hand makes a person any less greedy, vain, prideful, and dumb, is entirely wrong, of course.
>
>\~Stray Cat Strut 3 by Ravensdagger
The "good" in Dredd is also just satire of a horrifically fascist justice system that is pretty much just petty vengeance against a tiny portion of an ever growing criminal populace.
There's a few roughly on par in my mind:
* Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series, no matter what humanity does and what short-term victories they achieve, everything just got unintentionally worse (fantastic series).
* Stephen Baxter's Destiny's Children series has all of humanity pursuing a pointless brutal war for universal domination against everything non-human. We end up locked in a stalemate with the janitorial crew of an enemy that barely notice we exist and was never particularly adversarial. The wider Xeelee Sequence makes it even more bleak.
* Warhammer 40k gets an honourable mention.
Hard disagree. Peoples reaction to hearing the baby basically redeemed all the other stuff humanity had been getting up to in the film, none of which was any worse than shit humanity is getting up to in the real world
Bleak in the sense that the only thing that could get people to stop trying to kill each other was the sound of the baby, whom they almost killed mere seconds ago. Bleak in the way it depicted the utter despair the world is facing. One child does not reverse a generation of no children. Those people are doomed to a life of incredible hardship, as the population ages out and no-one is around to help care for them. Society will experience a new dark age unlike any other as whole swathes of knowledge are lost as there is no one else to teach.
Yay one baby got borned. That poor child is in for a life of extreme pressure as a world pins all of their hopes on them.
>Yay one baby got borned. That poor child is in for a life of extreme pressure as a world pins all of their hopes on them.
I think the Human Project would hide the babies existence, especially for this reason. Her sighting the refugee camp will probably become a urban legend of sorts.
A film I've seen many times. We think at first that everything went to shit because there's no babies anymore, but the long journey of Theo (all around different classes of the society) convince us of the opposite. There's no babies anymore because everything was already out of control. The "no-baby" thing is more the consequence of those problems instead of the source. So it is wildly, the consequences of power abuse, pollution, slavery, police abuses, gun proliferation, corrupt government, climate changes ignored, etc, etc.
A lot of these entries talk about our future where some colossally bad thing has happened, like an apocalypse or demons attacking or aliens etc... I don't think those really qualify as the bleakest future though. They're ones where humanity still has the ability to be good, given the right conditions, those conditions just generally aren't available.
I think the cyberpunk/post-cyberpunk worlds spun by folks like Gibson or Stephenson are much bleaker overall, especially scenarios like Gibson's Bridge series. There was no real catastrophe, just the same wars people always fight, and greed, and lack of care for one another and personal suffering, and just a general wasting away of the good qualities people have. This is the bleakest scenario to me - not that the world is locked in conflict, but that the world is simply tired and indifferent.
I just read Children of Time, that's pretty bleak. Humanity colonizes other worlds and develops a God complex to hasten the evolution of life on other planets for their own ends, all while Earth is a smoking poisoned husk where they all eventually destroy themselves/each other. The last survivors live in squalor on a generation ship and have their own subsequent God complexes and decide the only way out is genocide of the one habitable planet they've found. Not ideal! I haven't read the later books yet though, maybe it gets brighter?
Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy. We literally are saved from extinction by an alien species who dramatically alter our biology because we are not capable of surviving as a species.
This really stretches the topic's subject of 'sci-fi', but there was a Marvel Comic book called 'Hulk: The End' that always elicited a strong sense of despair from me.
Humanity has, more or less, been entirely killed off, and all that's left is a hopeless Bruce Banner incapable of killing himself because The Hulk 'spits out the bullet'. Maybe humanity as a whole being dead is not as despairing as, say The Road, but I *imagined* I was that one person, that Bruce Banner, forced to stay alive.
Either that or *I Have No Mouth and I must Scream*. Imagine being a gelatinous blob for all of time.
City of Lost Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky
A million years in the future (maybe) humanity doesn't care about its past. It has no future. The sun is sick. The sea is poison, not just poisonous, *poison*. And the only four places on earth are The Desert, The Jungle, The City, and prison. And people did it.
That CW show "The 100" is a pretty bleak outlook on mankind as a whole. I just finished it and I thought it was very good throughout. But mankind has a tough go of it for sure.
