Recommend me some grimdark fiction!

June 30, 2019 9:17 AM

I'm really enjoying a particular kind of grimdark fiction recently: settings of profound and insurmountable systemic terribleness where individual morality is sort of irrelevant because individuals are perversely incentivised or have no good options or can't even imagine an alternative. Examples and counter-examples inside. What else should I read?

Examples:

- Warhammer 40K, especially Gaunt's Ghosts, the Last Chancers, and Ciaphas Cain
- Kameron Hurley's Bel Dame trilogy and Light Brigade
- The Black Company by Glen Cook
- Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Solzhenitsyn
- Broken Earth by N.K. Jemison
- The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang

Counter-examples:

- New Jim Crow, Gulag Archipelago, and other non-fiction about real-world horribleness.

- "Great Man theory" horribleness where a single person somehow causes all the misery in the world (and, typically, defeating that person makes everything better). I really like the bit in Black Company where when the big bad finally decides to abandon her throne, she puts her affairs in order in a week and slips away unnoticed in a single carriage while her empire grinds on without her.

- Mockingjay trilogy, and other stories where individuals manage to effect widespread change. At most, they can strike some deeply ambiguous and historically irrelevant compromise with the system to do some local and personally meaningful good.

posted by meaty shoe puppet to Writing & Language (27 answers total)

The Traitor Baru Cormorant is very deliberately doing this thing, as I understand it. (It is VERY not my genre, and there are some tropes I don't cope well with, so I've skipped it, but people who like that sort of thing like it.)
posted by restless_nomad at 9:20 AM on June 30, 2019 [5 favorites]

KJ Parker,s Engineers Triology might fit the bill. His stuff in general is pretty grim.
posted by supermedusa at 9:24 AM on June 30, 2019 [2 favorites]

Paolo Bacigalupi is worth a try. There are often local heros and acts of kindness, but, in general, individuals don't actually matter. (The Wind Up Girl is the famous one and not a bad place to start.)
posted by eotvos at 9:26 AM on June 30, 2019 [2 favorites]

Seconding eotvos' suggestion of Paulo Bacigalupi's work. I particularly enjoyed The Water Knife

On a completely different scale but I also recommend Neal Stephenson's Seveneves
posted by mce at 9:36 AM on June 30, 2019 [4 favorites]

Steve Erikson and Ian Esselmont's "Malazan" books should hit the mark.
posted by Welsky at 10:09 AM on June 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

In the fantasy line, this is pretty much Joe Abercrombie's wheelhouse.

Also Morgan has a fantasy trilogy ("A Land Fit for Heroes") that should be worth a shot.
posted by soundguy99 at 10:11 AM on June 30, 2019 [2 favorites]

Twig is extremely grim and sometimes leans into "all the systemic badness is the fault of This One Person that we're fighting." But overall, it recognizes that that person is just a symbol of the system and that the system has unintentionally/intentionally created an ouroboros with itself that makes the terribleness feed into itself and reinforce it and can only be cooperated with, not defeated. The protags are...very immoral, by necessity and by their nature, even if they have personal (warped) moral codes that they try but not very hard to follow.
posted by gaybobbie at 10:14 AM on June 30, 2019 [2 favorites]

Possibly Ninefox Gambit by (MeFi's own!) Yoon Ha Lee; definitely Lee's short stories.

Seconding Baru Cormorant.
posted by yarntheory at 10:31 AM on June 30, 2019 [2 favorites]

Anything by Peter Watts.
posted by Rust Moranis at 10:45 AM on June 30, 2019 [10 favorites]

Something by Peter Watts
posted by the Real Dan at 11:23 AM on June 30, 2019 [6 favorites]

Do not read Paolo Bacigalupi's The Wind-Up Girl. It is racist. Bacigalupi basically uses the Southeast Asian setting for flavor, handwaving respect and accuracy for the cultures there with "it's the future!", down to using an outdated name for Malaysia because I guess he thinks 'Malaya' has more character. Here's a review by Jaymee Goh that brings up most of the issues I have with the novel. (Caveat: I probably wouldn't be as pissed about it if everyone and their mother hadn't praised him for writing! about! Thailand! What an interesting setting! So unique! Yeah, okay, but it's not really Thailand, it's Bacigalupi's own fantasyworld with Thai words slapped onto it like a shitty coat of paint.)

I could excuse all of that as standard white people writing SFF Orientalism were it not for the character of Emiko, an inexplicably Japanese robot whose graphic gang rape and torture is almost lovingly described. She is programmed to be compliant to everyone even though she hates what they're making her do, which, combined with the way her Japanese-ness is fetishized, brings up some seriously gross stereotypes about submissive Asian women.

