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* [[Sarcasm Mode|Welcome]] to the glorious society of Oceania from ''[[Nineteen Eighty-Four|1984]]'', the poster child and one of the most triumphant examples for [[Dystopia]]. A [[Vast Bureaucracy]] that has control over almost anything, called The Party, rules over Oceania's inhabitants. [[Big Brother Is Watching]] You. By the way, 1984 presents some Crapsack Worlds to choose from:
** Do you want to just be one of the vast majority who lives in blissful ignorance and just cares about living happily? Then, welcome to the Proles! The Proles are the vast majority of the population of Oceania who have been conditioned to never give a shit about politics, and have to live in [[Wretched Hive]] habitats with next to no technology, education, or luxury. The Party will never give a shit about you and your wants, and will treat you like an animal in an African reservation while cruise missiles fall on your head. But at least you can still have limitless fun and pleasure, right? Yes, but if you got too smart the Party can still kill you here.
** What's that? You want to join the Party so that you can take part in killing Proles and running the bureaucracy? Then [[Sarcasm Mode|congratulations]]! [[Big Brother Is Watching|Big Brother's eyes will be constantly watching you]] for the rest of your life, whether it's your public life with other people, or your private life in your own bathroom and apartment, which by the way is still crapsack. You have to master the art of Doublethink, the art of holding two mutually contradictory ideas and believing in both of them at the same time, while constantly denying the self and Reality. You will constantly be informed that Oceania is at war with either Eurasia or Eastasia at any given time, and insists that they've ''always'' been at war with whoever they're
** What's that? You want to get the fuck off Oceania and take a vacation in Eastasia and/or Eurasia? Then congrats! You are now hated by Oceanians, but at least you can mind your own business, right? Wrong! Both Eastasia and Eurasia have the exact same ideology as Oceania, the "Obliteration of the Self" or as Oceanians like to call it, Ingsoc. Why all the wars and tortures despite being [[Not So Different]]? It's all just an excuse to waste as many resources as we can, provide the Proles with a cheap and easy reason should they come to complain about the crapsackness, and/or just because of [[For the Evulz|pure power]]. You can also choose the "disputed areas" between the superstates where you can spend a great deal of time being smart, but you will be killed by the superstates' soldiers or be taken as their slave.
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** What makes it even more horriffic is that {{spoiler|O'Brien}} spends a good part of his second conversation with Winston detailing exactly why the [[Dystopia]] of the book [[And I Must Scream|will never, ''ever'', be dismantled]]. {{spoiler|Unless you include the Appendix..}}
** What makes this [[Crapsack World]] truly effective is that...it's completely normal. There's no monsters, demons, or aliens anywhere in sight. Just the regular evil of mankind fueling the neverending misery.
* In ''[[A Wrinkle in Time]]'' and its sequels there are several crapsack worlds, and alternate futures in which Earth is a crapsack world. One of which is a world so conformist and authoritarian it makes [[Nineteen Eighty-Four|Ingsoc]] look like a utopia. People are so rigorously controlled, failing to bounce a ball in exact time with every other child on the planet gets you thrown in a torture chamber, and catching the common cold gets you euthanized.
* In Jay Kristoff's novel [[Stormdancer]], the Shima islands are flowing with pollution, an evil shogun in power-hungry and selfish, and "impure" people are being executed buy a group of religous zealots called "The Lotus Guild." How can one girl and a flightless griffin set thing right again?
* ''[[Fahrenheit 451]]''. The entire world subscribes to a nihilistically hedonistic ideology which boils down to "[[Kill It with Fire|If you have problems, don't face them, burn them!]]" Nuclear war is so prevalent that the sound of jets flying off to nuke entire cities out of existence isn't even commented on. Television has taken the place of the family. The population has degenerated into an [[Idiocracy]]. Drug use is so ubiquitous that a single EMT team will likely deal with upwards of a dozen ODs a night. Running over pedestrians and crashing cars ala ''[[Grand Theft Auto]]'' is the new national pastime. Being a bookworm and engaging in other intellectual activities will make the ignorant masses feel unhappy and is punishable by having your house and possessions burned down. Resisting having your house burnt down will result in a giant mechanical hound hunting you down and killing you.
