Crapsack World / Literature

• The Accusation, a short story anthology written by a real-life citizen of North Korea, is 247 pages of why North Korea is a real-life version of the above-mentioned Oceania.
• The world of the European Administration in The Administration Series is this. Overlaps with Crapsaccharine World.
  • On one hand, the society Administration has no racism, sexism or homophobia, safe and non-addictive drugs are sold by the government and every citizen has government-provided contraceptives implanted.
  • On the other hand, even talking ill of the government within earshot of anyone working for the various security agencies can get you arrested and interrogated i.e. tortured, there is institutionalized classism, with "corporates" able to get away with almost anything, and sabotage in the corporate world can be fatal.
  • Played straight with the future America- a Christian theocracy.
• India in the Alan Dean Foster novel Sagramanda. Rampant poverty, the poor attacking people to get money, greedy corporations that just leave it that way, a man eating tiger just left alone, multiple hit men, and an insane serial murderer feature prominently, as does somebody who tries to kill his own son because of the caste system.
• Almost anything by Patricia Highsmith. The POV characters of her books are generally either Villain Protagonists who get away with it, or pathetic losers who suffer horribly at the hands of unspeakable villains who get away with it. She did, however, write a surprisingly positive lesbian love story called The Price of Salt.
• American Psycho and other works by Bret Easton Ellis. Everybody is completely shallow and selfish, and they're usually too dense to notice how empty and meaningless their lives are.
• 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 tendencies.
• Even excluding the people’s general hatred towards Humans in An Outcast in Another World, Elatra lost over 60% of its population in one decade due to The Scouring and The Cataclysm, and things aren’t getting any better. Especially not with the Blight at their doorstep.
• 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. 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, apart from the aliens, it's this one.
• 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.
• The Astral Wanderer and the Forest of Tears by Amelie C. Langlois is set in a sentient forest that slowly drives its occupants insane and contains soul-devouring trees of flesh; predatory, hallucinogenic plants; and all manner of Eldritch Abominations.
• The world of Atharon could be described this way. There are multiple states, but most of them have slavery inherent in the system one way or another, there are people with terrifying magical powers and equally dangerous magical creatures. Then there is the afterlife...
• Bas-Lag Cycle: Bas-Lag, and especially its apparent largest city, New Crobuzon, 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 save New Crobuzon from invasion for a reason — but thanks to the particular paths the novels take, we don't see much of them.
• The world of Battle Royale, where Japan is part of an isolationist dictatorship, rock music is illegal, there are terrorist groups trying to take down the government... and every year a class of 3rd year high school students are drugged on a school trip and taken to an isolated location, where they are fitted with explosive collars and told that they have to fight to the death. If they refuse to fight to the point where no one dies for 24 hours, then they all die anyway.
• Bill the Galactic Hero's military system is seemingly designed to make the lives of the enlisted a living hell, from the moment they put their name on the dotted line. In fact, the only reason The Empire is even engaged in a war with the "vile Chingers" is because they needed someone to fight, so they picked a tiny race of peace-loving lizards from a heavy-gravity world. Now the Empire is losing, since the Chingers turn out to be very good at fighting and, unlike Empire leadership, are not complete morons. They also easily infiltrate the Empire thanks to their human-shaped robots (a tiny Chinger easily fits inside it). Since the public is told that Chingers are human-sized blood-thirsty lizards, they don't know what to look for.
• In Black Dawn, Jeanne describes the Dark Kingdom as "hell" and she's not far off. The kingdom is ruled by cruel nobles consisting of Night People, primarily vampires and witches, who keep humans as slaves, keeping them in squalid conditions, forcibly using them as a food supply (vampires drink their blood and shapeshifters eat their flesh), occasionally torturing and killing them for their own amusement and not even permitting them proper names. Any slave who tries to escape is brutally punished and may be executed as an example to the others. There are few wild animals in the valley because the Night People have hunted them all to extinction, so they bring in animals from the outside to hunt, including endangered exotic creatures. Life isn't always so peachy for the upper class either; the previous king was a cruel tyrant who would sometimes kill his own subjects with minimal provocation, and there's the shadow of a prophecy foretelling the end of the world looming over them. The king's own son has been abused and controlled most of his life by either his father or the nobles. Some 'lesser' Night People like shapeshifters can also apparently be killed by nobles with no consequences, given how little most people react to Delos killing Bern.
• The Book of the New Sun takes place millions of years in the future. The sun has grown red and dim, forcing people to migrate to escape increasingly colder climates, humanity has grown ignorant and superstitious - having lost control of miraculous technology like dimensional portals limiting their use to an elite few (some of whom aren't even human). It's also a world where a God-Emperor-like figure can have anyone arrested and tortured to death by a professional guild of Torturers (from where the protagonist comes from) and fighting him are power-hungry aristocratic rebels who are in league with Eldritch Abominations that are prophesied to destroy the world.
• Bring the Jubilee takes place in a world where the South won the Civil War. The Confederacy is now a massive empire that's swallowed up most of the western hemisphere. While it's prosperous and immigrants are welcome, citizenship and voting rights only go to white men whose ancestors were citizens at the time of the CS' victory. People of color are, if anything, treated worse than they were in slavery. Things aren't much better in the United States, which has been reduced to a rump nation overrun with poverty and corruption. Jobs are difficult to come by, the only people with any opportunity are the wealthy and people who win the national lottery, and blacks are treated with hostility and blamed as the cause of the war.
• For all of its lightheartedness and optimism, the United States of America in The Camp Half-Blood Series (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, The Heroes of Olympus, and all Sequel Series afterwards) just sucks. The country is lorded over by the gods of Olympus, a bunch of selfish, petty, divine jerks who packed up and left Greece/Rome to settle down in America and now regularly take out their anger on whoever they feel like. If you're a normal human then you at least have the chance of staying off their radar and the Mist will ensure that you remain blissfully ignorant of their existence. Unfortunately there's an equally good chance that you'll be the victim of a god's temper tantrum, which you won't see coming because of the aforementioned Mist. Even if you avoid it your entire life, the afterlife isn't any better. If you died without having accomplished great things in life, you get to spend the rest of eternity in the Asphodel Fields, doing nothing but standing around. And all of that is just if you're human. May God help you if you the had the misfortune of being born a demigod because the Olympians won't do much. If you're a demigod you get to spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder for the many, many monsters that will hunt you simply for having been born with divine blood. The only safe place in the country is Camp Half-Blood and there's a very good chance you'll die on the way there — as a kid. Your godly parent is likely aloof at best and abusive at worst, and any day they or another god may come to you with a dangerous quest or just show up to mess with you. Oh, and that's if your parent bothers to claim you at all. Let's just say there's a very good reason Percy starts off the first book with a Snicket Warning Label about how you don't want to be a half-blood.
• The Candidates (based on a true country): A political system where every four years, the two least qualified assholes around get nominated to try to fix a country that may well be beyond repair. A media that seems to have given up on actually taking the whole mess seriously and now just tries to capture the dim-witted viewing audience's attention with lowest-common-denominator spectacle. The halfway good people are the ones surest to suffer humiliation, hardship, and quite probably dismemberment as well, and the idiots and crooks aren't much better off in the long run. Yeah, this is a very dark take on the real world...
• 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 matter—after all, no matter if the world is good or bad, "We must cultivate our garden."
• The city of Parole from Chameleon Moon, populated by superheroes, watched at all times by the Eye in the Sky, and slowly falling into a river of fire.
• Childhood's End deals with the end of humanity as we know it, shepherded along by alien overlords. Children are entering a new state of consciousness and in the process becoming something distinctly non-human in the way to their meld with the overmind of the universe. The remaining generation of adults, who are dying off without being able to reproduce, band together and go through the stages of grief as the death of human civilization approaches fast. World religions and cultures crumble with a whimper. Pretty sad.
• 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 it—we're all doomed, but at least God is reasonably benign. His later stories fall squarely into this trope—good people are doomed, bad people usually rise and prosper, and according to In the Middle of the Night, we're headed for The Nothing After Death. Standard heroes are often set up, then subverted, like Jerry Renault of The Chocolate War, who's set up to fight The Brute and gets sent to the hospital, having achieved nothing, or the Avenger in We All Fall Down, a pint-size Vigilante Man who's actually fully adult and completely insane.
• In Citadel, the central part of the US is a gang-ruled war zone, a significant part of the Upper Hemisphere was frozen solid, the entirety of Europe is under the complete mental control of Tyrant, and the Citadel itself admits to striving more towards brutal efficiency than actual justice.
• Clocks that Don't Tick is set in a world ruled by immortal oligarchs known as the Bosses. They're not controlling or oppressive. On the contrary, it's their apathy that's responsible for the state of the world. With the elites immune to disease, cures ceased being developed. As a result, humanity is stricken by numberless deadly diseases, and most die before the age of thirty. Basic amenities such as heat or electric lighting is rare, as is food. The world's once great cities have been reduced to rusty wastelands. One can opt to become immortal and escape the filthiness of the outside world, but in doing so they become Thralls. That entails working sixteen-hour days for a debt that can never be paid off due to the astronomically high interest rate.
