< Crapsack World

Crapsack World/Literature

  • Welcome to the glorious society of Oceania from 1984, the poster child and one of the most triumphant examples for Dystopia. A Vast Bureaucracy that has control over almost anything, called The Party, rules over Oceania's inhabitants. Big Brother Is Watching You. By the way, 1984 presents some Crapsack Worlds to choose from:
    • Do you want to just be one of the vast majority who lives in blissful ignorance and just cares about living happily? Then, welcome to the Proles! The Proles are the vast majority of the population of Oceania who have been conditioned to never give a shit about politics, and have to live in Wretched Hive habitats with next to no technology, education, or luxury. The Party will never give a shit about you and your wants, and will treat you like an animal in an African reservation while cruise missiles fall on your head. But at least you can still have limitless fun and pleasure, right? Yes, but if you got too smart the Party can still kill you here.
    • What's that? You want to join the Party so that you can take part in killing Proles and running the bureaucracy? Then 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 by the way is still crapsack. You have to master the art of Doublethink, the art of holding two mutually contradictory ideas and believing in both of them at the same time, while constantly denying the self and Reality. You will constantly be informed that Oceania is at war with either Eurasia or Eastasia at any given time, and insists that they've always been at war with whoever they're 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!!! 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 us and despises the watchfulness of Big Brother, which is called "thoughtcrime" the Thought Police will come to take you, but instead of 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 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" 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. You can also choose the "disputed areas" between the superstates where you can spend a great deal of time being smart, but you will be killed by the superstates' soldiers or be taken as their slave.

"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.

    • What makes it even more horriffic 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..
    • What makes this Crapsack World truly effective is that...it's completely normal. There's no monsters, demons, or aliens anywhere in sight. Just the regular evil of mankind fueling the neverending misery.
  • In A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels there are several crapsack worlds, and alternate futures in which Earth is a crapsack world. One of which is a world so conformist and authoritarian it makes Ingsoc look like a utopia. People are so rigorously controlled, failing to bounce a ball in exact time with every other child on the planet gets you thrown in a torture chamber, and catching the common cold gets you euthanized.
  • In Jay Kristoff's novel Stormdancer, the Shima islands are flowing with pollution, an evil shogun in power-hungry and selfish, and "impure" people are being executed buy a group of religous zealots called "The Lotus Guild." How can one girl and a flightless griffin set thing right again?
  • Fahrenheit 451. The entire world subscribes to a nihilistically hedonistic ideology which boils down to "If you have problems, don't face them, burn them!" Nuclear war is so prevalent that the sound of jets flying off to nuke entire cities out of existence isn't even commented on. Television has taken the place of the family. The population has degenerated into an Idiocracy. Drug use is so ubiquitous that a single EMT team will likely deal with upwards of a dozen ODs a night. Running over pedestrians and crashing cars ala Grand Theft Auto is the new national pastime. Being a bookworm and engaging in other intellectual activities will make the ignorant masses feel unhappy and is punishable by having your house and possessions burned down. Resisting having your house burnt down will result in a giant mechanical hound hunting you down and killing you.
  • Gathering Blue: After The Ruin the book's community has been reduced to a barbaric society, with technology at pre-industrial levels.
  • Childhood's End: This Arthur C. Clarke novel 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.
  • Most of the Neuromancer universe, especially the Sprawl and Chiba City.
  • Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter's Time Odyssey. The universe will tear itself apart down to the subatomic level by cosmological expansion. The universe only has a finite amount of usable energy, and it's very slowly burning itself up. 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.
  • Earth in Night's Dawn. The environment was completely wrecked; giant storms rage across the surface, forcing all cities to built giant domes to protect themselves. Overpopulation is so great that the anything much greater than jaywalking will cause you to be sent as a indentured servant/slave to a colony world. And the Government allows the crime cults to thrive in the lower parts of the cities.
  • A Song of Ice and Fire wrote this trope courtesy of its Deconstructionist nature.

Sandor: There are no true knights, no more than there are gods. If you can't protect yourself, die and get out of the way of those who can. Sharp steel and strong arms rule this world, and don't ever believe any different.
Sansa: You're awful.
