The WordPress/JetPack writing prompt for today is:
Which book’s world would be the absolute worst to live in?
I think when most people see this prompt, they immediately think of modern dystopian fiction. I’ve seen The Hunger Games and The Handmaid’s Tale mentioned often. But both of those are tales of hope, of successfully rebelling against dystopia.
If you truly want a bleak, the good guy never wins, dystopia, you need to read 1984. Written just after World War II, there’s a bleakness and inevitability to George Orwell’s world that offers no hope, no reprieve. In the end, the protagonist gives in and accepts the evil that he lives within as being the best for him.
That would be one world I wouldn’t want to live in.
But let’s go deeper into history. Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, written seven centuries ago, is quite literally a hellscape. Hell has seven levels, each worse than the one before, and you’re going to visit all seven. No thank you.
I wouldn’t even wanted to have written that one.
But what about books that aren’t necessarily dystopian but still make horrible places to live? The one that comes to mind the most is Lucifer’s Hammer (Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, 1977). in the 1970s and 1980s, disaster stories were all the rage, from Poseidon Adventure and Jaws to Towering Inferno and Airport, the world was a dangerous place. But these were all localized disasters.
Global destruction was in vogue in publishing. Damnation Alley and On the Beach dealt with nuclear war, while Lucifer’s Hammer dealt with death by asteroid (later popularized in fils like Deep Impact, Armageddon and recently Don’t Look Up).
The difference between Lucifer’s Hammer and 1984 is that in the first, people start out as we know them. Then they descend into cannibalism and tribal warfare for survival. Yes, there is a through line of the good guys winning out, but it’s an incredibly small number of people, about two thousand, who survive and live with enough resources to hope to start society again. I would not want to live in that world.
I’m pretty sure I’d end up as someone’s dinner.
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About the article title. I hope you got Olivia Newton-John singing “Hopelessly Devoted to You” stuck in your head, as I did writing it!