• The Conan the Barbarian universe is a great example of a Crapsack World in fantasy. What you've got is a Low Fantasy world full of assorted, real-world-inspired ancient civilizations, and some barbarians. The choice that Robert E. Howard gives you is basically Barbarism Vs. Civilization. Civilizations are generally decadent and corrupt old empires with scheming, militaristic kings who will do anything up to and including resurrecting a dead sorcerer from an ancient, evil empire (in The Hour of the Dragon) to get more land for their nation. The only nation that doesn't seem to be either full of evil sorcerers (Stygia, Koth, Khitai, Zembabwei) or expansionist kings (Koth, Ophir, Nemedia, Turan, everyone else) would be Aquilonia, a Rome/medieval England hybrid that winds up being the first nation that is completely annihilated by a horde of savages, along with every other halfway-decent place to live in Hyboria. Barbarians will find that the line is very thin between savagery and noble savagery, once again. Cimmerians prove to be the only race in this category that have even a rudimentary grasp on morality, everyone else is either a cannibal (the Darfari), an unapologetic savage (Picts fit this perfectly), or a Viking-esque village pillager (the Vanir and Aesir).
  • Seeing how Howard and Lovecraft were friends and shared some ideas, the Conan books are set in a primitive version of the Cthulhu Mythos; they do share some gods.
• Cthulhu Armageddon is a post-apocalypse Weird West set After the End when the Great Old Ones have destroyed the world. If the fact it was filled with monsters, demons, and a slowly-dying humanity wasn't enough—humanity is composed of a bunch of dicks too. Just about everyone is willing to betray anyone and the only people with any loyalty to one another are the insane cultists.
• The Cthulhu Mythos. An entire universe where Humanity is surrounded by unimaginably horrifying Eldritch Abominations, compared to whom we are insignificant ants, and who will plunge all of us into madness, despair, and insignificance when they awaken from their slumber. Plus there's a neutral race of alien time travellers, who also confirm that humanity will go extinct in a horrible way.
  • Pretty much anything written by H. P. Lovecraft is set in a Crapsack World since he is after all a Nietzsche Wannabe.
  H. P. Lovecraft: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either Go Mad from the Revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
• Cyril M. Kornbluth:
  • "The Marching Morons": Also the setting for the prequel story "The Little Black Bag", and inspired Idiocracy. The average intelligence has plummeted; the world is full of stupid people with a few geniuses desperately scrambling to keep everything running.
  • "The Luckiest Man In Denv": A completely militarized society where Chronic Backstabbing Disorder is the norm, locked in a generations-long atomic war with its rival Ellay. (Nobody remembers that the two cities used to be part of one nation; indeed, nobody is even quite sure why the war started.)
  • "Shark Ship": Also known as "Reap The Dark Tide", this novelette shows a community of ocean dwellers who have forever forsaken the overpopulated land to lead a regimented life on the open seas. They are the lucky ones: a ship that loses its fishing net and goes back to the land in desperation finds that it has been taken over by a fanatical religious movement that glorifies torture, violence, and a one-child policy. The land is no longer overpopulated. It's barely populated at all. Remarkably, this is probably the most optimistic ending in Kornbluth's entire body of work, as it's suggested that the ocean dwellers will recolonize the land and establish a sustainable, relatively humane society.
  • "Virginia": A Short Story that portrays a world where a handful of billionaires control everything and gloat over all the wonderful inventions and discoveries they have suppressed to maintain their grip on power. (It's Played for Laughs, but it wouldn't be at all pleasant to live in such a world.)
  • Two Dooms: This novella imagines a victorious Axis partitioning North America between a Japanese West and a Nazi East - the same premise as The Man in the High Castle but played much nastier. The Japanese half is made up of fanatic pseudo-samurai ruling over a wretched population of slaves whom they'll murder at the slightest provocation; meanwhile, the Nazis are every bit as evil as you would expect (they enjoy torturing prisoners to death) but they're also insane - the protagonist, an American scientist from the 1940s who's become temporally displaced, saves his life by convincing a Nazi commandant that he's really an "Aryan" who's been the victim of a plot by Jewish magicians. This is taken absolutely seriously by the commandant and every one of his officers. ^note None of this was actually invented - Kornbluth was just taking the very worst aspects of Nazism and Totalitarian Shinto/ Bushido and turning them up to eleven.
• In the Daniel Faust series, God is missing or dead, angels are genocidal, and the only reason the world isn't in Hell's hands is that the various demonic courts are too busy feuding with each other to really focus on us. Humanity is a guppy in a very big ocean filled with very hungry sharks.
• Dark Future: Welcome to 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 Japanese megacorp GenTech who may or may not be run by a Nazi refugee, where the population are divided into the rich; who live in corporately-policed gated communities away from the slums of the poor, waited upon by mostly black slaves because Racial Equality never really happened in this world. Where the world is slowly drying out, disappearing beneath rising sea levels, and teeters unknowingly on the brink of the Apocalypse that an evil faux-Christian sect headed by a Time Abyss in the service of Eldritch Abominations are actively seeking to hasten. Oh, and Rock & Roll was banned after riots in 1961; John Lennon went into politics and people are still buying Ken Dodd albums.
  "Don't worry about the End of the Universe, because you could be the LUCKY WINNER!"
  — Elder Roger Duroc, Comeback Tour
• Darkness at Noon: Rubashov describes the Country of the Revolution as this: "In order to defend the existence of the country, we have to take exceptional measures and make transition-stage laws, which are in every point contrary to the aims of the Revolution. The people’s standard of life is lower than it was before the Revolution; the labour conditions are harder, the discipline is more inhuman, the piece-work drudgery worse than in colonial countries with native coolies; we have lowered the age limit for capital punishment down to twelve years; our sexual laws are more narrow-minded than those of England, our leader-worship more Byzantine than that of the reactionary dictatorships. Our Press and our schools cultivate Chauvinism, militarism, dogmatism, conformism and ignorance. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been. We have built up the most gigantic police apparatus, with informers made a national Institution, and with the most refined scientific system of physical and mental torture."
• 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 that 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, 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.
• Somewhat subverted with Discworld's city of Ankh-Morpork. It has all the makings of a Crapsack World and yet, due to the brilliance of the Patrician and the sheer stubbornness of its inhabitants, it is the place where everyone on the Discworld wants to live and always bounces back from whatever crisis it faces. In Night Watch, however, you see just how bad the city can be without Vetinari.
• Divergent: A war caused by a disastrous attempt to correct human genes that went wrong claimed half of the US population and turned most of the environment into rough, uninhabitable wasteland. The entire human race is now sorted according to whether they are genetically pure or damaged, and being sorted into the latter is...not nice. This predictably resulted in violence that erupted in the metropolitan areas, which are practically the only places where people live. The United States is now a shadow of itself, agreeing to a plan by a certain Bureau which necessitated an entire city, uhm, cities, to be transformed into giant experimental bottles with the intention to produce more pure people. That goal is not noble by itself, but then the Bureau isolated them for eight generations and counting, which resulted in the people inside forgetting why they live there and actually flipped the racism upside down so that now the genetically pure (or as they call, Divergents) are persecuted, ensuring that the experiment will go on for a while.
• 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. McKie, 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.
• The Dreamside Road: While not the worst example of this trope, the Thunderworks attacks have caused societal instability and left many people the world over destitute and without prospects for work. The damage and lawlessness become much clearer when Enoa Cloud leaves Nimauk and begins her adventures.
• 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 most who fall to it aren't 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 tens of thousands of people in a nerve gas attack. However, 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 when Harry wipes out the entire Red Court at the end of Changes. Of course, in the following book, it's revealed that 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.
• In Dune, Arrakis was one to some degree or other for most of the people. And definitely the Harkonnen home planet, Geidi Prime, as detailed even more in some of the prequels (with Gurney Halleck suffering horribly there as a slave child). The universe itself also counts, as even when Paul is the new Emperor of the known universe, he is unable to stop the Jihad his Fremen have unleashed which result in the deaths of billions of people.
• The titular Edge in the obscure fantasy series The Edge Chronicles isn't exactly an ideal spot for a vacation. The Deepwoods are dark and extremely dangerous, the Twilight Woods are a cursed place where anyone who enters will most likely go insane, the Mire is a polluted wasteland, Undertown is a dirty, overcrowded slum, Sanctaphrax is "a seething cauldron of rivalries, plots and counter-plots, and bitter faction-fighting", the river Edgewater is choked with sewage and the lands along the rim of the Edge are a desolate barren. 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. Later, both Sanctaphrax and Undertown get destroyed. But it's okay, just about everyone except the Guardians of Night and Vox escaped. By the end of the series, civilization has relocated to the Freeglades, and things are looking much, much better for everyone.
• 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 and Jonah Hex series.
• The Ancient Egypt of The Egyptian of course, the main point of the novel is how nothing really has changed since then...
• Stephen King's 11/22/63 presents an alternate history that diverges from ours with the survival of John F. Kennedy. The civil rights movement was a failure. The Vietnam war ended with a nuke being dropped on Hanoi, which precipitated other atomic conflicts around the world, including the destruction of Miami, meaning radiation poisoning is prevalent. Maine seceded from the U.S. and became a Canadian province. President Hilary Clinton is now trying to hold the remains of the country together under martial law. Gang warfare, pollution, poverty, extremism, famine, and hate crimes are commonplace. The disruption of the timestream is also causing frequent, increasingly violent earthquakes all over the world, some of which are strong enough to sink whole islands. And Paul McCartney is blind.