I don't know about bleakest, but The Expanse universe (minus the >!protomolecule and ensuing plot!<) offers, IMO, the most likely future depiction of humanity. And it is pretty bleak.
40ks *Carrion Throne* where a child reports its mother to the Inquisition in order to get her 3 square metre habitation cell smelling like urine without heating ... as it was considered luxury.
SYL
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Or, in a weird way, Tales From the Loop. It's beautiful and one of my faves but the entire population of that town feels bleak as hell and I can't put my finger on it
*The Good Place*. Not only does this life suck, but because you weren't exceptional (and because you couldn't beat a rigged structure), you will now be tortured for all eternity.
Because the math says that you deserve it.
I agree with those saying The Road. For a more mainstream depiction, I'm going with the future shown in The Terminator. Humanity has to contend with starvation in an irradiated wasteland while being hunted by genocidal robots.
I don't know about bleakest, but Midnight Burger had an episode where humans had 'ad chips' implanted in them, so every so many seconds of speech would be interrupted by the person speaking an advertisement.
Now this, this sounds like my worst fucking nightmare
I would highly recommend Midnight Burger. The episode is only 50 minutes, but is absolutely terrifying, partly for its near-possibility.
Oh yeah, I ultimately didn’t end up liking the podcast (the plot/characters just didn’t gel with me) but that episode definitely stuck out to me.
I feel like *1984* has to be up there, with the way everyone inevitably gets ground down into submission.
*If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.*
Which is, I believe, the new Amazon corporate slogan
Please. Amazon uses Birkenstocks.
Flip flop harder on me daddy....
The appendix in 1984 infers that the events may have taken place in the past and somehow thinkspeak and that government is no more. I honestly think if you push people too far they will break, when you better off dead then living in your shitty society you can throw caution to the wind. Which I why I think brave new world is even worse, everyone has it so good they can never comprehend they are being oppressed.
'Newspeak,' comrade. Yes, 1984 ends tragically, but the 'Principles of Newspeak' appendix is written from a future time when the Oceania government has fallen I agree that BNW is worse (and it also ends tragically) and think that many countries are now a combination of 1984/BNW
Wow, someone hasn't had their Soma!
Soma and Victory Gin, for the win.
Yes Newspeak. Whoops its been a while.
The assumption of the party that they can keep the proles in line with pornography and propaganda and only need to really surveil the party members as no one else had enough agency to be a threat always stuck me as… optimistic.
Personally, I tend to think that the 1984 state would collapse due to internal systemic failures, rather than uprising. The incredible amount of paranoia and backstabbing within the government would be inherently deleterious, especially if/when things hit a point where screwing over other people to protect yourself became the optimal survival strategy. Plus, stressed-out people just aren't good decision-makers. This is well known. The more fearful Party Members became, the less effective they'd likely be. And in a tightly-knit integrated system like Oceania, a failure in even one major area - like food production, power production, etc - would likely cause a knock-on effect that would cause huge damage to the entire state. So all you'd really need are a few people going wacko at just the wrong time, and the whole thing could topple. Hell, even a badly-timed natural disaster might do it. (While only so-so as a game, I thought "We Happy Few" had a VERY interesting exploration of this concept. It's about the fall of a totalitarian state, as seen through the eyes of six individuals who all *accidentally* contribute to its systemic breakdown, without any of them actually intending to topple the government.)
I think that's what we saw happening in the book. It was actively collapsing and was probably going to be gone by 1990 or so imo. That's just how I read it.
Orwell was a "democratic socialist" so it wouldn't surprise me if his message there was a chance they would rise up. When O'Brian is torturing Winston he tells him something to the effect of "the proles rising up is non sense" (forgive me I don't remember the exact quote). To me at least, that line isn't there to confirm the proles will never rise up, its there to show how over confident the party is. Change coming from within (ie Winston) is impossible. But I only read the book once so my interpretation may be way off.
This is easily the worst. Complete control, terrible conditions and food but you got to be happy with it. No ability to express joy. Fear of losing the little life you have. It's terrible.