* [[Gathering Blue]]: After [[After the End|The Ruin]] the book's community has been reduced to a barbaric society, with technology at pre-industrial levels.
* ''[[
* Most of the ''[[Neuromancer]]'' universe, especially the Sprawl and Chiba City.
* [[Arthur C. Clarke]] and Stephen Baxter's ''Time Odyssey''. The universe will tear itself apart down to the subatomic level by cosmological expansion. The universe only has a finite amount of usable energy, and it's very slowly burning itself up. {{spoiler|The very first intelligent species to evolve wasted a lot of that energy on an intergalactic war, and then resolved to last until the big rip. To do that, it systematically, and with much guilt, resolves to wipe out all life which consumes too much energy. If a species has the audacity to consume oxygen for energy, it gets wiped out before it manages to leave its home planet. If a species doesn't put a foot wrong, it gets wiped out when the sun dies of natural causes.}} Worst of all, {{spoiler|apart from the aliens}}, it's this one.
* [[Wretched Hive|Earth]] in ''[[The
* ''[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]'' ''wrote'' this trope courtesy of its [[Deconstruction
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'''Sansa''': You're awful.
'''Sandor''': I'm honest. It's the world that's awful. }}
* In [[
* ''[[House of the Scorpion]]'' is set [[Twenty Minutes Into the Future]], where Mexico is under control of the corrupt quasi-communist Keepers, and life in the United States is so bad, that not only are people crossing the border into the United States, but ''into Mexico'' as well.
* ''[[As I Lay Dying]]'' by [[William Faulkner]]. Strangely, a rant about death given by a doctor who has just watched a woman he was supposed to be saving die a horrible and painful death is actually the only upbeat part of the entire novel.
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** Things get worse in the ''Rook Barkwater'' series. The city becomes even worse, slavery returns, Sanctaphrax becomes grounded and taken over by Nazi-like fanatics, all of the sky pirates are gone, and 95% of the "good" characters from previous books are either jailed or dead.
*** And later, both Sanctaphrax and Undertown get destroyed, with everybody who was left. Talk about being unnaturally cheery.
* Stephen Baxter's ''[[Xeelee Sequence]]''
* Patrick Suskind's ''[[Perfume]]''. Everyone is either motivated by greed, selfishness, lust or desire for fame, or callous and apathetic to their fellow human beings. Grenouille, a twisted little troll of a man who ''kills women for their scent'', actually comes across as the most sympathetic character in the whole book - at least he's motivated by a desire to create something beautiful, in the absence of anything else to give his life meaning.
* ''[[The Jungle]]'' by Upton Sinclair. Anything which can go wrong, will in the [[Nightmarish Factory|Packingtown]]. The [[Fridge Horror]] is, of course, that an investigation revealed all the claims of Sinclair ''valid'', except [[Human Resources|rendering workers falling in processing vats into lard and fertilizer]].
* ''[[Harrison Bergeron]]'', by [[Kurt Vonnegut]], in which any person who has any kind of talent is handicapped to prevent them from excelling and thus making other people feel inferior. The main character is smart, tall, strong, and handsome, so his handicaps include headphones that play distracting noises, three hundred pounds of weight strapped to his body, forty pounds of birdshot around his neck, eyeglasses designed to give him headaches, and a rubber ball on his nose, black caps on his teeth, and shaven eyebrows to hide his beauty. {{[spoiler|He rebels and dies, and his parents are too handicapped to be aware of watching their own son shot on television.}}
** In fact, lots of [[Kurt Vonnegut]]'s books either have the world heading for disaster (imminent or eventual), or illustrate how crapsacky the world is even ''without'' the [[
* [[Flannery O'Connor]] had issues. Just about her entire body of work involves unbelievably flawed, unsympathetic characters feuding and bickering with each other, finishing with a tragic, often gruesome climax, usually the consequences of their actions. Of course, since all of her stories were written while she was dying of lupus, this might explain her outlook. Considered one of the premier authors of Southern Gothic literature, which is an entire ''genre'' of this trope.