• Empire of the Vampire: What was until barely three decades past a rather by-the-numbers Medieval European Fantasy setting went rapidly downhill after a falling star crashed into the planet, sending up clouds of dust and particles thick enough to conceal the sun itself. The initial problems were bad enough - most harvests failed, millions of people were rendered jobless and pennyless, and a continent-wide famine was only narrowly averted. And that was before the Dead took advantage of the fact that the sun, though still faintly present, was now too weak to burn them. Fast-forward twenty-seven years, and most of the continent has been rendered a barren wasteland, with forests of dead black trees constantly smothered in downpours of ashen grey snows and filthy muddy rain. Nothing grows except potatoes and mushrooms, much of the larger fauna has been rendered extinct and the last of humanity's food stores are finally running out. All that without taking into account the hordes of ravenous corpses rampaging across the Empire, draining entire cities and enthralling the survivors into chattle slavery for their ancient overlords. In the words of the protagonist himself:
  Gabriel de León: “Besides, who the fuck would want to inherit an earth like this?”
• The Empirium Trilogy: Being a human during the Third Age is a constant source of stress and danger. If you're not worrying about the Undying Empire's agents potentially ruining your life, then you're worrying about your female friends or family members randomly disappearing without a trace.
• Eva takes place in a future where the human population is so high that much of the world is covered in urban sprawl, and there are few wild animals left.
• Everland: The series takes place in a war-torn dystopia where much of the adult population is dead, the female gender is threatened with extinction, and Germany is being run by a tyrannical despot.
• The world of Evillious Chronicles certainly qualifies, given all the tragedies that happen in a thousand-year stretch. Each time period has a host of issues- from diseases that drive people mad with hunger, to tyrannical princesses, to the destruction of entire nations overnight. Still, special mention goes to the world by Gallerian's era, where the "rules" that govern the world are breaking down and there are zombies roaming around, parents giving birth to bizarre (sometimes tiger-shaped) babies, and people are getting infected with Hereditary Evil Raiser Syndrome and more strange things, all for no reason. And it seems every power in the world, from the Freezis Foundation (now Freezis Conglomerate) to the Evillious governments, are maliciously corrupt.
• Fahrenheit 451. The entire world is an idiocracy that subscribes to a nihilistic and hedonistic ideology which boils down to "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. 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 a la 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 spider hunting you down and killing you.
• A dramatic fantasy example would be the setting of The First Law. The kingdom is run by a secret police, many of the main characters are murderers and cutthroats, Aristocrats Are Evil, the Wise Old Mentor likes to blow people up, the peasants are oppressed and the city-folk are slimy.
  • The book ends with pretty much no positive changes in the world, a figurehead Jezal as King of the Union, Logen still on the run, Ferro returning to her vengeance-seeking ways, and Bayaz turning out to be the biggest jerk in history.
    • And Jezal gets kicked hard when his change of heart and indications he wants to make a go of the 'king' situation results in Bayaz reminding him who's running the show. Ouch.
• FKA USA by Reed King is a black comedy absurdist novel that takes place in a future America that survived a civil war that went nuclear but fractured the country into dystopian factions run by megacorporations, religious wingnuts, well-meaning but hapless hippies and whatnot. Robots and even electricity is expensive, so mass human labor is used instead. Besides irradiated soil, the air is so polluted that some days America gets Alien Sky type colors and due to a population that largely grew up in a very poor educational environment - America is having difficulty maintaining advanced technology including the VR goggles and app downloads that make life more bearable.
• 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."
• Flatland. Your social class is determined by how many sides you have, with autocratic Circle priests in charge. Irregulars are shunned by society and endure miserable, closely-monitored lives. Women, being line segments, are subject to many restrictive laws (announce their presence everywhere they go, use special doors) in order to prevent them from accidentally impaling someone. Painting and even use of colour have been outlawed and suppressed, and only shapes with a pedigree can marry. The lower classes' only hope is that their children are born with extra sides, so they will get a better chance at life. Additionally, every thousand years, when a sphere arrives to preach the Gospel of Three Dimensions, the Circles execute or imprison anyone who follows its word.
• The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere: The present day setting doesn't quite qualify, but the world before the Collapse certainly does. It was a Space Opera-like setting setting ruled by the Iron Princes, people who replaced most of their body with machinery and ruled over most of the populace with an iron fist. As the collapse front approached the solar system, different factions emerged and started warring for ressources, each intent on enacting their survival plan at the expense of the others. As it turns out, the Tower of Asphodel wasn't supposed to contain only 100,000 people, that's just the amount that the Ironworkers were able to save.
• Search the Sky by Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth. Halsey's Planet is slowly depopulating itself, Gemser is an insane gerontocracy where age is the sole factor in determining status, Azor is a Straw Feminist world where believing in gender equality is a crime against the state, Jones is a world where conformity in everything (including appearance, architecture, dress, and habits) is mandatory, and Earth is a coin-operated world where intelligence is frowned on. And all colony worlds are inbred because there were too few original colonists for each world.
• From Russia with Love: Ian Fleming spends a third of the book outlining how life in the Soviet Union sucks and why only depraved sociopaths such as Red Grant actually enjoy working for its intelligence apparatus. Authorities routinely use beatings and extrajudicial killings to brutally suppress dissent and torture prisoners. They also have no qualms purging so-called "enemies of the state" and sending them over to The Gulag as they did under Stalin. The book also states that nobody would dare utter The Dreaded spy agency SMERSH's name publicly lest they face State Sec knocking at their door. In short, the average Joe in Soviet Russia has no stomach for a possible revolt.
• A Frozen Heart: In this Tie-In Novel to Disney's Frozen, Prince Hans of the Southern Isles comes from a kingdom that has been transformed into a Police State by his father, a cruel tyrant who reacts violently when his authoritarian rule is criticized and crushes his subjects with excessively high taxes. In one instance, the king even seizes a poor farmer's livestock and torches his barn out of pettiness. It leaves Hans wondering how someone like his father "could be so stupid" and is one reason why he hates his family. However, if this were Hans's story, he would be The Hero revolting against his abusive family, so his father ends up being a minor character as the majority of A Frozen Heart focuses on covering the same plot as the original Frozen movie.
• Three Zed from Fusion Fire and Crown of Fire has a strict eugenics program culling any children who are too compassionate, gentle, friendly, or fearful. On top of that, the political intrigues and power struggles at the top also mean that it's rather easy to get on someone's bad side, those who aren't at the top are likely to be manipulated and used against their will for the leaders' plans (including for suicide missions), and resistance to orders means death.
• Fyodor Berezin's Red Stars trilogy has World-2, a parallel universe, where history diverges from ours during World War 2. Hitler delays Operation Barbarossa by a full month, allowing Stalin to deal the first blow. Germany falls to the Soviets in 2 years, followed by European countries "liberated" from Nazi oppression. Britain escapes conquest only because they had the foresight to scuttle the French Navy, preventing the Soviets from mounting a successful naval invasion (even though they managed to capture the Italian Navy). Stalin then institutes the policy of prolonging the Pacific War, thus keeping the US busy, by secretly helping Japan. Fast-forward to modern times: the USSR dominates the world, the US is the only remaining free power run by a military dictatorship, there are frequent clashes between the two powers, no space program exists, and tactical nukes are used without much thought. When the leaders of our world learn of World-2's existence, they are horrified at the possibility of the other world's people doing the same. At the end of the second novel, the governments of the US and Russia launch hundreds of ICBMs at one another, then teleport those missiles to World-2, hoping to start a nuclear war there. The follow-up book indicates that they failed. Berezin seems to like working with this trope.
• Gathering Blue: After The Ruin the book's community has been reduced to a barbaric society, with technology at pre-industrial levels.
• Gene Wolfe:
  • Book of the New Sun is such a Crapsack World that the ending of the series, in which almost the entire population of the world drowns is seen as being the good ending.
  • The sequel, Book of the Long Sun is arguable worse. Humanity has been trapped inside a huge Generation Ship for so long that almost nobody remembers that there is anything outside. Everyone worships gods that are a cross between sociopaths and Neglectful Precursors and in fact are just the digitized personalities of a dictator, his family and his cronies. Technology is being slowly lost, the fabric of the cities is crumbling and the titular Long Sun is beginning to malfunction, causing droughts.
• The world of The Giver Quartet. Either you live in a technologically advanced utopia that is tightly controlled or a medieval tech-level village where you can suffer cruelty from the forces of man, nature, or both.
• London in The Glimpse, if you belong to the 25% of the population predisposed to mental illnesses. The "Pures" without that predisposition get the Crapsaccharine version in gated communities.
• The Godless World Trilogy: The Gods abandoned their creation 1000 years before the story starts, leaving it to all spiral out of control. There's never-ending wars between the True Bloods and the Bloods of the Black Road, tensions between Huanin and Kyrinin that never end, relentless persecution of the na'kyrim, and a general sense of misery and despair that never goes away. This gets worse once Aeglyss taps into The Shared and starts poisoning everyone with his own angst and misery.
• Simon R. Green uses this in at least two of his series:
  • The Forest Kingdom series' spinoff Hawk & Fisher has the city of Haven as the Wretched Hive version, where even the "gods" aren't above greed, mayhem, sociopathy, and a host of other antisocial tendencies, but still attract worshipers.
• The later Nightside series draws heavily on Haven to create a similar setting as part of a hidden version of London.
• Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, a fundamentalist Christian theonomy that has stripped women of most of their rights.
• 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. 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 end looming.
• Her Crown of Fire: Lotheria is a shithole. The students at the prestigious Stanthor Academy are fed barely enough, while the non-magical peasantry mostly just starve. Even the wealthy Lyon family's manor house is in disrepair. No wonder Rose and Tyson want to go home so badly.
• Played for laughs in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Killing billions of people to build a bypass, nothing wrong with that.