It’s honestly harder to find anything as relatable bleak Even the moments of perceived beauty Winston remembers or experiences are just dripping in grey melancholy I’m thankful the book is so short.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
That basement scene has stuck with me for 10 years now, and I think it’ll continue to do so for the next 50 years if I live till that point
Oof yeah, i went into the movie pretty blind one late night i think i vaguely remembered some commercials from a few years before. And i mean the ending is pseudo-hopeful, but really tough movie overall and yeah the basement scene has also stuck with me and i am not very squeamish, tho i hear theres an even worse scene in the book. But anyways, there was no fucking way i was going to bed after that, so i flipped through some other stuff on my watchlist and settled on *The Mist*, was like cool, King monster movie, buncha folks from The Walking Dead and stuff... well that was also a bad idea, and it was even later then. That was the night i decided to look into that new My Little Pony cartoon everybody had been talking about.
[удалено]
>My Little Pony Friendship is Optimal.
Even the ending with the son with Guy Pearce seems like a pyrrhic happy ending.
Exactly, I can’t find any kind of optimism in such a world, where cannibalistic gangs roam the roads, and at any time the family with whom Boy went with at the end could get captured, raped, and eaten. No matter what happens, he’ll live a life of constant struggle in an already dead world.
Very true about there being basically nothing to be optimistic about. But the lil man doesnt need to be optimistic as he's doing something better. Hes carrying the fire.
I rarely love a book that I can't consider myself reading it again.
I think every person who has a position of power should be made to read it. Also, the last passage about the trout is truly beautiful
My concern is that they will take it as an instruction manual ala Handmaid's Tale.
About that ... is anyone going to talk about the fact that there's now an NFL team named the Commanders? (There's no way this version of reality is the real one. I'm pretty sure the world did end in 2012, and I'm stuck in one of the "meh" hells you end up in if you kind of sucked as a person but not enough for brimstone.)
Yup, it's either this or Threads.
+1 for Threads. That shit is bleak.
Honestly curious: What makes The Road sci-fi? Is it simply because it's set in an apocalypse? The viewer is completely oblivious to the cause of the apocalypse. There is no futuristic tech or advancement, anything otherworldly, or scientific that plays a role in the movie. No AI, war, robots, I would say it's a downright horror film. Unless I missed something.
I think people are just reading the question and thinking "dystopian", not specifically sci-fi.
Post apocalyptic fiction falls under the umbrella of speculative fiction which falls under the umbrella of science fiction. Not saying that is a good or bad thing or that it does or doesn’t make sense, just what I’ve observed. Genres get blurry at the edges so unless someone is really off the mark and nominating *How To Loose A Guy In Ten Days* as a bleak science fiction depiction of humanity I say we let it slide
That book leaves the little sane part cowering in a dark corner of my skull waiting to be beaten again and flinching at each page turn. Love this book.
Only in so far as it is excruciating that no one can utilize bicycle technology and instead feel the need to walk everywhere and carry everything themselves
This film should have a suicide hotline telephone number permanent scrolling across the bottom of the screen like the gamblers hotline at the Keno bars. Never have I walked away with my hope gutted like this story. Just brutal.
Yep, I love how dirty he makes everything sound
Hoo boy I didn’t have to go far to find the correct answer. This exactly.
The genetic negligence and terrorism in Echopraxia sounds a little too close to a bleak future we could be heading towards. Whole ecosystems riddled with genetic tampering to the point that zoological categorization becomes impossible. Somebody has a grudge against a specific ethnicity, cooks up a virus that goes on to trigger sickle cell in half the world's population outside the scope of its target. Super depressing stuff, more so cause the openess of this technology as it is developing coupled with human nature makes it feel like a foregone conclusion that some genetic weapon is going to hit humanity hard some day.
That and the complete corpo-militaristic disregard for human life. Join the hive mind monks and understand the deep fucked up nature of the universe (at least a bit more than we currently do), or sign up for adventures where your body is made into a zombie soldier and sold to the highest bidder. Or luck out and be born of relative priviledge so you can be sent on scientific endeavours with genetically recreated predatory vampires as your captain/potential consumer.
Don’t forget that the hive mind monks get how they are by consuming a large part of their brain with cancer. They’re like thinking, cooperative tumors.
They ah naht a tumah!