** However, given O'Connor's strong belief in the redemptive power of suffering, she certainly didn't see it this way. For example, in response to a fellow Catholic who wondered why she couldn't use her considerable talents to write something "uplifting", she said, "If your heart had been right place, you would have been uplifted."
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** On the inverse side, if a king rules justly, a kingdom can prosper and greatly avoid being attacked by Youma. En for instance is a very good place to live under its current king and has been so for 500 years (though there are still some less pleasant people around). It's more of a [[World Half Full]], since the evil can be held back when people are good and just (contrast to most examples, where the good simply ''can't'' win for any significant period of time). It also has the [[Incorruptible Pure Pureness|twelve Kirin]], who do their best to advise their [[Humans Are Flawed|less-than-perfect human monarchs]].
* Most works written by [[Franz Kafka]].
* Anything by Patricia Highsmith. The [[Point of View|POV]] characters of her books are generally either [[Villain Protagonist
* The ''[[Star Wars Expanded Universe]]'' sometimes looks like it's heading in this direction. It's less intense than in other examples, but still, whenever the peaceful, freedom-loving institution of the moment manages to get the upper hand and finally look like it's going to turn things for the better, ''something'' happens that screws everything up and plunges the whole galaxy right back in the darkness of endless war. After the Empire there's Ysanne Isard, then Thrawn, then the Emperor reincarnates, then he reincarnates ''again'', then the Imperial Remnant reunites under Daala and starts messing up the place again. Then the cult of Ragnos springs up, then the Yevetha set out to destroy everyone, then there are several more attempts to restore the Empire... and all this in only twenty years. And when the galaxy finally seems to have some peace and things seem to be looking brighter, the Yuuzhan Vong invade and start a war that kills trillions. Then there's ''another'' civil war. Then the Empire and the Sith rise ''yet again''. Seriously, how people from the Star Wars galaxy ever wish for anything but a quick, painless death is a mystery.
** This is an example of most ''[[Star Wars]]'' authors wanting to tell the [[Better by a Different Name|same story]] while hoping to avoid [[Continuity Snarl|problems with the continuity]]. The solution? Do the same thing a few years later.
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* [[Voltaire]]'s ''[[Candide]]'' disabuses the title character of the notion that he lives in the best of all possible worlds (a popular metaphysical notion of Voltaire's time) by tossing him from one ridiculous misfortune to the next, throughout the entire novel.
** However, though the end leaves Candide a poor peasant working to death for the rest of his life, he does consider that the friendships he got from those misfortunes are evidence that at least this world isn't the ''worst'' of all possible worlds.
*** But it all really doesn't
* ''[[The Running Man (novel)|The Running Man]]'' by [[Stephen King]] is set [[Twenty Minutes Into the Future]] in a world where many people are dying of lung cancer due to pollution and cannot even get basic medicine, where the more elite classes are apathetic and everyone is numbed out by watching horrific TV "game shows" where people die for small amounts of money.
* ''[[The Road]]'' by [[Cormac McCarthy]] is set [[After the End]], in a world where there has been no sunlight for eight years, the forests are dead and falling to the ground, Georgia is as cold as Alaska, and the nights are described as being "as dark as the cellars of Hell". Cannibal cults with female slaves roam the countryside, eating the babies of their women as soon as they give birth, and sometimes 'farming' people in their basements, slowly eating them bit by bit. People are dying from the cold, from some kind of horrible disease that causes them to cough blood until they drop dead, and from starvation, walking through barren farmlands. If this sounds awful that's because, you know, it kind of is.
** ''Anything'' by Cormac McCarthy, really.
* Anything [[Bertolt Brecht]] wrote pre-[[World War Two|WWII]].
* The ''[[Cthulhu Mythos]]''. An entire universe where Humanity is surrounded by unimaginably horrifying [[Eldritch Abomination
** Pretty much anything written by [[H.P. Lovecraft]] is set in a [[Crapsack World]], since he is after all a [[Nietzsche Wannabe]].
