Pesimistic Books About The Future?
 

DOES ANYONE KNOW ANYGOOD ONES BESIDE 1984?

Welcome to the forum.

It may be something of a cliché, but one possible answer is "most 1950s British science fiction"....

.... more usefully, <A HREF="http://www.dvdtalk.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&action=showpost&postid=2105952#2105952" target="_blank">here</a> is a list of apocalyptic fiction from an earlier thread. They won't all be pessimistic, however.

A short list of dystopian/1984-esque novels is <A HREF="http://www.dvdtalk.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&action=showpost&postid=2453308#2453308" target="_blank">here</a>.

"A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess (one of my favorites) is a pretty downtrodden view of the future. I read the 21 chapter version and wasn't expecting it to become a coming-of-age story.

<b>Stand on Zanzibar</b> by John Brunner is a good example. A <i>lot</i> of late sixties and early seventies science fiction novels and stories are really pessimistic about the future.

Wow, I was just about to ask a similar question about bad future/end of the world kind of books. I just finished reading "Lucifer's Hammer" by Niven and Pournelle and I always find it a depressing book, as well as other end of the world scenarios (Pretty much anything by K. Vonnegut too). And "White Plague" by Frank Herbert was pretty depressing too.

Brave New World is generally mentioned in the same breath as 1984. In college one year I wrote a long essay that discussed how the themes were different. I think the gist was that in 1984 they were oppressed from without, whereas in Brave New World they were oppressed from within. Or something.

I would say that in 1984's theme is that direct oppression is what will end society, ie - oppression through control of media, goverment, thought-police, etc etc.

In Brave New World, everyone was oppressed by the process of child rearing in that society, but the worst opression was self imposed when most people chose to use soma and not deal with reality.

I think that Brave New World is a more plausible view of our near future. Neil Postman wrote an interesting book against the practice of watching television called Amusing Ourselves to Death in which he makes a long comparison between soma and television. Not that we need that comparison, soma is alive and well in most forms of escapism.