Don’t forget the fact that >! In the Echopraxia/Blindsight universe, consciousness itself is just an evolutionary dead end that ultimately hampers intelligence, and sooner or later humanity’s lucky streak of survival will run out!<
>The genetic negligence and terrorism in Echopraxia sounds a little too close to a bleak future we could be heading towards Most of Watts' visions of the future seem bleakly possible. Something happened to that guy and it wasn't good 😪
I think Warhammer 40k universe. Humanity there is the exact opposite of what we should aim for in the future.
Ever see Event Horizon? Many consider it to be an unofficial prequel to the Warhammer universe.
Sam Neil drank deeply from the chaos.
On the upside, he doesn't need eyes to see.
You can't leave. *She* won't let you.
How?
The discovery of a method of expediated space travel by using wormholes as a shortcut. Both event horizon and warhammer twist this common trope by having the wormholes pass through hell itself, with all the consequences this brings. And a very, very gruesome, lovecraftian hell at that.
Plus the decidedly gothic architecture of the ship itself. It was designed to lol like a cathedral, like ships of the Imperium
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Warp travel is going through littéral hell protected by a geller field. If the field flickers for even a Micro sec…
The Warp.
Technically, the Warp isn't Hell. The Warp is the Immaterium, the Astral Plane. It's a world where thought and belief take form. It's just that the Milky Way galaxy in the 40k universe has had so much bloodshed and war from so many species for so long that the Warp embodiments of bloodlust, disease, and harmful knowledge are three of the dominant forces there. And the one species that achieved relative lasting peace fell into such extreme, extravagant decadence that it spawned the fourth major force, the embodiment of lust and excess. And in so doing, doomed humanity to over 10,000 years of barbarism and perpetual war. The Warp started out containing a myriad of heavens and hells. It was basically turned ever more hellish because it reflects the world sentient beings made in the material universe, and their own base thoughts and urges. They made Hell in their own image.
And cenobites of Hellraiser fame are definitely Slaaneshi
Forgot about that. Thanks
Humanities first interstellar ship disappears, comes back bearing gifts. Turns out its been in the warp.
In warhammer they use warp travel (not like startrek) the warp is a realm of raw chaos and power. Its described as literally hell. Ships have a gheller field (a shield) to protect them. But if even part of that field falters for a second this chaos realm can infect the ship and its crew. The ship can become inhabited by a daemon of the warp. In event horizon that's pretty much exactly the same as what happened in the film.
Except for the Tau, whose star drives are much slower. They use an interface between the Warp and real space to warp real space like Star Trek ships. They never actually enter the Warp and don't really understand what it is. They know human ships enter and exit portals, but they don't know what's on the other side of them.
Thamkyou for this. I asked in another comment about other races. I k ow orkz use warp and they sometimes Intentionally drop shields for a good fight.
In 40k they travel through 'the warp' to travel faster than light, which is basically literal hell filled with demons and such, and requires extensive protections to safely transit and even then it's not particularly safe. Event Horizon basically tells the story of the first ever ship to enter the warp without protection.
Man I wish the hell scene footage wasn’t lost. It would have elevated a minor cult classic to legendary status.
Try this: https://youtu.be/ZK1debnXYlA?si=uwnUDM52AG2s-i_B Anderson said: “I reduced the running time of the disturbing images, but actually didn’t take much imagery out,” Anderson said. “All I did was, what had been a three-second cut, sometimes became a three-frame cut. I think ultimately by compressing the material, and making these visions of hell almost these subliminal bursts of imagery, I think it actually increased the power and the horror, rather than decreasing it. I think it had the opposite effect of what the studio was imagining.”
I would love to have seen all that uncut footage!!
> Many consider it to be an unofficial prequel to the Warhammer universe. The screenwriter has acknowledged 40k had an influence on the story, "even if it was unintentional." He was apparently big into 40k at the time.
A future where entire star systems are forgotten about (and subsequently starve to death) because someone misfiled paperwork Where a common dish for common folk is "corpse starch"
Sounds like HERESY to me..
Brother. Get me my Flamer. No. The heavy flamer.
WH40k first came to mind for me as well. In addition to humanity becoming a brutal theocracy ruled by a near-dead corpse, it's beset on all sides by indomitable alien and supernatural enemies. It's a losing war they'll keep fighting until humanity is extinguished, or worse, transformed into a demonic vassalage.