Sandor: I'm honest. It's the world that's awful.

  • In The White Tiger, there's The Darkness, where all the poverty-stricken people reside. Keep note that Indian society in whole is full of rampant corruption within politicians and policemen and pretty crappy to live in if you're not rich.
  • House of the Scorpion is set Twenty Minutes Into the Future, where Mexico is under control of the corrupt quasi-communist Keepers, and life in the United States is so bad, that not only are people crossing the border into the United States, but into Mexico as well.
  • As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. Strangely, a rant about death given by a doctor who has just watched a woman he was supposed to be saving die a horrible and painful death is actually the only upbeat part of the entire novel.
  • 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 got of the 'king' situation results in Bayaz reminding him who's running the show. Ouch.
  • 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 the author 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 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.
  • 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.
      • And later, both Sanctaphrax and Undertown get destroyed, with everybody who was left. Talk about being unnaturally cheery.
  • 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.
  • Patrick Suskind's Perfume. Everyone is either motivated by greed, selfishness, lust or desire for fame, or callous and apathetic to their fellow human beings. Grenouille, a twisted little troll of a man who kills women for their scent, actually comes across as the most sympathetic character in the whole book - at least he's motivated by a desire to create something beautiful, in the absence of anything else to give his life meaning.
  • The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. Anything which can go wrong, will in the 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.
  • Harrison Bergeron, by Kurt Vonnegut, in which any person who has any kind of talent is handicapped to prevent them from excelling and thus making other people feel inferior. The main character is smart, tall, strong, and handsome, so his handicaps include headphones that play distracting noises, three hundred pounds of weight strapped to his body, forty pounds of birdshot around his neck, eyeglasses designed to give him headaches, and a rubber ball on his nose, black caps on his teeth, and shaven eyebrows to hide his beauty. {{[spoiler|He rebels and dies, and his parents are too handicapped to be aware of watching their own son shot on television.}}
    • In fact, lots of Kurt Vonnegut's books either have the world heading for disaster (imminent or eventual), or illustrate how crapsacky the world is even without the end looming.
  • 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."
  • 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.
  • The novel A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole seems to personify this entire trope in the character of Ignatius J. Reilly: Fat, ugly, repulsive, arrogant, full of useless facts but little actual intelligence, utterly lacking in empathy and humor, sponging off his mother with zero gratitude whatsoever, and generally making the world a worse place to live. It doesn't help that all of the other characters in the novel are defined by their flaws and inadequacies, and stumble through their lives without a clue as to what they're doing or how they're affecting others. The novel's climax gives the reader the hope of Reilly finally getting his comeuppance, then dashes it by giving him an easy out that promises the continuation of his repugnant behavior. It's worth noting that the author committed suicide eleven years before the novel's first publication.
    • It's also worth noting Ignatius is often considered to be a self-portrait of Toole, who went into a depression after no one picked up his "amazingly brilliant" piece of work. Theory goes his suicide was not so much for a bitter outlook on the world as from a bitter moment of self-realization.
    • There's an additional theory that Toole's suicide may have been the result of a conflict with his own sexuality. Furthermore, although Ignatius and other characters are painted as blinkered and bumbling fools, it should be noted that New Orleans (the novel's setting) still retains its sense of carnival and is replete with colourful characters. In fact it gives quite a balanced view of New Orleans, giving us a look into the party atmosphere of the city without sparing us its seedier elements. I'm not completely convinced that the book qualifies as a decent example of a Crapsack World.
  • 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.
  • Search the Sky by Frederic 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.
  • The Twelve Kingdoms: 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.
  • Most works written by Franz Kafka.
  • 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.
  • The Star Wars Expanded Universe sometimes looks like it's heading in this direction. It's less intense than in other examples, but still, whenever the peaceful, freedom-loving institution of the moment manages to get the upper hand and finally look like it's going to turn things for the better, something happens that screws everything up and plunges the whole galaxy right back in the darkness of endless war. After the Empire there's Ysanne Isard, then Thrawn, then the Emperor reincarnates, then he reincarnates again, then the Imperial Remnant reunites under Daala and starts messing up the place again. Then the cult of Ragnos springs up, then the Yevetha set out to destroy everyone, then there are several more attempts to restore the Empire... and all this in only twenty years. And when the galaxy finally seems to have some peace and things seem to be looking brighter, the Yuuzhan Vong invade and start a war that kills trillions. Then there's another civil war. Then the Empire and the Sith rise yet again. Seriously, how people from the Star Wars galaxy ever wish for anything but a quick, painless death is a mystery.