  • What makes it even more tragically hilarious is that a few chapters later it is revealed that a new propulsion system - the Infinite Improbability Drive - has made hyperspace travel obsolete and no one will be using that bypass. Douglas Adams knows his tropes.
• 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 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.
• House of the Scorpion is set 20 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.
• How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse: Played with. The usually cryptic Zombie Apocalypse scenario has a much lighter note, sometimes Played for Laughs.
  Duff: Zombies are excellent stylists, if you ask me. They dance the Moonwalk like professionals, make the best cotton candy and even rap faster than Eminem.
• Suzanne Collin's The Hunger Games:
  • How about this? North America has collapsed into a totalitarian nightmare composed of 12 (actually 13) districts ruled by the Capitol, a that city considers watching children slaughter each other on television to be the height of entertaining. Every year each district is forced to send two teens between 12 and 18 to fight until one survives as a constant reminder to the people how much power the government possesses over them. People from the districts tend to be dirt-poor, starving and will be beaten or killed for pretty much no reason at all while those in the Capitol live outrageously decadent lives. Then you have the arena itself, complete with neurotoxic mists, nightmare-inducing bees ( a.k.a. tracker jackers), 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' young adult novel, the world of Panem is insanely brutal.
  • Special mention to the tracker jackers, 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 now running (or buzzing) 'round the countryside, terrorizing people.
  • Even if you do happen to win the Hunger Games, you have some of the bleakest futures ahead of you: PTSD, madness, horrific nightmares, being prostituted out to the elite by the government, getting chosen a second time, or becoming dependent on drugs/alcohol to numb out the pain and memories especially when the Capitol kills everyone you love for making them look silly. Don't forget being forced to mentor the Tributes from your District. In Haymitch's case, that meant trying to help 46 children only to watch them die in the Games.
  • Even 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 civilization where everything must be rationed and everyone works. Cinna's prep team were locked in a dark room in chains and beaten for 'hoarding food' aka stealing bread. 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 they beat the Capitol was to hold a Hunger Games themselves except using Capitol children. Which, other than completely destroying their pampered way of life would give them ample reason to start a rebellion on their own later down the line.
• The Earth of the Idlewild series has been completely depopulated for at least fifteen years with skeletonized corpses commonplace. Without people, structures have fallen into disrepair and supplies are frequently questionable. The handful of survivors realize that just one unlucky day may result in their slow, agonizing, inevitable death, and they won't even know that day. Disagreements commonly undercut teamwork. The burden of rebuilding civilization is constant, as is the fact that Nature has survived just fine and will be happy to bury them as well.
• I Did NOT Give That Spider Superhuman Intelligence!: The story acts as a prequel to Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain. LA has some dark parts by the time of Supervillain, but this book shows that it used to be so much worse. A Mad Scientist is kidnapping people off the street, the hero and villain with the most professional reputations have started a blood feud, and the police have been forbidden from interfering because it's just too dangerous. It's to the point that when Spider introduces a plan that involves feeding the worst members of the community to Mourning Dove and Psychopomp, everyone agrees.
• I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. Outside, the world is a scorched nuclear wasteland. Inside, in a world-filling complex, are the final five survivors. All of them are at the mercy of AM, the godlike AI that destroyed the world. It utilizes its power to endlessly twist and torture them, from corrupting their bodies to sending them on impossible missions for food while keeping them on the brink of starvation. It's been doing this for the last 109 years and plans on doing it forever out of sheer, contemptuous hatred for humanity. And that's just the premise. Hell, considering that 1984's appendix refers to The Party in the past tense, which could be interpreted as Big Brother falling after all in the end, the world of IHNMAIMS may be even worse. In the book at least, the most noble thing you can do is kill your fellow men to release their suffering.
• Kraken Calling by political activist and anarchist author Aric McBay is set in a near-future North America where megacorporations flouting environmental laws have long since reached tipping point. So the world is in a state of ecological collapse from various causes and governments have gone totalitarian to rein in a starving population. One indication that everyone is hurting is the police/security forces have uniforms that are often not only second-hand, but they're ragged and patched over with whatever odd bits work. Even CEOs have to ration their air conditioning and this in a world that's really heated up with global warming.
• In Jay Kristoff's Stormdancer, the Shima islands are flowing with pollution, an evil shogun is power-hungry and selfish, and "impure" people are being executed by a group of religious zealots called "The Lotus Guild." How can one girl and a flightless griffin set things right again?
• Mars in Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars, as well as its comic book adaptation Warlord of Mars is stated to be a dying word whose oceans dried up thousands of years ago due to an ecological catastrophe. The planet is an arid, extremely dangerous place, most of its fauna is hostile and carnivorous. Hordes of Green Martians roam the land raiding the weak, while the last civilized peoples live in the city-states where Decadent Courts and tyrants are depressingly commonplace with princesses and noblewomen being regularly targeted for kidnapping. Resources are scarce. To keep their populations under control, the Martians developed a culture that causes them to exist in a constant state of perpetual warfare, consider assassination and kidnapping to be respectable and honorable professions, and fight duels at the drop of a hat. The predominant religion is a Path of Inspiration created by a society of cannibals that lures their unsuspecting victims in search of paradise to their domain in order to enslave and devour them. Said cannibals are also victims themselves of another Path of Inspiration created by others that feed on them and this cycle has been perpetrated for eras and nobody that returned alive was able to warn the world about it, being executed for heresy. To top it all off, the atmosphere is decaying and the one thing keeping all life on the planet from suffocating is a complex factory built by the Precursors that few people understand how it works. On the flip side, technology is so advanced that Martians are functionally immortal and can live for thousands of years, that is if they can get that far.
• Wherever David Rice goes in Jumper, somebody wants to beat the crap out of him. They often succeed.
• The Jungle: Anything which can go wrong, will in the Packingtown. The Fridge Horror is, of course, that an investigation revealed all the claims of Sinclair valid, except rendering workers falling in processing vats into lard and fertilizer.
• In the Juno Mozambe Mysteries aka KOP trilogy by Warren Hammond, the planet Lagarto was once a thriving tropical human colony reminiscent of South America. The key to its wealth was a unique fruit that produced one of humanity's finest wines. Unfortunately, humans from more advanced, older worlds including Earth itself have managed to take samples and successfully reproduce that fruit and its resultant wine. With Lagarto being a backwards One-Product Planet, its economy crashes to become a planetary 3rd world country where crime is commonplace, the police (including the main character who's practically a crime lord) is corrupt and does racketeering on the side and a big chunk of the economy comes from catering to offworld sex tourists.
• The Last Dragon takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where it never stops raining, which means it's hard to grow crops that won't drown, which means a lot of people go hungry. Worse, there's some heavy Fantastic Racism and a terribly oppressive pseudo-feudal society.
• The basic idea of The Laundry Files is that creatures like those from the Cthulhu Mythos really exist and that it's only through the efforts of a few top-secret organizations that they don't invade our planet. This kind of business can get very, VERY nasty. In the first book alone they only saved the entire universe from being eaten by the skin of their teeth. And It Gets Worse. Especially when CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN gets brought up: Basically, there will soon come a time when interdimensional boundaries wear so thin that unspeakable horrors will be able to be summoned by ordinary humans unintentionally, as a product of a particularly horrifying variation of Clap Your Hands If You Believe. This is so serious, the government considers using the SCORPION STARE program to reduce the world's population by turning random people to stone a viable solution.
• 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...
  • For the believers in the last 3 1/2 years of the Tribulation, to a certain extent, it becomes a Cozy Catastrophe as God provides protection for them and their equipment while everyone else suffers. Bloody rivers? God provides clean water. Sun-baking heat that scorches everything? Not if you're a believer. Pitch-black darkness in New Babylon? God will at least provide some level of visibility. The world's economic system crashing with the destruction of New Babylon? God has the believers covered in that area. Oh yeah, don't forget to look up, believers, because your redemption draws near!
  • The crapsackness returns in Kingdom Come as the Other Light faction amasses a huge army of converts at the latter end of the Millennium to overthrow God and Jesus when Satan is released. Fortunately, this doesn't last as Satan's entire army is smoked into ashes in seconds, Satan is forced to bow before Jesus Christ and confess Him as Lord before being sent to the Lake of Fire, and the entire material universe is destroyed prior to God creating the "new heavens and new earth".
• The Leonard Regime takes place in a world where everybody is controlled by an oppressive dictator.
• Nineteenth century France as depicted by Les Misérables.
• 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. To elaborate, Camorr is a place where children as young as eight are hung for stealing a loaf of bread as a matter of course, slavery is openly practiced, nobles have literally no checks on their power and can do whatever they please, including torturing commoners for their own amusement, and gladiatorial combat between humans and giant octopuses, man-eating sharks and fist-sized wasps are a common and beloved form of entertainment. Characters like Vencarlo Barsavi, Maxilan Stragos, and Requin, who would be monstrous Big Bads ripe for getting their arses kicked by the heroes in any other 'verse, are here irreproachable pillars of the community and on-and-off allies of the protagonists.
• The Man in the High Castle: An extremely hellish and oppressive one where the Axis won World War II. Not just for the actual characters, but also applies to the book-within-a-book The Grasshopper Lies Heavy — an incredibly racist United Kingdom ends up winning the Cold War and conquering the world. Of course, compared to the one they live in, the characters view the one in the novel as paradise. Similarly, the divide between Nazi-occupied territories and Japanese-occupied territories reflects this divide; while the Japanese are certainly not nice to their subjects, they are on the whole far more humane, rational and sane than the Nazis are, who practically become Omnicidal Maniacs in their endless war to attain racial purity.