{{quote|
* [[China Mieville]]'s world [[Bas-Lag Cycle|Bas Lag]], and especially its apparent largest city, New Crobuzon, featured in his novels in ''[[Perdido Street Station]]'', ''[[The Scar]]'', and ''[[Iron Council]]'', fits this to a 'T'---if there's a pool of water in the city which is ''not'' stagnant and oily, or any non-corrupt person with any amount of noticeable power, we've not seen it or him.
** There are implied to be nice and happy things in Bas-Lag - Bellis wants to {{spoiler|save New Crobuzon from invasion}} for a reason - but thanks to the particular paths the novels take, we don't see much of them.
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* The [[Ancient Egypt]] of ''[[The Egyptian]]'' of course, the main point of the novel is how nothing really has changed since then...
* The Marquis De Sade's novel ''Justine'' is pretty horrific. Justine recounts how, at the age of twelve, she asked for shelter in a man's house and was told that she could only stay if she would have sex with him. The person she talks to this about screams at her for being a parasite that wanted something for nothing. Mind you, this is essentially the ''high point'' of the story.
** The world of pretty much all of De Sade's work in general qualifies as this big time. Given his general [[Humans Are
* [[Alastair Reynolds]]' ''Revelation Space'' series fits this trope very well. By ''Absolution Gap'', the third novel, the series is pretty much a hard SF version of [[Warhammer
* The ''Edge the Loner'' pulp western series by George G. Gilman featured a Wild West so violent and corrupt that the sociopathic walking scar called Edge may have been the only man strong enough to survive it. Inspired by the Eastwood/ Leone spaghetti westerns, the Edge books may well have inspired the equally vile western settings of [[Vertigo Comics]]' ''[[Preacher (Comic Book)]]'' and ''[[Jonah Hex]]'' series.
* ''[[Mistborn]]'' features a world that starts out a post-apocalyptic wasteland ruled by an [[Evil Overlord]]. {{spoiler|After the heroes kill him, things start getting ''worse'', especially when the local [[Omnicidal Maniac]] gets released from [[Sealed Evil in a Can|his can]]. [[Subverted Trope|But Vin and Sazed manage to fix it in the end]]}}.
* Most residents of Camorr, a sort of [[Low Fantasy]] medieval Venice turned [[Up to Eleven]] in Scott Lynch's ''[[The Lies of Locke Lamora]]'', would pay good money (doubtless stolen or extorted) to live in a [[Crapsack World]] instead.
* ''[[The Dresden Files]]''. Good or often merely neutral supernatural factions are outnumbered and outgunned by bad supernatural factions that are always chaotic evil and prey on humanity like cattle. Dark magic is hyper-addictive while few are even warned of this. Cosmic horrors lurk in the background, as well as the threats of sacrificial ascension rituals and old gods. The breaking of the masquerade being an effective "nuclear" option, the divisions between various evil factions, and the web of rules and alliances are the only reasons why the evil factions haven't simply taken over. However, the current villains appear to be systematically breaking from those rules, such as killing 10s of thousands of people in a nerve gas attack.
** But it's also arguably a [[World Half Full]]. Insanely determined people like Harry Dresden and Michael ''can'' make a difference with a lot of effort and help from the benevolent supernatural powers. The whole [[Crapsack World]] and [[Hopeless War]] tropes get subverted pretty hard {{spoiler|when Harry wipes out the entire Red Court at the end of ''Changes''.}}
** Of course, in the following book, it's revealed that {{spoiler|the destruction of the Red Court left a power vacuum open that was filled by an even nastier group, bringing the Crapsack back in full.}}
* Let's discuss ''[[Clark Ashton Smith|Zothique]]''. It's the last inhabited
* Early Robert Cormier stories like ''The Bumblebee Flies Anyway'' are set in either [[A World Half Full]], or this, depending on how you look at
* K.J Parker's ''[[The Scavenger Trilogy|Scavenger Trilogy]]''. Life is hard, short and mired in failure. There is less and less secure government, and you don't want to know what is driving what order there is.
* ''[[Left Behind]]'', during the last 7 years of humanity, people get to experience at frequent intervals: worldwide earthquake, 1/3 of the world's water supply turning into deadly poison or blood, utter darkness covering the Earth, hail of fire, plague of giant locusts whose bite cause painful boils for 6 months (those bitten are rendered immortal temporarily to prevent suicide), deathly cold, deathly heat, and then the Prince of Darkness himself gets in on the fun...