    • This is an example of most Star Wars authors wanting to tell the 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 gray 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. Many like to believe that it ended with the Hand of Thrawn duology, when the Empire and the New Republic finally sign a lasting truce.
  • Most of Nathaniel "Mr. Sunshine" 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.
  • 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.
  • Whereas the city of Haven in Simon R. Green's Hawk and Fisher series is the Wretched Hive version, where even the "gods" aren't above greed, mayhem, sociopathy and a host of other antisocial tendencies, but still attract worshippers. His later Nightside series draws heavily on Haven to create a similar setting as part of a hidden version of London.
  • 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.
  • The Running Man by Stephen King is set Twenty Minutes Into the Future in a world where many people are dying of lung cancer due to pollution and cannot even get basic medicine, where the more elite classes are apathetic and everyone is numbed out by watching horrific TV "game shows" where people die for small amounts of money.
  • The Road by Cormac McCarthy is set After the End, in a world where there has been no sunlight for eight years, the forests are dead and falling to the ground, Georgia is as cold as Alaska, and the nights are described as being "as dark as the cellars of Hell". Cannibal cults with female slaves roam the countryside, eating the babies of their women as soon as they give birth, and sometimes 'farming' people in their basements, slowly eating them bit by bit. People are dying from the cold, from some kind of horrible disease that causes them to cough blood until they drop dead, and from starvation, walking through barren farmlands. If this sounds awful that's because, you know, it kind of is.
    • Anything by Cormac McCarthy, really.
  • Anything Bertolt Brecht wrote pre-WWII.
  • 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 True Neutral race of alien time travellers, who also confirm that humanity will go extinct in a horrible way.

HP 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.

  • China Mieville's world Bas Lag, and especially its apparent largest city, New Crobuzon, featured in his novels in Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council, fits this to a 'T'---if there's a pool of water in the city which is not stagnant and oily, or any non-corrupt person with any amount of noticeable power, we've not seen it or him.
    • There are implied to be nice and happy things in Bas-Lag - Bellis wants to save New Crobuzon from invasion for a reason - but thanks to the particular paths the novels take, we don't see much of them.
  • This trope is one of the base premises of a whole genre: Cyberpunk.
  • 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.
  • 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 Ancient Egypt of The Egyptian of course, the main point of the novel is how nothing really has changed since then...
  • The Marquis De Sade's novel Justine is pretty horrific. Justine recounts how, at the age of twelve, she asked for shelter in a man's house and was told that she could only stay if she would have sex with him. The person she talks to this about screams at her for being a parasite that wanted something for nothing. Mind you, this is essentially the high point of the story.
    • The world of pretty much all of De Sade's work in general qualifies as this big time. Given his general Humans Are the Real Monsters worldview, this isn't too surprising.
  • 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 Edge the Loner pulp western series by George G. Gilman featured a Wild West so violent and corrupt that the sociopathic walking scar called Edge may have been the only man strong enough to survive it. Inspired by the Eastwood/ Leone spaghetti westerns, the Edge books may well have inspired the equally vile western settings of Vertigo Comics' Preacher (Comic Book) and Jonah Hex series.
  • Mistborn features a world that starts out a post-apocalyptic wasteland ruled by an Evil Overlord. After the heroes kill him, 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.
  • Most residents of Camorr, a sort of Low Fantasy medieval Venice turned Up to Eleven in Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora, would pay good money (doubtless stolen or extorted) to live in a Crapsack World instead.