• The Marquis de Sade 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 about this to screams at her for being a parasite that wanted something for nothing. Mind you, this is essentially the high point of the story — it gets much, much worse for the poor girl as it goes on.
  • The world of pretty much all of Sade's work in general qualifies as this big time. Anyone who isn't a bastard in his works is either a hypocrite or a victim, and fundamental human decency doesn't seem to even exist. Given his general Humans Are Bastards worldview, this isn't too surprising.
• In The Maze Runner, the world is crawling with those infected with the Flare and even those not infected have proven themselves to be just as nasty. Nearly everybody is willing to kill the protagonists (and everybody else) and there's nearly nothing in the way of plant life either.
• The Metro series. Hoo boy.
  • Even without the supernatural elements, the premise is relentlessly bleak. World War III broke out, full-scale nuclear exchange, turning the world into a blasted, radioactive wasteland full of man-eating mutants. The remnants of humanity is forced underground, into the titular metro, where they can only survive one day at a time, hoping against hope that one day, before the multivitamin tablets run out and everything breaks down, they can return to the surface in some limited capacity. Everything is scarce. Food, water, ammunition, parts, everything. Mutant attacks are commonplace. Only the bravest or most insane dare set foot on the surface, even for a few minutes. Even with humanity reduced to the fifty thousand people living in the Metro, life is among the cheapest commodities available.
  • But surely, with humanity reduced to no more than fifty-thousand people, and everyone on a disaster footing, humanity could pull together and...? HA HA HA—No. The people of the Metro split up almost immediately, and the default condition is a precariously balanced cold war between Hansa, the Reds and the Reich, that turns hot every so often. And none of these are particularly nice places to live. Hansa is a hyper-capitalist society, and people without means are treated as less than dirt. The Reich is suffering from an aging population and brain-drain caused by its increasingly insane racial purity policies, and the Reds are Stalinists on steroids, with all that entails. Meanwhile, small independent stations on the outer ends of the lines are more often than not left to fend for themselves, and a station going silent due to mutant attacks, starvation, dehydration, disease or something more sinister is lamentable, but hardly out of the ordinary. Even Polis, held up as "the city on the hill", is a caste-based society without social mobility and plagued by political infighting between the scientist and warrior castes. The only organization working for the Metro as a whole, the Spartan Rangers, is mired in bureaucracy and only consists of a few dozen people anyway.
  • On top of all this, there are a whole slew of supernatural elements that make the whole thing even more depressing and frightening. Worst are the ghosts. Whole stretches of tunnel are occupied by the souls of those killed by the bombs, who live out their last moments of life for all eternity, when they don't strip the sanity from the living. One character theorizes that the apocalypse didn't just destroy the world, but Heaven and Hell too, and left the souls of the dead to wander the earth for all eternity. Then there's whispers in the night. The balls of seemingly sentient lightning that soar through the tunnels. The hallucinations that sometimes tell a traveler to suck his gun barrel. The passages that seem to bar themselves, trapping travelers inside to die of thirst. And a lot of other things.
  • Finally, there's the Dark Ones. They're mutants. Probably. However, unlike other mutants, these ones are vaguely humanoid, entirely sapient, move completely silently, and can kill humans with a touch. Even seeing a Dark One is likely to strip the poor sap who sees it of their sanity. Their presence is announced by a chill wind and a feeling of palpable dread. And no one knows anything about them. What they are, beyond cold and antithetical to human life, is a complete mystery. The fact that they are peaceful and that their driving people insane was an unforeseen and tragic side effect of attempting to communicate comes far too late to be of comfort to anyone.
• Mistborn: The Original Trilogy features a world that starts out as a post-apocalyptic wasteland ruled by an Evil Overlord. Ash falls from the sky constantly and the majority of people (called Skaa) are either literally slaves or barely a step above it. After the heroes kill the Lord Ruler, things start getting worse, especially when the local Omnicidal Maniac gets released from his can. But Vin and Sazed manage to fix it in the end. By the time of the Sequel Series the planet is relatively technologically advanced (featuring things like electricity and firearms) and, while it still has its problems, is overall a pretty nice place to live.
• Discussed in A Model Life: Charlie offers the dissatisfied James a home in a different model, where he'd be a powerful law-enforcer in an apocalypse, with the complete authority to hurt or kill anyone. James finds the idea utterly horrifying.
• In the Moreau Series, the Pan-Asian War left Tokyo and New Dehli radioactive craters, and the PRC conquered Japan and Taiwan. Tel Aviv was nuked by the Islamic Axis during the Third Gulf War, and sub-Saharan Africa and South America have been devastated by other, unnamed wars. Moreaus, created as soldiers, are second-class citizens at best throughout the world, and many are refugees from war or persecution. The Troubles continue unabated in Northern Ireland. The U.S. verges on a Police State, with rampant political corruption as a bonus, and verges on civil war with the Moreau population, and the alien invaders who caused much of this conspire behind the scenes to make it worse.
• Mortal Engines: Most of the world is a barren wasteland mainly made of mud and oil. Parts of the ocean have dried up and many species are now extinct. Giant predator cities chase each other for resources and often kill the inhabitants carte-blanche. Inside and outside these cities, pirates, murderers, and slavers are very common, with zero presence of law or justice. You can be turned into a zombie cyborg after death and be forced to live like that forever. The only opponents to the Municipal Darwinist system aren't much better and also frequently kill innocent people. Also, there are destructive orbital weapons that end up getting used. At least farther in the future everything seems to be better.
• NowWhat in Mostly Harmless, a singularly miserable planet (which also happens to be an alternate of Earth) that Arthur Dent happens across in his travels to find a suitable alternate Earth (and Fenchurch?) So bad is this planet that the only picture of the president was after he'd shot his own face off, and the only export is the useless skin of an animal that's just as cold and miserable as the colonists, whose only ambition is to leave at any cost.
• The world of The Mysterious Stranger, written by Mark Twain at the height of his Creator Breakdown, is certainly this trope. Featuring a small Austrian village at the height of the European witch craze, where the common folk are so miserable that anyone who has a run of good fortune, no matter how small, will be accused of witchcraft and certainly burned at the stake— and the condemned accept this without protest because their lives are so horrific that they prefer death. Yet at the same time, paranoia is so high that everyone goes along with it even though the majority know that witches aren't real because they're terrified that others are true believers who would suspect them for their skepticism. And this is before Satan shows up and reveals that all humans are doomed from the start, and that the only way to reduce suffering is either to let them die immediately, so that they no longer experience the horrors of the world, or to render them insane so that they at least have the illusion of joy which may or may not be the fate of the narrator at the end. Not that Satan is any better of course; despite not being the same entity as the Devil (at least, according to his own word), he cares naught for human beings at all, because he has no Moral Sense whatsoever, and claims that humans are the worst of all creatures because of their sense of morality. Not that any of this matters because humans have no free will, and any attempt to change one's fate simply seals one's doom. The setting is so misanthropic and depressing that the story could have been written by Gen Urobuchi and nobody would notice any difference.
• Most of Nathaniel Hawthorne's work is about how much people suck and the world is a horrible place full of evil. For some reason, he's called a Romanticist. Well, a Dark Romanticist, anyway.
• Most of the Neuromancer universe, especially the Sprawl and Chiba City.
• Earth in The Night's Dawn Trilogy. The environment was completely wrecked; giant storms rage across the surface, forcing all cities to build giant domes to protect themselves. Overpopulation is so great that anything much greater than jaywalking will cause you to be sent as an indentured servant/slave to a colony world. And the Government allows the crime cults to thrive in the lower parts of the cities.
• The world of The Night Land and Awake in the Night Land is plunged into eternal darkness after the Sun gone out, and it has Lovecraftian monsters lurking in the darkness.
• Welcome to the glorious society of Oceania from Nineteen Eighty-Four, 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 multiple Crapsack Sub-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 Apathetic Citizens of the population of Oceania who have been conditioned as a bunch of politically uncaring idiots, only surviving and breeding 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 rocket bombs fall on your head. But at least you can still have limitless fun and sex, right? Yes, but if you get 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 congratulations! 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 in some cases is shittier than the Proles. 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 fighting — the records of history and news are changed constantly in order to favor whatever The Party had in mind, which is done by The Ministry of Truth. If you have some unresolved anger issues, you can dispose of them in our "Two Minutes Hate" sessions, where all your anger and wrath can be directed to the first traitor to the Party, Emmanuel Goldstein. The best part? No Sex Allowed; the only sex you're allowed to have is with the partner the Party assigns to you, and only for procreation — sex for pleasure is strictly verboten. And by the way, unless you're a Prole which are nothing but animals compared to The Party, if you even think about dissenting against the rest of the Party and despise the watchfulness of Big Brother, which is called Thoughtcrime ("crimethink" in their "purified" language), the Thought Police will come to take you away, but instead of just killing you, they will "cure" you in the Ministry of Love, where you will be subjected to Cold-Blooded Torture and Mind Rape in Room 101 until you come face-to-face with the Despair Event Horizon itself and choose to love Big Brother. (You may want to join the Thought Police, but the rest of your comrades can still torture you there).
  • 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", the "Neo-Bolshevism" 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 pure power.
    "There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face ... forever."
  • Wait, you want to Take a Third Option and live outside the three horrible superstates? Slick move, because now you're a lowly near-slave of the Disputed Zone that the three superstates fight over! And it doesn't even matter which of them currently controls your particular region because they'll all treat you just as harshly while you do the same kind of slave labor for them. Oh, and to add insult to injury, whatever you're producing is not in any way necessary to the economies of any of your masters, and the whole Disputed Zone could be removed from the planet without changing anything about all the oppression going on.