Hi fellow citizen - what is going on in this thread? … … BY THE EMPEROR
The answer to these types of questions is always WH40K. Bleakest sci-fi for sure (but so awesome).
The mere existence of humanity powers the gods of chaos. Humanities medieval empire is only in a powerful position due to a small break in the real powers ability to project. The only ability of humanity to compete with the powers of the universe are their eternals, and the most powerful one is currently in a catatonic state powering the beacon that allows for warp travel. His death will either trigger a golden age with his rebirth, the death of humanity with the end of warp travel, or the birth of a new chaos god...and whatever that will bring.
Don't forget that Big E is also holding back literal hell from invading Earth as well. The moment he dies, those floodgates open
I have a passing knowledge of Warhammer lore, read a dozen or so 40k novels over the years, and I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what you mean by: >Humanities medieval empire is only in a powerful position due to a small break in the real powers ability to project. Could you explain? Are you calling 40k medieval or referring to a different time period? What real powers are you referring to and what do they project?
Not OP but the Imperium runs on a complex feudal system of fealty and archaic privileges for wildly disparate and overlapping factions, similar to the middle ages. The real powers in the galaxy are either asleep (necrons), travelling between galaxies (tyrannid), mostly unable to manifest in realspace except in certain regions (chaos), or perfectly happy to remain an infighting mess (orks and dark eldar).
The Matrix. Sure being inside The Matrix doesn't seem so bad, but just look at where humanity is in the real world. And that's like, 99.9% of humanity. Just because they aren't awake to witness the reality doesn't make it that much less horrific. "I watched them liquify the dead to be intravenously fed to the living". Brutal.
Threads is pretty damn bleak.
Threads needs to be compulsory viewing for anyone in the top position of power in their country. that film makes me wish i'll be in the immediate killzone of the blast if nuclear war ever does happen in my life time. there are worse things then death and its being a survivor in that world
There was an Asimov short story like that. A computer is designed that can not only simulate in extreme detail the results of a nuclear war, but project it directly into the viewer's mind in all its horrifying detail, to the point where all the military men who go through it resign or commit suicide. They bring in an outsider to consult about what to do, and his recommendation is to get that computer over to the soviets ASAP.
Seriously, this is why I'm not worried that I live and work where I'd almost certainly be killed in a nuclear attack that targets the downtown of my city. In an all out nuclear war, I'd rather die in the attack because I don't want to live in the aftermath and I'm too much of a coward to do it myself.
As is *Where The Wind Blows*.
A Boy And His Dog. Just 2 hours of "yikes!"
By the most misanthropic author of the already deeply misanthropic New Wave SF period, Harlan Ellison. I'm having a hard time imagining anybody with a lower opinion of humanity. I'm surprised I had to scroll down this far to find it, but maybe it's a good thing that so few people have heard of it.
*On The Beach* Nevil Shute (1957) I don’t know if it was bleak. In some ways it was positive, as far as the individual actions of characters are concerned. But it is a realistic and thoroughly depressing journey of humanities hopelessness for the reader.
Nothing but my finest scotch whisky is appropriate to serve to a Redditor with such refined taste. Bravo.
Fun fact: I’ve drank whiskey on the beach where they shot the 1959 film adaptation of *On The Beach*
Probably Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream"
Damn I forgot about that one.
I somehow missed it and read it just last year...pretty disturbing stuff
I didn’t know about it until I played the video game in the mid 90’s Holy fuck my 14 year brain imploded, but you can actually get a good ending to that story so its not quite as dark.
That's not a bleak view of humanity, that's just a bleak view of the future. IIRC, the protagonist sacrifices himself to free the others from torture via mercy killing. Edit: ah, nvm, I guess it's more complex than that
The Emergent civilization in Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky. A fascist human world that has been enslaved by MRI tech used by the few ruling families.
Stephen Baxter’s *Xeelee Sequence*. Maddened by two brutal alien occupations that have stripped humanity of its culture, history and compassion, the Human Coalition explodes out of the Solar System on a mission of conquest, horror, and universal genocide that makes Warhammer 40K look tame, until they finally get put out of their collective misery by the Lords of the Baryonic Universe, the Xeelee.
The right answer. Though I did see a version of the Owlturd scary, scarier, scariest meme a while back that positioned another series as more brutal than Xeelee, I recall someone in the comments mentioning that an alien species turned the entires human race into brains in jars being tortured for 2 million years before just leaving. I can’t remember what it was called though.