  • The Dresden Files. Good or often merely neutral supernatural factions are outnumbered and outgunned by bad supernatural factions that are always chaotic evil and prey on humanity like cattle. Dark magic is hyper-addictive while few are even warned of this. Cosmic horrors lurk in the background, as well as the threats of sacrificial ascension rituals and old gods. The breaking of the masquerade being an effective "nuclear" option, the divisions between various evil factions, and the web of rules and alliances are the only reasons why the evil factions haven't simply taken over. However, the current villains appear to be systematically breaking from those rules, such as killing 10s of thousands of people in a nerve gas attack.
    • But it's also arguably a World Half Full. Insanely determined people like Harry Dresden and Michael can make a difference with a lot of effort and help from the benevolent supernatural powers. The whole Crapsack World and Hopeless War tropes get subverted pretty hard 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.
  • Let's discuss 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.
  • 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 brutally 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.
  • K.J Parker's Scavenger Trilogy. Life is hard, short and mired in failure. There is less and less secure government, and you don't want to know what is driving what order there is.
  • Left Behind, during the last 7 years of humanity, people get to experience at frequent intervals: worldwide earthquake, 1/3 of the world's water supply turning into deadly poison or blood, utter darkness covering the Earth, hail of fire, plague of giant locusts whose bite cause painful boils for 6 months (those bitten are rendered immortal temporarily to prevent suicide), deathly cold, deathly heat, and then the Prince of Darkness himself gets in on the fun...
  • 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 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.
  • Modern day Britain in Noughts and 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.
  • 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.
  • How about Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games? North America has collapsed into a totalitarian nightmare which considers watching children slaughter each other on television to be the height of entertaining. People from the satellite states (which supply the children in question) tend to be dirt-poor and will be beaten or killed for pretty much no reason at all. Then you have the arena itself, complete with neurotoxic mists, nightmare-inducing bees, giant walls of fire, mad dogs who happen to be templated off your dead friends...did we mention the whole country is required to watch? The rest of the world is conspicuously absent, possibly destroyed in the vaguely implied calamity that brought the government in question to power.
    • For a freakin' young adult novel, the world of Panem is insanely brutal.
    • Special mention to the 'nightmare-inducing bees', who were just one species of many, rather horrifying ones created in said government's labs to beat down a revolution over seventy years ago, that the government just let loose and are there for are running (or buzzing) 'round the countryside, terrorizing people.
    • Even the joining the rebels isn't much better. After risking everything following a rumor with risk of being killed or becoming a mute slave of the Capitol, you get to look forward to a civiliztion where everything must be rationed and everyone works. Cinna's prep team were loaked in a dark room in chains and beaten for 'hoarding food.' Even Katniss the Rebellion 's symbol for hope isn't given much special treatment by Coin. Coin herself is just President Snow playing for the good side. One of her suggestions when the beat the Capitol was to hold a Hunger Games themselves except using Capitol children. Which, other then completely destroying their pampered way of life would give them ample reason to start a rebelion on their own later down the line.
  • Holly Lisle and her Matrin novels. In the prequel of the books, you have a society of rich, powerful wizards that waste energy like it's nothing and when they run out, they use 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.
  • Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Attwood, where religious fundamentalism makes it a Crapsack World.
  • 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.
  • The planet Dosadi in The Dosadi Experiment (by Frank Herbert) is so vile and horrid that anyone that wasn't born on the planet is bound to get torn to shreds within a couple of hours. Jorj X. Mc Kie, the protagonist, quickly finds that he must adapt to the mindset of the Dosadi natives if he is to survive his stay on the planet and complete his mission.
  • In Harry Potter, wizarding Britain (in effect the world) is ruled by the Ministry of Magic, which is so chock-full of corruption that widely-known murderers can get off free even when they publicly glorify their cult leader, Lord Voldemort, under whose service they were accused of committing their crimes; it also treats non-humans, Muggles and Muggle-borns (wizards whose parents are both Muggle) with utter contempt, AND it holds an entire species in institutionalised slavery, AND it's led by people who are either evil (like Fudge, who only cares about getting re-elected, even if he gets an innocent man's soul SUCKED OUT AND EATEN) or SUPER-evil (like Umbridge, who likes to make children write things in their own blood and finds it FUNNY to get someone's soul sucked out).