His YA novels are less racist but also less grimdark, though in a "things end hopefully for our protagonists" rather than a "yay, I've change the world" way. I personally would make that trade-off.

For a grimdark narrative about hopelessness, may I suggest Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go? It's about kids raised to be organ donors, and the bureaucratic indifference of the society around them felt very real.
posted by storytam at 11:29 AM on June 30, 2019 [10 favorites]

Andrej Nikolaidis : The Olcinium Trilogy. "Makes Samuel Beckett seem cheerful"
posted by TheRaven at 11:46 AM on June 30, 2019

Joe Abercrombies' "First Law" trilogy does this with the added bonus ending reveal that actually makes things even darker.
posted by anansi at 11:54 AM on June 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

The Road (Cormac McCarthy)?
posted by kbbbo at 12:28 PM on June 30, 2019

Tales from the Radiation Age by Jason Sheehan might meet your qualifications. The writing is reminiscent of Mark Twain, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.
posted by doctor tough love at 3:01 PM on June 30, 2019

O god I hate that stuff! What about 1984? Clockwork Orange? J.G. Ballard? I haven't read any of it for decades, so all my examples are ancient and sortof childish and probably not really right. But that's all the hopeless stuff I remember reading back when I used to read things. My brother and I read and reread A Clockwork Orange until we could speak the language. Bleak House? Does that end well sneakily? I can't remember, but I can't see how it could, what with Chancery being Chancery. I hope it doesn't have some tacked on happy ending, but I can't remember. I remember loving it.
posted by Don Pepino at 4:50 PM on June 30, 2019

The Parable of the Sower (Octavia Butler)
Seconding Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)
Thirding the Traitor Baru Cormorant (Seth Dickinson)

Maybes:
Ninefox Gambit (Yoon Ha Lee)
MaddAddam trilogy (Margaret Atwood)
posted by esker at 4:55 PM on June 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

Charles Stross's Laundry Files series.

Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space series, as well as Revenger

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
posted by nickggully at 6:27 PM on June 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

Yes, Joe Abercrombie will definitely suit your needs.
posted by ashbury at 9:49 PM on June 30, 2019

Anything by Jack Womack, but in particular Random Acts of Senseless Violence.
posted by q*ben at 10:12 PM on June 30, 2019

I came here to recommend Ninefox Gambit as well. If you like warhammer you will like this.

I dislike Joe Abercrombie's work but I can't argue that it doesn't fit your criteria.
posted by AndrewStephens at 6:45 AM on July 1, 2019

Oh, this isn't precisely grimdark (it's just Russian) but it's a very interesting urban fantasy with a lot of the elements you're looking for, and probably the right tone: Night Watch (and sequels) by Sergei Lukyaneko.
posted by restless_nomad at 7:21 AM on July 1, 2019 [1 favorite]

An interesting version of this I read recently was the Tower of Babel books by Josiah Bancroft. Traveler goes to see the Tower of Babel (in fictional fantasy setting) because it's supposed to be the center of knowledge and culture - it isn't.
posted by markslack at 7:30 AM on July 1, 2019

China Mieville's Bas-Lag books (Perdido Street Station, The Scar, Iron Council) should fit the bill.
posted by valrus at 8:03 AM on July 1, 2019 [2 favorites]

Justin Robinson, Undead on Arrival. Protagonist has 24 hours to solve and avenge his murder, set in the zombie apocalypse.
posted by bile and syntax at 9:14 AM on July 1, 2019

Even if you don't enjoy the soul crushing grind of tradition that underpins the plot of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books, it's damn near impossible to avoid savouring the prose.

Worth taking at about half the usual reading speed, with frequent pauses to let the flavour develop. Reading Peake is like eating a good solid Christmas pudding; small bites keep you busy for a good long while.
posted by flabdablet at 10:53 AM on July 1, 2019 [2 favorites]

Would you be interested in an absurdist retelling of the Oz fable where the Witch is a lone dissenter in a decades-long fruitless war against the Emerald City administration (notably, not always the Wizard)? Because I can recommend you an absurdist retelling of the Oz fable where the Witch is a lone dissenter in a decades-long fruitless war against the Emerald City administration (notably, not always the Wizard). (Also any of this guy's flipped fables, really.)

Also nth-ing Never Let Me Go. Also, House of the Scorpion (okay, yes, it ends on a sorta-kinda-not-really-up-note, which is mainly just the protagonist looking out on the vast horrific systems he's encountered and wondering what in the heck he's ever going to do about them, while being grateful that none of them had quiiiite managed to kill him yet).
posted by queen anne's remorse at 5:33 PM on July 4, 2019 [1 favorite]