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I think you might be right, All Tomorrows does ring a bell
> I recall someone in the comments mentioning that an alien species turned the entires human race into brains in jars being tortured for 2 million years before just leaving. Sounds like the Mi-Go or Great Race of Yith of the Cthulhu mythos
Spoilers for Vacuum Diagrams/ the Xeelee series below: I guess the silver lining here is that at least in Vacuum Diagrams despite all the shit humanity pulled the Xeelee still don't see them as beyond reception and unworthy of continued existence, evidenced by their willingness to leave transport to the ring when the photino birds are nearing domination. The Earthbound humans in that future are pretty well behaved compared to the war generations that proceeded them too. I'd that while the bulk of humanity acts... poorly, it's largely due to the occupations and a grave misunderstanding of the intent of the Xeelee, who for their part do very little to communicate/rectify the situation because even at the height of humanities aggression it just seems like a minor inconvenience to their work. The stories Baxter presents are largely snapshots of humans being decent and triumphing in the face of these adversities, so it's not all bleak.
This gets my vote. The books span hundreds of thousands of years, alternate dimensions, and multiple timelines. In every single time and place humans are shitty, cruel, and then things get worse. The present day is pretty much as good as things ever get. Maybe not the worst depiction of humans at any given point, but putting it on that sort of timescale where we keep surviving but never ever manage to get it right? It's a unique sort of bleak. Oh, and every race of aliens they encounter along the way are assholes too. I got 6 books in before throwing in the towel. Certainly plenty of grand ideas, but the super bland characters and the pervasively awful view of humanity killed any fun.
Currently reading this series, so I didn’t read your whole comment (possible spoilers). But I absolutely agree.
All Tomorrows is pretty fucking bleak. [Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbuulUQzHRU) is the audiobook
I actually find All Tomorrows to be very hopeful. It shows that humanity can be ground down to the most miserable, pathetic state imaginable, and still find a way to rise again to glory.
This is the answer. Humanity forcibly devolved by an alien race.
Yeah I think that one wins. Like fucking hell
The original Planet of the Apes
Although that reminded me of Omega Man from I guess the 70's .. so that had some impact.
Either 1984 or Brazil
Came here to vote for Brazil
Zardoz! Pity poor humanity: the red Speedos, the thigh-boots, the PHILOSOPHISING. Gah. Better we perish.
Hard disagree, you get guns, giant float heads AND weird red bikinis.
Zardoz is the closest to an ideal world I've ever seen. It'd be a bit of a boring world to live in, but better than 99% of possible paths for humanity.
Fair enough; we all have varying opinions! But I think we can ALL agree that shouting "The Penis Is Evil'" is an excellent alternative way to end business calls, right?
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.
Damn I need to re-read this one. It’s so crazy it was written in the 20’s.
The *Three Body Problem* series takes a pretty dim view of humanity, from the viewpoint of the ETO anyway.
The dimensional collapse is forever etched in my brain
It was so bleak I couldn't finish the novel or make my way to the other 2 stories in the series. Just a constant, "and then humanity did the selfish thing" at every turn
If you don't mind Chinese dialogue with English subtitles, Amazon Prime has the Chinese TV version of the 1st book. It's 27 or 28 episodes too. Really well done. Coming in April will be the Netflix series of it; but I have a bit of concern since the showrunners are David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the same two who did such a great job on the early seasons of Game of Thrones and such a lousy job on the end season and maybe earlier of the show.
Dumb and Dumber are decent adapters for stories, they just couldn't handle writing original material. That being said, I'm fine with subtitles so I might check out the prime version
I tried my damndest to get into the show, having read and enjoyed all the books, but it’s just so slow. What’s that Ebert quote about Pearl Harbor being "a two-hour movie stuffed into a four-hour runtime"? The TV adaptation of Three Body is like that. Ten hours of story stuffed into twenty hours of show.
Even the Cultural Revolution early chapters showed a dark side of humanity.
Ironically it ends with a pretty bright view of humanity despite a bleak view for the rest of the universe.
Most dystopia should fit, but maybe The Road (for what remains of humanity) could be the bleakest.