    • Then there's the Death Eaters, who make the Ministry look like saints. They're led by Lord Voldemort, who was already a completely unrepentant, happily irredeemable murderer when he was 16-17. Then the Death Eaters take over the Ministry and conduct a systematic, Nazi-like campaign which is so evil that Grindelwald (the wizarding version of Adolf Hitler) thinks it's going too far. Oh, and guess what? NO wizarding government from the rest of the world tries to help either side; either they're too scared of wizarding Britain to interfere, in which case Voldemort rules a superpower, or ALL of them are so messed up that they don't even care.
    • At the end of the last book, the ordinary Ministry is put back into power. There's zero indication of any societal changes at all. The grand sum of the heroes' achievements is to prevent things from getting any worse.
      • A rather cynical political theory called "public choice" argues that governments are run for the narrow self-interest of politicians and bureaucrats. At least one serious academic paper has noted that the Ministry of Magic lives down to the very worst predictions of that theory.
  • The world of The Witcher books is full of monsters that are often better than humans they prey on, but are still hunted by titular Witchers - humans mutated into perfect monster killers - who are hated and loathed by common people. Fantastic Racism is everywhere - Humans Are the Real Monsters abusing their position of power, Elves, who are forces to live in ghettos, aren't really that much better - other races generally sides with Elves but remember they weren't so nice before humans conquered them. The Empire is conquering other nations with military (and War Is Hell by the way) or economics, it is made clear that soon after the end of the last book this world will suffer their equivalent of Black Death plague, which Corrupt Church will blame on magic users, leading to wizard holocaust. This world is so corrupted and rotten that Ciri, who can travel between the worlds, abbandons it in the end, which means that when new ice age will come to wipe everybody out, there won't be any of her descedants to lead the survivors to another world. The games, despite being so dark they're often compared with Dragon Age are still Lighter and Softer compared to the books.
  • Darwath is being invaded by flesh-eating Lovecraftian monsters, but that's just their top problem; also, their world is sliding into an Ice Age, and the Church is zealously destroying the wizards and magic-tech which are the only things that just might save them. Hambly spends three books basically raising hopes in order to dash them. Even when, at the very last minute, the wizard persuades all the monsters to emigrate to a warmer climate, that still leaves them with a collapsing ecology and a politico-religious state that makes Afghanistan look like a shining city on a hill.
  • In The Pale King, the New Mexico trailer park and the rest of Chapter 8 provide a grim portrayal of a teenage girl trying to survive with her drifter of a mother.
  • Witch and Wizard: Let's see, children ripped from bed in the middle of the night? Check. Evil overlord bent on taking over the world? Check. Said children constantly on the run from said overlord? Check check.
  • 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.
  • 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 in the dotted line.
  • The world of Timeline-191 may not be a total Crapsack World, but it's definitely a much grimmer reality than our own. The United States is forced into geopolitics much sooner, and is never able to develop into the "land of opportunity" that defined its character from the late 19th Century onward. Surrounded by hostile countries, it instead evolves into a slightly less-oppressive version of the Soviet Union, becoming just another player in the global empire-building game. The world is far less idealistic and far more militarized. The most brutal battles of both World Wars take place between Union and Confederacy, and nuclear weapons are used with more abandon. Ironically, Japan is the only major player in this timeline's version of World War Two not to have a nuclear bomb dropped on it.
  • The world of Of Snail Slime defiantly falls under the roof of the Crapsack World. Inventions of mass destruction are showcased in large competitions, standard operating procedures for US government agents is breaking, entering and kidnapping, and ancient Greek mythological figures have a tendency to show up and wreck the place.
  • The two 'future worlds' shown in Animorphs. One is in The Stranger and one in The Familiar. Both have the world controlled by the Yeerks, with all humans enslaved, and a lot of Earth's natural flora and fauna destroyed due to Yeerk tendencies.
  • Stephen King's 11/22/63 presents an alternate history which diverges from ours with the survival of John F. Kennedy. The disruption of the timestream causes frequent earthquakes all over the world. Radiation poisoning is prevalent, due to nuclear war or destruction of reactors caused by the earthquakes. Gang warfare, pollution, poverty, extremism, famine, and hate are commonplace. And Paul McCartney is blind.
  • 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, were 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. 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 and 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
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