  • What makes it even more horrific is that O'Brien spends a good part of his second conversation with Winston detailing exactly why the Dystopia of the book will never ever be dismantled. Unless you include the Appendix.
  • Thanks to the Ministry of Truth's absolute control over the flow of information and constant historical revisions, there's no way of knowing how much of this world is even real. All that hoo-hah about Eurasia and Eastasia? It could all be lies. Maybe Oceania is an all-powerful One World Order that keeps its citizens in check with false flag operations that are blamed on nonexistent enemies, or maybe it's a North Korea-style dictatorship limited to all or some of Great Britain, which fabricates everything it about the outside world. Winston doesn't even know if it really is the year 1984.
    "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
  • What makes this Crapsack World truly effective is that... it's completely normal. There's no monsters, demons, or aliens anywhere in sight. It's just regular human evil in a terrifyingly realistic world fueling the eternal misery for decades and decades.
• Modern-day Britain in Noughts & Crosses, a rare example of a functional world where although everyone can get enough to eat and can live well there is so much prejudice against non-African descended races that if you don't have dark skin, you will probably spend your life only having the most basic things on offer.
• Oliver Twisted: Set in a world where monsters have escaped their infernal prison and roam amongst the living, darkness has sunk into the heart of society as the defenseless are preyed on and orphans are corrupted to be sacrificed in this twist of the tale of Oliver Twist. However, it is strongly implied that Oliver would fulfill his destiny with his newfound True Companions to steer out and shut the door of hell on all demons forever.
• Discussed early in Greg Egan's Orthogonal trilogy by Nino, who quotes an earlier offscreen conversation with an opponent of the Generation Ship project.
  Nino: He said that if the mountain crashed into the ground, it would be a mercy. He said the whole idea of a city in the void was insane. One by one, things would go wrong — things that couldn't be fixed without help from outside. Within a generation, you'd all be starving. Eating the soil. Begging for death.
• 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.
• The Parrish Plessis series takes place in one. Parrish tries her best to improve things, she really does, but Diabolus strikes at every turn, and the series' ending leaves open the possibility that all her efforts have only made things worse.
• In the Past Doctor Adventures novel Matrix, extra Whitechapel murders gender an alternate twentieth century of militia-ruled poverty; drug-crazed murderous gangs, and animate, flesh-shredding corpses infused by the malignancy of the gestalt entity behind this nightmare.
• Perfume: Everyone is either motivated by greed, selfishness, lust or desire for fame, or callous and apathetic to their fellow human beings. And they all smell terrible. 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 Power of Five: In Oblivion, we get to see what the world looks like under the Old Ones. It's an endless string of natural disasters, wars, terrorist attacks, plagues, refugees, crazed despots, dystopian police states and, of course, the occasional Eldritch Abomination attack.
• The Punktown stories are set in a dark future world that houses the titular dystopian city. Stories are a blend of horror, dystopian sci-fi, and film noir, and the resultant concoction has abominations, creepy future fetishes, and lots of violent crime. You know you live in a Crapsack World when Punktown has become a sourcebook for Call of Cthulhu.
• The paleolithic era as portrayed in Quest for Fire: A beautiful but hellish landscape full of bloodthirsty carnivores and equally nasty herbivores where human societies live as warring hordes who regularly kill, rape and even eat one another in their struggle for survival. Early modern humans with their egalitarian foraging ways and comparatively frail bodies are barely managing to compete with the stronger and more aggressive archaic species. Even the diminutive Red dwarves are massacring them.
• The Railway Series: The Other Railway is implied to be even worse than its TV adaptation lets on. Many steam engines, Percy in particular, are rather afraid of it, believing that it's no longer a safe place for steam engines as railway companies invest more and more in modern diesel traction. Fortunately, the book series' late author, the Rev. W. Awdry, knew better.

"Percy's ideas, however, though natural for an engine, are a little muddled. British Railways Officials are not cruel. They are sad to lose faithful steam friends and glad to help engines to go to places like the Bluebell Railway at Sheffield Park in Sussex, where they can be cared for and useful and safe."

• In the eyes of many of its characters, London is this in The Rats, even before the mutant killer rats come up out of the sewers.
• Most of the Quirk Classics' Literary Mash-Ups are set - or more accurately re-set - in exaggeratedly terrible worlds. By nature, most of this is played for comedy, with the original dialogue being used in deliberate contrast to the horrible events occurring around the characters.
  • Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and its associated titles take place in a version of Regency England currently in the middle of a Zombie Apocalypse; reportedly, Manchester has been completely overrun and even London isn't safe from the walking dead.
  • Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters is set in a world where an event known as the Alteration has turned literally every form of marine life against humanity, transforming previously-harmless creatures like minnows into vicious killers and ushering in a host of mythical Sea Monsters. On top of that, human beings aren't so pleasant either: on top of the massive upsurge in piracy, mainstream society is extremely callous, with servants often being ignored while drowning or being torn apart, and apparently it's common practise to throw a child overboard to slow down any pursuing sea monsters. Even figures like Sir John Middleton and Mr Palmer have been re-imagined as colonial slavers who have no qualms about robbing native cultures of their natural resources and kidnapping islander women to take as wives - in this case, the new Lady Middleton and Mrs Palmer. And as if that wasn't bad enough, the story ends on the reveal that the novel is a Cosmic Horror Story and an Eldritch Abomination is now loose in the ocean, ready to bring about the end of everything.
  • Android Karenina actually begins in a Crapsaccharine World at first; however, as Alexei Karenin continues listening to the Face's advice and begins gaining more political power, the few elements that mitigated the underlying unpleasantness are ultimately stripped away. By the end, the country has been reduced to a Dystopian parody of Tsarist Russia, with the Tsar firmly under the control of the Honored Guests, all advanced technology confiscated from the populace, a State Sec of super-powered robots assigned to enforce the new government, and the long-abandoned social class of Serfs being reinstated to replace robot workers.
• The world of Ready Player One is Post-Peak Oil, resulting in most of the population crowding into slums surrounding cities (where trailers are literally stacked on top of each other for space) for the slim hope of employment. The economy is extremely weak, and resources are scarce. On top of that, exploitative MegaCorp IOI maintains a virtual monopoly on many industries and has enough influence that they can legally imprison and enslave debtors. Just about the only redeeming factor of this world is the virtual reality of the OASIS, and even that is under threat from IOI's attempts to win control of it via Halliday's contest.
• Ten years before the beginning of The Reckoners Trilogy, humans began to spontaneously manifest superpowers. Unfortunately, use of these powers almost instantly transforms any Epic, no matter how moral they might have been before, into a total psychopath. Now, humanity is crushed and shattered, with the only surviving civilization being ruled by Epic warlords. Newcago is one of the nicest places around, simply because it has running water and electricity, although you could easily still be killed by an Epic at any time. The only heroes are the titular Reckoners, a secretive organization that hunts and kills Epics.
• 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 40,000.
• The eponymous planet Riesel in Riesel Tales: Two Hunters is covered in rusting, miles-high cityscape, giant swaths of which have been outright abandoned; and it's all lorded over by a powerful mafia faction. The air, thin as it is due to the sheer altitude of the skyline (nobody lives on the deadly ground level), is heavily polluted from centuries of neglect. Just about every corner is crawling with crime, ranging from petty thieves to violent psychopaths. Its population has more than its fair share of swindlers, gangsters, bounty hunters, mercenaries and megalomaniacs; and the rest are comparatively nice people who are too poor to leave or are rich enough to live in the safer and more updated districts.
• The world of Basawar in The Rifter is ruled by the Payshmura Church, a largely misogynistic, homophobic, and financially corrupt organization. The land itself is stripped of nutrients and the air depleted of oxygen due to the frequent opening of the Great Gate, which drains life from Basawar.
• 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.
  • Virtually all of McCarthy's works are like this. Good people are powerless and die senselessly (or are pile-driven past the Despair Event Horizon and may as well be dead), the bad guys (when there are any) are like forces of nature, and the world itself is hard-core crap-sack with The Road being the most extreme example. It is impossible In-Universe and out for people to find a reason to live on a daily basis. What few good things are there are very small lights in a really big field of darkness.
• The Running Man by Stephen King is set 20 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 world of Nexxium with its multiplanar universe found in Salvos, is not a nice place to live, in any of the planes shown. The starting plane, the Nether Realm, is literally hell, where demons are "born" by a storm of black rain that quickly dries, causing them to hatch from eggs, many self-aware, many not. They almost immediately have to compete for survival against each other, and the survivors are captured by the decree of Demon King Regnorex, and forced to serve. The main character escaped that fate, being dragged off to the Mortal Realm by a particularly petty and vengeful Greater Demon (level 50 to her 20), and she learns the Mortal Realm isn't much better, with murder-happy cultists, wild monsters across the land, countries that summon [Heroes] from other worlds that don't exactly treat their summoned super-weapon like people, ruthless assassins who will do anything to fulfill their contract, and all sorts of horrible people. Fortunately, Salvos does find trustworthy allies in both places and the allies in the latter are genuinely trying to help her reunite with the former, and in the process, they all make the world a better place everywhere they go.
• K.J Parker's The 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.
• A Series of Unfortunate Events includes:
  • A lumber mill whose manager apparently has no knowledge of healthcare laws and only pays his employees in chewing gum.
  • A boarding school run by a card carrying Sadist Teacher.
  • A village full of insane crow worshippers (no, really) who murder anyone who doesn't follow their ridiculous set of laws.
  • A circus where the performers are treated like dirt by both their bosses and the spectators.
    • Also not that the circus freaks had abilities most people wouldn't even consider bad or freaky most of the time... like being able to write with both of your hands... I mean... What the hell Villain? That's low even for that type of setting.
• The Collective in Shades of Grey. It's a post-apocalyptic dystopian society with a caste system based solely on what colors you can see and nothing else. Part of the teachings of Munsell, the 'Founder' of the collective, involved the reduction of the number of facts in the world in order to create an incurious and largely dim-witted populace who willingly destroy advanced technology as part of regular "Leapbacks" to the point where everything from telephone networks to riding horses is forbidden. Society is run more like a strict boarding school than anything else, with the leader of the Collective being referred to as "headmaster", while local leaders are called "prefects". The aforementioned Leapbacks have turned this into a Scavenger World, where people attempt to scrounge for colored scrap in order to produce synthetic colors that everyone can see, or else just find mundane items such as spoons or unallocated postal codes. Mundane wildlife such as rabbits are extinct, while massive killer swans and other mutant megafauna roam the Outlands, alongside bizarre phenomena such as ball lightning and phookas. Chromaticans only know what stars are based on what they remember from stories and photographs taken by accident, since they don't have night vision because their pupils can't dilate.
• Tellos in Shadow of the Conqueror. Where to begin? The world is periodically wracked with apocalpytic, extinction-level Nights that see the Shade and mass famines wipe out most of the world's population; every man, woman, and child needs to vigorously train with weapons in preparation for when humanity is inevitably on its last legs again; Hamahra is under the toe of a brutal industrial elite with slums everywhere, the poor barely making enough money to sustain themselves as they're endlessly worked in the factories; the preceding governmental systems were an evil aristocracy and a communist empire; warfare has grown so deadly and widespread that tens of millions were slaughtered over the course of the Dawn Empire; Sky Pirates and Human Traffickers make themselves rich off the suffering of people they rob, pillage, enslave, or blackmail; the only concerted effort to improve the world and end the Shade forever resulted in the creation of the aforementioned empire and countless deaths; the Archknights are locked in a Forever War with the Shade and can barely find time to help the people who desperately need them, and when they actually do, there's so much rape and murder in the major cities that they can never hope to help all of the people who are being attacked and brutalized at that very minute. Tellos is an immutable Crapsack World that offers no escape from endless brutality and conflict, and the closest thing to The Chosen One is a reformed Evil Overlord who spends his time viciously slaughtering the lesser monsters of the world.
• In Shattered Twilight, to the point that a widow's child being kidnapped by demons is almost ignored by the priesthood on the basis that it happens all the time and they have more important things to do.
• The short story "Transaction" by Redfern Barrett takes place in a city (implied to be Berlin) where every interaction - sex, violence, conversation, breastfeeding - involves a financial transaction. Everything is broken, and people live minute-to-minute attempting to avoid falling into debt.
• The Sister Verse and the Talons of Ruin has the Dreadlands, a world that links all universes, but poverty is rampant, and it's been overrun by Eldritch Abominations and a sadistic death cult.
• Life under the rule of her stepmother is terrible, but arguably only gets worse after Snow White leaves the house in Six-Gun Snow White because now she has to face being biracial and a woman in a white man's world. Even when she finds the best haven she's going to find in Oh-Be-Joyful, Witch Hex tells her that "What's east is hungry. What's west is hard."
• Snow Crash presents a future USA which has broken up into a loose collection of autonomous corporate city-states guided by anarchist-capitalist principles. Just to give you an idea of what this means, The Mafia runs a pizza delivery company, and they take it very seriously: if a pizza is half an hour late, the boss himself will personally visit your house and apologise and offer you a guarantee that the delivery boy responsible will be wearing Cement Shoes the same evening.
• Someone Else's War presents a world both beautiful and horrifying. Truth in Television, as it follows a young Muslim boy living at the height of the LRA's terrorization of Uganda.
• A Song of Ice and Fire and its television adaptation, Game of Thrones. The nobility are busy squabbling over the throne of the largest single geopolitical bloc in the continent of Westeros, all while hideous monsters in the far North are waking from their long sleep and will likely invade... and, almost nobody is preparing for it. Also, most of the ordinary people are routinely treated horribly. Many nobles think nothing of raping or murdering them, and they also have to worry about dying of starvation when not conscripted to fight in agriculture-destroying wars they know little about. And winter is coming.
  • The continent of Essos is no better: part of it is still a smoking, glowing ruin from a major volcanic catastrophe that wiped a thriving empire off the map over four hundred years ago and thus is completely uninhabitable, unless you can bathe in lava and like sulphurous steam rooms — every known (and confirmed) expedition/ army sent to the peninsula of Valayria to try taking it back, looting it or just trying to find out what happened... has been lost. To the last man. Other places in Essos have such hopeful names as "The Shadow Lands", "The Bone Mountains" and "Slavers' Bay", others are rumored to be suffering the equivalent of low-level magical fallout and/or plague of some sort... and the rest? Is mainly a patchwork of city states and would-be empires that have all seen better days, all loosely linked by that aforementioned slave-trade economy focused around Slaver's Bay, all compounded by hordes of marauding semi-nomads living in the grasslands between the states having to be fended off by bribes or they'll attack. And, the less said about the continent of Sothoryos, the better: it was Ground Zero to something truly nasty enough to make the Doom of Valyria look like child's play. There are only some islands well off the coast and, maybe, two or three cities even vaguely inhabitable left. Very little is known of what happened, since trying to survive long enough to dig through and investigate that verdant, pestilence-ridden, red-in-tooth-and-claw hellscape is practically impossible for baseline humans.
• Spin presents an Earth that has become encased in a membrane by unknown forces and appears to be doomed to be destroyed within a few decades. Crime and violence are rampant, an oppressive right-wing regime has taken over the United States, much of the developing world is flirting with theocracy, and religious zealots are everywhere and have caused an epidemic of bovine disease to spread around the world thanks to their idiotic attempts to breed a pure-red calf. The ending subverts this trope, as it turns out that not only has the membrane ensured Earth's survival, but the beings who created it have gifted humanity with a whole new planet to colonize.
• The Star Wars Legends universe sometimes headed 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 same story while hoping to avoid problems with the continuity. The solution? Do the same thing a few years later.
  • It really depends on the book and the author. The ending of Outbound Flight aside, Timothy Zahn's novels, for example, tend to stay true to the original feel - there are dark times, but there is also joy and beauty and hope and adventure, and nothing is completely, unambiguously terrible. In some novels, it's almost a white and grey contrast between the good guys and the bad guys, and the Empire is never some monolithic evil structure - it's made of people who are trying their hardest to do what they think is right.
    • Of course, Zahn-bashing is more popular now. His characters are being systematically killed off and his preference for Everybody Lives, where the tension comes not from who dies next but how can they escape, gets mocked as unrealistic. A lot of old-school EU fans are very selective with canon.
  • Star Wars: Legacy is a comic book series, but it is set in the same universe as the EU just set about a century into the future. According to this, after all the aforementioned stuff has been dealt with... it gets worse anyway. Until it gets better.
  • The entirety of Republic history shows this isn't exactly an uncommon thing either. Galactic society came into being as a direct result of the ancient and warmongering Rakata Empire subjugating and seeding life throughout the galaxy, only to fall and its technology reverse-engineered centuries later. It's rare even a century or two can go by without some massive galactic war going on, usually between the two opposing Force orders, the Jedi and the Sith fighting one another. What's more, since neither of these orders can actually ever manage to eliminate the other, it's become an endless cycle of the two sides fight, one gets defeated, licks their wounds, and then rise up to do battle all over again. Entire planets are scoured of life during these wars and billions killed on a regular basis. If you are lucky you might be born, live, and die in one of the very rare times of true galactic peace, but even if there isn't a war on a galaxy-wide scale going on right now, there are going to be multiple smaller intersystem and between system wars happening all the time that you could end up getting caught up in.
  • Take the planet of Melida/Daan from Jedi Apprentice. The planet has been embroiled in a 300-year long Civil War that has spiraled into a Cycle of Revenge that nobody knows how it started and has completely wrecked the planet; economies are driven towards new weapons, both sides are low on supplies, an entire generation has been wiped out, and whatever land is left goes towards mausoleums encouraging future generations to fight harder. Plus the two sides can't even agree on a name; the slash between Melida and Daan is a compromise by the Republic.
• The Stormlight Archive (also in The Cosmere like Mistborn), was this for thousands of years. Periodically The Desolations would occur, forcing humanity to battle for survival against the demonic Voidbringers. Desolations were so severe that humanity was typically on the edge of extinction and knocked nearly back to the Stone Age, with the Heralds who lead them uncertain if humanity would even know how to make bronze upon their return. This is, however, subverted by the fact that the last Desolation was nearly four thousand years ago, and humanity is currently more advanced than it has ever been before. The world might not exactly be a great place to live, but it's certainly not a total crapsack.
• In The Sundered, the whole world's flooded with water... that eats people! The only technology left is old and rusting, and the only way anybody survives is by abusing psychic mutant slaves, which are dying out.
• In The Sun Eater, far in the future humanity has balkanized into various economic consortiums or political groups. The biggest of these is the Sollan Empire - a Church Militant empire where feudal genetically-engineered nobles lord it over their standard human subjects and the Inquisition ferrets out proscribed technology and ideas. Rivalling the Sollan Empire is the Lothrian Commonwealth which is the Soviet Union in Space and seeking to replace humanity with hermaphrodite clones. The third great power are the Extrasolarians, a motley assortment of amoral technologists/scientists who banded together against the Sollan Empire's decree. And for humanity, this is a huge improvement - millenniums ago, over 90% of humanity was conquered by American A.I. overlords and rendered into cancer chunks held in Lotus-Eater Machine pyramids when they weren't being used as Wetware CPU.
• Sunshine is set in a world where the vampires and other assorted nasties are going to win the war against humans in about a century or so.
• 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 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 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.
• Tales of the Space South takes place in the badly impoverished planet-city Space Alabama, a hellhole ruled by a racist aristocracy, with Lord George "Fore-man Grill" Birmingham, a disgusting Jerkass, at the helm.
• What do you think about living in The Passage, where the majority of human population has been wiped out (possibly everyone outside North America, and mostly everyone in North America), there are superhuman zombie-vampires who are far stronger than humans, too fast to aim at and you turn into one of them after being bitten in one of five cases - and are simply devoured in other four? Oh, and all of them are controlled by several Big Bads who are using most remaining humans as cattle, and strong light is only effective defense you have?
• The late Robert Asprin edited a series of short fantasy anthologies with multiple spinoffs known as Thieves' World. All of the anthologized stories were written for the series, and set in a common World Half Empty. At least it started out as one; it later got much, much worse.
  • His Cold Cash War, about corporate-sponsored mercenaries, also depicted an extremely grim and violent world, so much so that he started writing the light comedy series Myth Adventures to cheer himself up in contrast.
• The Tide Child Trilogy by RJ Parker. You know a world is really awful when they give a woman great political power simply because she survived several births. Birth Defects plus the deaths of infants and mothers who gave birth is depressingly common in this world. As an ocean world, precious land is scarce and the seas are full of things happy to eat human flesh. Finally the two main island nations have a Forever War spanning decades and much Human Sacrifice is used to placate the gods.
• This trope is one of the base premises of a whole genre: Cyberpunk.
• 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 the Union and the Confederacy, and nuclear weapons are used with more abandon. Ironically, Japan is the only major player in this timeline's version of World War II not to have a nuclear bomb dropped on it.
• In Tom Holt's Ye Gods!, Prometheus gives Jason Derry a view of a world without him in order to show why it's so important he sides with him against the Jerkass Gods. In this world there's no such thing as a joke, everyone lives in fear of the gods all the time, and game shows are deadly. Jason's reaction is "I wouldn't want to live there, but I wouldn't want to live in Florida and plenty of people do."
• Tom Kratman:
  • In Caliphate, much of Continental Europe is undergoing decay under Caliphate rule, having a massive slave class, literally zero women's rights (sex slavery is the norm), and a horrifyingly totalitarian system. The Middle East is a crapsack state as well, as noted by character Besma. The protagonist faction, the Imperial States of America, is a ruthless fascist state that commits atrocities worldwide to destroy Islam - and they're our best hope. The rest of the world isn't much better, with everyone pretty much in a state of hostility to one another that's effectively low-level war punctuated by periods of actual armed combat.
  • In the Countdown series it becomes clear that the world is slowly but surely going to hell, and that civilisation is crumbling under the rising tide of barbarism that the governments of the world are either unwilling or unable to try to address.
• In general, the Sixth World of Trail of Lightning has been decimated by the Energy Wars and flooded by climate change. In specific, Dinétah is a society of scavengers and survival hunters where order is imposed by corrupt law enforcers or warring criminal cartels.
• The Twelve Kingdoms:
  • Played straight whenever a king falls from the way; their kingdom is overrun by man-eating beasts, volcanoes erupt and the earth cracks open, snow buries villages in the middle of summer, monsters swim up from the depths to devour ships, it rains frogs and locusts consume crops for miles, plagues wipe out whole villages in a single night, typhoons flatten forests and... well, you get the general idea.
  • 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 twelve Kirin, who do their best to advise their less-than-perfect human monarchs.
• The world of The Unexplored Summon://Blood-Sign is run by secret factions of summoners. In the setting, magic-users are Invisible to Normals, making it difficult for normal people to even think of resisting. On top of that, any summoner can summon Materials, supernatural beings which are completely indestructible by non-magical means. Several years prior to the series' beginning, many high-ranking summoners died in an event known as the Secret War, and their loss broke the Balance of Power between the factions. As a result, internal discipline has been weakened, allowing many summoners to go rogue. Finally, the White Queen, the ultimate Material who is worshipped as a goddess, is an insane Eldritch Abomination who's responsible for all of this.
• The world of Vermis I is one infested with all kinds of monsters, undead, witches, and far worse. Friendly encounters in the wilderness are somewhat rare, and the only major human population center mentioned is said to be in a state of chaos, split between several factions in a bloody civil war. Understandably, the birth rate in this world is rather low at the time Vermis takes place, and many of the children who do get born end up being abducted and eaten by witches.
• Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War starts off easy with a dystopian near-future setting where America is ravaged by terrorism, gutted by economic meltdowns, torn by ethnic strife and suffering almost totalitarian Federal tyranny, and the rest of the world is little better off. It gets much worse before long...
• In The White Tiger, there's The Darkness, where all the poverty-stricken people reside.
• William Napier's Attila trilogy is set in the very last years of the Western Roman Empire. In the world of 450 AD, everything is crapsack. Both the Western and Eastern empires are ruled by weak hysterical lunatics. The Roman world is crumbling. The rich and powerful evade any sort of responsibility and refuse to contribute to trivial things such as maintaining proper defences and keeping the armies fully manned. Britannia has been abandoned to the barbarian Saxons. The collapsing Empire totters from one shock to the next. And then a barbarian warlord emerges in the East to unify the steppe tribes. The doomed hero Aetius gathers such Roman armies as he can, knowing it is all futile. But even he is shocked beyond despair by a prophecy that this is the last generation to know Imperial Rome and within twenty years there will be nothing but memories. What is already a Crapsack World will only get worse.
• 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.
• In A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels, there are several crapsack worlds and alternate futures in which Earth is a crapsack world.
  • A Wrinkle in Time itself features Camazotz, a world so conformist and authoritarian it makes 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.
  • A Swiftly Tilting Planet (the second sequel) has Charles Wallace and his flying unicorn twice landing in "projections" — crapsack possible future worlds.
• The world of the Witcher books is full of monsters that are often better than the humans they prey on, but are still hunted by the titular Witchers - humans mutated into perfect monster killers - who are hated and loathed by common people. Fantastic Racism is everywhere - Humans Are Bastards abusing their position of power; Elves, who are forced to live in ghettos, aren't really that much better - other races generally side with Elves but remember that they weren't so nice before the humans conquered them. The Empire is conquering other nations with force of arms (and War Is Hell in this setting, by the way) or economics, and it is made clear that soon after the end of the last book, this world will suffer their equivalent of the Black Death, which the Corrupt Church will blame on magic users, leading to a wizard genocide. This world is so corrupt and rotten that Ciri, who can travel between the worlds, abandons it in the end, which means that when the new ice age comes to wipe everybody out, there won't be any of her descendants to lead the survivors to another world. The games, despite being so dark that they're often compared with Dragon Age, are still Lighter and Softer compared to the books.
• Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence — hundreds of thousands of years of humanity in a massive Hopeless War of attrition against the Xeelee, who are also fighting a race of dark matter beings who want to render the universe unfit for baryonic life (like humanity). They lose. First the humans, then the Xeelee. Might be subverted, though, in that Xeelee knew they couldn't win and so spent all of time (and we do mean "all of time" literally) creating a method to leave the universe into one better suited for our type of life. They succeeded and even allowed the remnants of humanity to use it.
• You Can Be a Cyborg When You're Older by Richard Roberts: The world has degenerated into an environmentally and politically devastated hellscape with most of the world's AI having hone insane as well as a weird Cult having emerged around cosplaying as fantasy characters. That doesn't get our heroine down, who thinks The World Is Just Awesome.
• Zothique: It's the last inhabited continent—all the others either had all their inhabitants slaughtered or sank beneath the sea. Technology has been smashed back to the level of bows and arrows. Zul-Bha-Sair, one of the better locations, is ruled by the "Charnel God" Mordiggian. Naat, meanwhile, is run by particularly nasty necromancers, and Uccastrog is also known as "The Isle of the Torturers." A typical story in the setting, "The Last Hieroglyph," sets up a standard heroic journey that turns out to be to the fate of all living things: being stored as a hieroglyph on a god's record of the world, which will be complete on the approaching day when everything in the setting is wiped out. For added fun, the author and his buddies loved shared-universe fiction, so this is the future of the above-mentioned Cthulhu Mythos, which is the future of the above-mentioned Cimmeria, so the inhabitants were actually lucky that they weren't all eaten by Eldritch Abominations.
• Z Is for Zombie by Adam-Troy Castro and illustrated by Johnny Atomic. As the introduction puts it:
  "The truth is that something primal has changed during the night. There have been dark negotiations between those we exalt as gods and those we fear as demons. Treaties have been rewritten. Borders have been redrawn. The territories that once belonged to the realm of life now belong on the wrong side of death. For those of us living on Earth it's a lot like learning that the government has decided to plow under our homes and neighborhoods using the right of eminent domain, except there's no warning and no appeal and no compensation and no other place to go. Yes. This is unfair. It certainly sucks to be us."

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