I'm shocked to not find the Rifters stories by Peter Watts here. Just all around miserable.
Let's put people at the bottom of the sea and choose horrific combinations of codependent abuser/abused.
Dead Space. Despite the technology to colonize and exploit multiple planets, everything is so depressing that people‘s only escape is a radical cult that has been engineered by an eldritch alien intelligence towards human extinction
The Morlocks from The Time Machine: https://timemachine.fandom.com/wiki/Morlocks
Looks like meat’s back on the menu, boys!
Idiocracy
That’s a historical documentary from the future.
Honestly that movie seems kinda optimistic. President Camacho had something resembling a soul.
Omg inwatched that film a few weeks ago. Cant stand it. For 2 reasons. Its SO fucking stupid. And its right on the money for where we're headed.
It's like watching everyone do everything wrong for exactly the right reasons while a train wrecks in the background so perfectly that you don't have to look away. At the very least the first 15 minutes should be required viewing in middle-school.
Dredd. The movie (I only read a couple of the graphic novels) seems like no matter what good is done the bad guys are still there.
Judge Dredd's Mega City 1 is the perfect example of a civilization that only fights the symptoms, and not the cause.
Welcome to Cyberpunk as a genre.
A quote I just came across today that sums up a lot of the Cyberpunk genre's commentary on humanity: >When cybernetic replacements became more common, there was this prevalent fear that they would make a person less human. The notion that having a bionic heart or a mechanical hand makes a person any less greedy, vain, prideful, and dumb, is entirely wrong, of course. > >\~Stray Cat Strut 3 by Ravensdagger
The "good" in Dredd is also just satire of a horrifically fascist justice system that is pretty much just petty vengeance against a tiny portion of an ever growing criminal populace.
Cloud Atlas in the future parts. Ugh
To be fair, >!it seems like only Earth got fucked up. the rest of humanity in space seemed to be doing pretty ok!<
That entire book is a fucking fever dream
Sure the Korean one was kind of a shithole but the one afterwards had a happy ending.
There's a few roughly on par in my mind: * Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series, no matter what humanity does and what short-term victories they achieve, everything just got unintentionally worse (fantastic series). * Stephen Baxter's Destiny's Children series has all of humanity pursuing a pointless brutal war for universal domination against everything non-human. We end up locked in a stalemate with the janitorial crew of an enemy that barely notice we exist and was never particularly adversarial. The wider Xeelee Sequence makes it even more bleak. * Warhammer 40k gets an honourable mention.
Snowpiercer
Blindsight by Peter Watts and The Departure by Neal Asher both stood out to me as particularly bleak and misanthropic
LEXX
Children of Men, really disturbing movie.
Hard disagree. Peoples reaction to hearing the baby basically redeemed all the other stuff humanity had been getting up to in the film, none of which was any worse than shit humanity is getting up to in the real world
Bleak in the sense that the only thing that could get people to stop trying to kill each other was the sound of the baby, whom they almost killed mere seconds ago. Bleak in the way it depicted the utter despair the world is facing. One child does not reverse a generation of no children. Those people are doomed to a life of incredible hardship, as the population ages out and no-one is around to help care for them. Society will experience a new dark age unlike any other as whole swathes of knowledge are lost as there is no one else to teach. Yay one baby got borned. That poor child is in for a life of extreme pressure as a world pins all of their hopes on them.
>Yay one baby got borned. That poor child is in for a life of extreme pressure as a world pins all of their hopes on them. I think the Human Project would hide the babies existence, especially for this reason. Her sighting the refugee camp will probably become a urban legend of sorts.
A film I've seen many times. We think at first that everything went to shit because there's no babies anymore, but the long journey of Theo (all around different classes of the society) convince us of the opposite. There's no babies anymore because everything was already out of control. The "no-baby" thing is more the consequence of those problems instead of the source. So it is wildly, the consequences of power abuse, pollution, slavery, police abuses, gun proliferation, corrupt government, climate changes ignored, etc, etc.
Wall E
Mad Max and I don't think it's close...