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* How about Suzanne Collins' [[The Hunger Games]]? North America has collapsed into a totalitarian nightmare which considers watching children slaughter each other on television to be the height of entertaining. People from the satellite states (which supply the children in question) tend to be dirt-poor and will be beaten or killed for pretty much no reason at all. Then you have the arena itself, complete with neurotoxic mists, nightmare-inducing bees, giant walls of fire, mad dogs who happen to be templated off your dead friends...did we mention the whole country is required to watch? The rest of the world is conspicuously absent, possibly destroyed in the vaguely implied calamity that brought the government in question to power.
** For a freakin' ''[[What Do You Mean It's for Kids?|young adult]]'' novel, the world of Panem is insanely brutal.
** Special mention to the 'nightmare-inducing bees', who were just one species of many, rather horrifying ones created in said government's labs to beat down a revolution over seventy years ago, that the government just let loose and are there for are running (or buzzing) 'round the countryside, terrorizing people.
** {{spoiler|Even the joining the rebels isn't much better. After risking everything following a rumor with risk of being killed or becoming a mute slave of the Capitol, you get to look forward to a civiliztion where everything must be rationed and everyone works. Cinna's prep team were loaked in a dark room in chains and beaten for 'hoarding food.' Even Katniss the Rebellion 's symbol for hope isn't given much special treatment by Coin. Coin herself is just President Snow playing for the good side. One of her suggestions when the beat the Capitol was to hold a Hunger Games themselves except using Capitol children. Which, other then completely destroying their pampered way of life would give them ample reason to start a rebelion on their own later down the line.}}
* Holly Lisle and her Matrin novels. In the prequel of the books, you have a society of rich, powerful wizards that waste energy like it's nothing and when they run out, they use {{spoiler|the souls of the people of the Warrens, obliterating any chance they have to be reborn.}} The rest of the timeline isn't much better, with a world destroyed by magic, people turned into mutants and those same mutants hunted down and killed in brutal ways.
* [[People's Republic of Tyranny|Gilead]] in ''[[The
* Tadeusz Borowski calls this the "world of stone," and most of his Holocaust fiction fits into it nicely. The slaughter of innocents becomes not just commonplace, but ''normal'', just another event in an ordinary day. The concentration camp inmates who retain their human decency get killed off, leaving behind only those who're willing to steal and betray others to survive (and even they're subject to their luck running out or [[Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves|their captors no longer needing their assistance]].) Hope itself is an essentially negative force, leading people passively to their fate when, had they completely given up hope, they might have at least [[Taking You with Me|taken a few of their tormentors with them]].
** On the other hand, every once in a while Borowski sets up the trope and subverts it, as in "The January Offensive," where the narrator's initial arguments in favor of this trope are countered with a more uplifting tale.
* The planet Dosadi in ''[[The Dosadi Experiment]]'' (by Frank Herbert) is so vile and horrid that anyone that wasn't born on the planet is bound to get torn to shreds within a couple of hours. Jorj X. [[Mc Kie]], the protagonist, quickly finds that he must adapt to the mindset of the Dosadi natives if he is to survive his stay on the planet and complete his mission.
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** At the end of the last book, the ordinary Ministry is put back into power. There's zero indication of any societal changes at all. The grand sum of the heroes' achievements is to prevent things from getting any worse.
*** A rather cynical political theory called "public choice" argues that governments are run for the narrow self-interest of politicians and bureaucrats. [http://www.quezon.ph/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/barton.pdf At least one] serious academic paper has noted that the Ministry of Magic lives down to the very worst predictions of that theory.
* The world of ''[[The Witcher]]'' books is full of monsters that are often better than humans they prey on, but are still hunted by titular Witchers - humans mutated into perfect monster killers - who are hated and loathed by common people. [[Fantastic Racism]] is everywhere - [[Humans Are
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20131206235948/http://www.barbarahambly.com/hambooks.htm#dark Darwath] is being invaded by flesh-eating Lovecraftian monsters, but that's just their top problem; also, their world is sliding into an Ice Age, and the Church is zealously destroying the wizards and magic-tech which are the only things that just might save them. Hambly spends three books basically raising hopes in order to dash them. Even when, at the very last minute, {{spoiler|the wizard persuades all the monsters to emigrate to a warmer climate,}} that still leaves them with a collapsing ecology and a politico-religious state that makes Afghanistan look like a shining city on a hill.
* In ''[[The Pale King]]'', the New Mexico trailer park and the rest of Chapter 8 provide a grim portrayal of a teenage girl trying to survive with her drifter of a mother.
* ''Witch and Wizard:'' Let's see, children ripped from bed in the middle of the night? Check. Evil overlord bent on taking over the world? Check. Said children constantly on the run from said overlord? Check check.
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* The world of [[Timeline-191]] may not be a total [[Crapsack World]], but it's definitely a much grimmer reality than our own. The United States is forced into geopolitics much sooner, and is never able to develop into the "land of opportunity" that defined its character from the late 19th Century onward. Surrounded by hostile countries, it instead evolves into a slightly less-oppressive version of the Soviet Union, becoming just another player in the global empire-building game. The world is far less idealistic and far more militarized. The most brutal battles of both World Wars take place between Union and Confederacy, and {{spoiler|nuclear weapons are used with more abandon. Ironically, Japan is the only major player in this timeline's version of [[World War Two]] ''not'' to have a nuclear bomb dropped on it.}}
* The world of [[Of Snail Slime]] defiantly falls under the roof of the Crapsack World. Inventions of mass destruction are showcased in large competitions, standard operating procedures for US government agents is breaking, entering and kidnapping, and ancient Greek mythological figures have a tendency to show up and wreck the place.
* The two 'future worlds' shown in ''[[Animorphs]]. One is in The Stranger and one in The Familiar. Both have the world controlled by the Yeerks, with all humans enslaved, and a lot of Earth's natural flora and fauna destroyed due to Yeerk
* Stephen King's 11/22/63 presents an alternate history which diverges from ours with the survival of John F. Kennedy. The disruption of the timestream causes frequent earthquakes all over the world. Radiation poisoning is prevalent, due to nuclear war or destruction of reactors caused by the earthquakes. Gang warfare, pollution, poverty, extremism, famine, and hate are commonplace. [[Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking|And Paul McCartney is blind.]]
* ''[[Dark Future (novel)|Dark Future]]'': [[Sarcasm Mode|Welcome]] to [[Twenty Minutes Into the Future|the 1990s]] as envisaged by [[Games Workshop]] and [[Kim Newman]]. A [[Cyberpunk]] [[Dystopia]] ruled over by mostly corrupt politicians who're in the pocket of [[Japan Takes Over the World|Japanese]] [[Mega Corp|megacorp GenTech]] who may or may not be run by a Nazi refugee, were the population are divided into the rich; who live in [[Law Enforcement, Inc.|corporately-policed]] gated communities away from the slums of the poor, waited upon by mostly black slaves because [[Alternate History|Racial Equality never really happened]]. Where the world is slowly drying out, disappearing beneath rising sea levels and teeters unknowingly on the brink of the Apocalypse that [[Religion of Evil|an evil faux-Christian sect]] headed by a [[Time Abyss]] in the service of [[Eldritch Abominations]] are actively seeking to hasten. Oh, and [[Rock and Roll]] was banned after riots in 1961; [[John Lennon]] went into politics and people are still buying Ken Dodd albums.
{{quote|''"Don't worry about the End of the Universe, because you could be the LUCKY WINNER!"''|'''Elder Roger Duroc''', ''Comeback Tour''}}
* ''[[Someone Else's
* Loompaland, where Oompa Loompas come from in ''[[Charlie and the Chocolate Factory]]''. We only have Wonka's word to go on, but it seems to be a horrid [[Hungry Jungle]] full of ravenous beasts called Hornsnozzlers, Snozzwangers and Whangdoodles. The Oompa Loompas were ''not'' at the top of the food chain, and the edible thngs below them tasted terrible. If all this is true, then as dangerous a job as working for Wonka may be, it was the much more preferable option.
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