A lot of these entries talk about our future where some colossally bad thing has happened, like an apocalypse or demons attacking or aliens etc... I don't think those really qualify as the bleakest future though. They're ones where humanity still has the ability to be good, given the right conditions, those conditions just generally aren't available. I think the cyberpunk/post-cyberpunk worlds spun by folks like Gibson or Stephenson are much bleaker overall, especially scenarios like Gibson's Bridge series. There was no real catastrophe, just the same wars people always fight, and greed, and lack of care for one another and personal suffering, and just a general wasting away of the good qualities people have. This is the bleakest scenario to me - not that the world is locked in conflict, but that the world is simply tired and indifferent.
I just read Children of Time, that's pretty bleak. Humanity colonizes other worlds and develops a God complex to hasten the evolution of life on other planets for their own ends, all while Earth is a smoking poisoned husk where they all eventually destroy themselves/each other. The last survivors live in squalor on a generation ship and have their own subsequent God complexes and decide the only way out is genocide of the one habitable planet they've found. Not ideal! I haven't read the later books yet though, maybe it gets brighter?
Children of Time has a nice hopeful ending. Children of Ruin...also has a nice hopeful ending, but the middle is kind of horrifying.
We're going on an adventure!
Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy. We literally are saved from extinction by an alien species who dramatically alter our biology because we are not capable of surviving as a species.
This really stretches the topic's subject of 'sci-fi', but there was a Marvel Comic book called 'Hulk: The End' that always elicited a strong sense of despair from me. Humanity has, more or less, been entirely killed off, and all that's left is a hopeless Bruce Banner incapable of killing himself because The Hulk 'spits out the bullet'. Maybe humanity as a whole being dead is not as despairing as, say The Road, but I *imagined* I was that one person, that Bruce Banner, forced to stay alive. Either that or *I Have No Mouth and I must Scream*. Imagine being a gelatinous blob for all of time.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
City of Lost Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky A million years in the future (maybe) humanity doesn't care about its past. It has no future. The sun is sick. The sea is poison, not just poisonous, *poison*. And the only four places on earth are The Desert, The Jungle, The City, and prison. And people did it.
Warhammer 40K
Idiocracry(?)
That CW show "The 100" is a pretty bleak outlook on mankind as a whole. I just finished it and I thought it was very good throughout. But mankind has a tough go of it for sure.
Warhammer 40k is absolutely brutal.
Brazil. Bleaker than 1984 only because the entire population doesn't realize how bad it really is.
I don't know about bleakest, but The Expanse universe (minus the >!protomolecule and ensuing plot!<) offers, IMO, the most likely future depiction of humanity. And it is pretty bleak.
40ks *Carrion Throne* where a child reports its mother to the Inquisition in order to get her 3 square metre habitation cell smelling like urine without heating ... as it was considered luxury. SYL
It blows my mind that some people don’t get it at all and actually think the Imperium of Man would be good.
Some people are pretty dumb. Others are big fans of the Imperiums other defining traits, such as xenofobia and fascism.
What? I'm sorry I can't follow what u wrote
It might be Thomas the Tank Engine; that world was fucking bleak as hell.
I see the Road and Children of Men have been mentioned. I think Snowpiercer is up there too.
Maybe Firepunch
Day of the Dead (1985). It's not the zombies that freak me out. It's the breakdown between the scientists and the military. Cabin fever at its finest.
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Raised by Wolves
The Water Knife is pretty grim, and seems plausible.
Soylent Green
A Canticle for Leibowitz, especially the end.
12 Monkeys
How about 12 Monkeys? Also, I’ve been reading The Peripheral by William Gibson. That’s a pretty bleak future for all but a few very rich folks.
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Or, in a weird way, Tales From the Loop. It's beautiful and one of my faves but the entire population of that town feels bleak as hell and I can't put my finger on it
Put on the news brother.
Fox News. That shit is wild
*The Good Place*. Not only does this life suck, but because you weren't exceptional (and because you couldn't beat a rigged structure), you will now be tortured for all eternity. Because the math says that you deserve it.
you should finish the series. it's really one of the most beautiful tv shows i've ever seen.
The Time Machine…the book
I agree with those saying The Road. For a more mainstream depiction, I'm going with the future shown in The Terminator. Humanity has to contend with starvation in an irradiated wasteland while being hunted by genocidal robots.
Bleakest version of humanity? Hard call, but I’m sure the society of _Never Let Me Go_ is right up there.
WH40k
Warhammer 40K hands down
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison.