Most morbid AH

[Adept Havelock]

Heh - I'm surprised no one has mentioned WW3 yet.

Chris

Ugh. Yeah, David Soul, Cathy Lee Crosby and President Rock Hudson being the last line of defense for the Alaskan Pipeline is pretty damn morbid.



My vote for the most morbid timeline is either the Moon of Ice timeline, the Drakaverse, or Stephen Baxter's Titan.

 

[Hobelhouse]

I believe it was the minister of propaganda for the Nazis. I wanna say Goebbels.

Yeah, it was Goebbels. But the Nazi's only ruled Europe, not the whole world. I remember a scene when Goebbels's daughter was talking about the 'American appetite for Nazi secrets'.

 

[Ivan Druzhkov]

I haven't read it, but wikipedia presents a rather disturbing overview of The Ultimate Solution.

Damn, I came across that title reading Gavriel Rosenfeld's book on Nazi-themed AH, and that one really stuck out in my mind. No only are people tortured and mutilated, but every character (save one or two people) in the book is a sadist.

Cyril Kornbluth could get pretty distressing if he wanted too. His "Axis wins" short story, "Two Dooms," has, IIRC, the US divided along the Mississippi. The Japanese are busy turning their half into agricultural plantations, while the Nazis are busy engaging in full-blown ethnic cleansing. Near the end of Not This August, which starts with an American surrender to the Soviet Union, we get a rather cheerless portrait of rural New York being treated like the Ukraine in 1931, with starving people working the land with their own labor, people for miles around being shot in their homes for hoarding, and hospitals packed with diseased elderly Americans who the Soviets are working to destruction. Oddly enough, it's still the scariest "Red Invasion" book I've ever read.

However, I think that Daniel Quinn's After Dachau takes the cake for the most morbid AH ever. Imagine this: the Nazis win WWII and wipe out the Jewish population in Europe. Succumbing to Nazi rhetoric, the US joins with the Third Reich to wipe out every human being that isn't white. Now, imagine that the year is 4000 AD. For millenia, every person in the world is white, and the events of the 20th century are only remembered as a collection of hazy myths. And no one, anywhere, thinks what happened all those centuries ago was a bad thing, or even something to get excited about.

Now that's morbid.

 

[Saladan]

1984 is the most dystopian setting you could get. In that universe their literaly is no hope of anything ever getting better. Not only that but you don't know if anything is true or some lie created by the government.

 

[robertp6165]

The alternate world presented in THE PROTEUS OPERATION by James P. Hogan is pretty bleak. Hitler is given atomic weapons in 1942, and conquers the whole world outside of the United States and Australia. Only the fact that the Manhattan Project gave the U.S. the bomb in 1945 allowed it to survive, and by 1975 it is engaged in a Cold War which is about to go hot, with little chance that the little which remains of the Free World will survive.

The world presented in David Poyer's THE SHILOH PROJECT...a book I haven't seen anyone on this board mention in all the time I've been around here...is pretty bleak too, especially the utterly dystopian Confederacy (only the Confederacy as presented in HT's TL191 novels approaches it for sheer evil, IMHO).

 

[Paul Spring]

"Two Dooms" is a pretty dark vision, even for a world with total Axis victory. If I remember right, the Japanese killed most of the population in their part of the former USA and brought in huge numbers of Chinese and southeast Asian and Indian peasants who basically work as serfs for Japanese masters. The Germans killed all of the Jews and African-Americans in their territories, and use people of Slavic descent as slave labor. Also, even though it's set hundreds of years in the future, the Nazis and Japanese feudalists who control the entire world are so anti-intellectual and anti-scientific that technology has not advanced much in the centuries since the war.

 

[Kang Seung Jae]

I've read the Turner diaries, and its far more horrifying than one can imagine. The "freedom fighters" are exceedingly ruthless, pointlessly sadistic, and rule through naked fear. They have no compunction with using terror to cowl an unwilling populace to go along with their ideals. It is quite simply a neo-nazi's utopia: an intensely autocratic, paranoid, genocidal society devoted to the destruction of the Other, for no real good reason. And worst of all it is presented as an admirable goal.

I've read it also (it's not a banned book in Korea, ), and I have to say, it underestimates the US government and China.

 

[Ivan Druzhkov]

I should've asked this sooner, but what exactly is meant by "most morbid?" Are stories morbid if they have a dystopic setting, or do they need actual hideous acts to occur within the story? I was wondering since, aside from a few details mentioned here and there, the Third Reich of IPOME is really dull and all-encompassing rather than terrifying.

 

[Amerigo Vespucci]

However, I think that Daniel Quinn's After Dachau takes the cake for the most morbid AH ever. Imagine this: the Nazis win WWII and wipe out the Jewish population in Europe. Succumbing to Nazi rhetoric, the US joins with the Third Reich to wipe out every human being that isn't white. Now, imagine that the year is 4000 AD. For millenia, every person in the world is white, and the events of the 20th century are only remembered as a collection of hazy myths. And no one, anywhere, thinks what happened all those centuries ago was a bad thing, or even something to get excited about.

Now that's morbid.

Damn! I came in here to list that book. Great minds, and all that jazz. Of course, if anyone here wants to read it, we've just ruined it for them, as you don't find out that fact until halfway through the book. Hell of a shock for me -- especially since I had only started reading it because I noticed it on the library shelf.

 

[Nicksplace27]

Children of Men is by far the absolutly most morbid AH book I have ever read.

It kept me awake just thinking about that kind of dystopic world, It really affected me. Nothing will top it I don't think. You know, even the most dystopic scenarios have some hope becuse there is always a new generation to carry on the struggle no matter what. But in book, it isn't so...

 

[Wolf]

What about Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka's Warday? Definatly morbid , at least if you are an American or live in the former USSR.

 

[Ivan Druzhkov]

Damn! I came in here to list that book. Great minds, and all that jazz. Of course, if anyone here wants to read it, we've just ruined it for them, as you don't find out that fact until halfway through the book. Hell of a shock for me -- especially since I had only started reading it because I noticed it on the library shelf.

Yeah, I probably should have done that in white. My bad. Sorry if I’ve just ruined someone’s day.

Turning to other matters, I managed to find two more morbid titles for the collection. The first is a book entitled K Is for Killing by Daniel Easterman. In this one, Lindberg gets the presidency in 1936, IIRC, and proceeds to let the Ku Klux Klan run the country. How morbid does is get? Well, the book starts with a table listing the names of American and German concentration camps in 1942. The American list continues for about two pages after the German list finishes. To top it off, we also get an excerpt from an incredibly racist children’s book from the period.

I also came across a somewhat obscure one by an Austrian named Christopher Ransmyr. It’s called Morbus Kithara, though the title in English is The Dog King. It’s set in the fictional Austrian village of Moor in the years after World War II that was the site of a slave-powered quarry. However, in this book, the Morgenthau Plan has been imposed on postwar Austria, and the whole area is reverting back to a medieval existence. To make matters worse, the American occupation authorities are going to surreal lengths to procure “justice” from the populace. Outside the town, a sign has been mounted that reads:

Here
Eleven Thousand Nine Hundred
Seventy-Three People Lie Dead
Slain by the Inhabitants of this Land
Welcome to Moor

Meanwhile “Stellamour Parties,” named after the American official that created the deindustrialization plan in this story, are used to preserve the memories of the past through having the whole town dress in costume as victim and perpetrator and reenact wartime events beneath the mouths of the quarries. Not only are all the characters in the book tortured in some way or another, those that were born after the war ended don’t really feel anything at all towards those who perished.

Grim, huh?

 

[MerryPrankster]

Let's see... General militarism, oppression of Canada, oppresion of the mormons, not exactly nice to its own blacks, oppression of its native Indians, invasions of Mexico, arming terrorists in Ireland...

Don't forget hostage-taking and -killing in guerrilla country.

 

[MerryPrankster]

What about Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka's Warday? Definatly morbid , at least if you are an American or live in the former USSR.

Agree. That's a pretty dark, unpleasant scenario, and that's only a limited nuclear war too.

 

[Max Sinister]

I'd nominate Draka after all I read about it, but I didn't read the books myself.

 

[zoomar]

"Two Dooms" is a pretty dark vision, even for a world with total Axis victory. If I remember right, the Japanese killed most of the population in their part of the former USA and brought in huge numbers of Chinese and southeast Asian and Indian peasants who basically work as serfs for Japanese masters. The Germans killed all of the Jews and African-Americans in their territories, and use people of Slavic descent as slave labor. Also, even though it's set hundreds of years in the future, the Nazis and Japanese feudalists who control the entire world are so anti-intellectual and anti-scientific that technology has not advanced much in the centuries since the war.

That's the old Kornbluth short story right?

I totally agree. As an "Axis wins WW2" story, this is far more depressing and morbid than Fatherland, In the Presence..., or Man in the High Castle. Each of these books had some and hope or normality in their distopias, however Two Dooms was simply and irrevocably depressing. I was particularly struck by how dark and crude things were in this future (windowless airliners, crude motorized carts, universally barbarous japanese landlords and samurai west of the Rockies and and evil Germans ("Italian Germans", and "French Germans", and "American Germans", etc in a crazy race caste society) in the east. The scene in the giant Nazi race research center in Chicago - described as a huge, deliberately dark and dingy Gothic castle thing filled with racist scientists and doctors dissecting untermenchen live - still evokes shudders in me 30 years after reading the story for the first time. For a short pice of fiction, it includes many such wierdly frightening scenes. Unlike Dick, who has a soft spot in his heart for his Japanese (who were basically just regular people), Kornbluth's Japanese are pure barbarians - easily as bad as the Nazis.

For a more realistic sense of "Nazis win" hopelessness, I'd second that The Proteus Operation's AH is pretty bleak - at least one of the AHs in the book. It's got several, one of which is probably the social democrats' dream.

 

[zoomar]

Agree. That's a pretty dark, unpleasant scenario, and that's only a limited nuclear war too.

Oddly, I had the opposite reaction from Warday. In comparison to most nuclear war novels, it does not depict a total collapse of civilization. The US survives, sort of. Britain, Japan, and other European nations offer a reverse Marshall Plan for the USA, and it describes a lot of very realistic and sometimes positive human reactions to the war. Too bad that Russia ceases to exist, though.

 

[Burton K Wheeler]

I nominate For all Times. It isnt as bleak as some other AHs presented here, but that wasnt the quetsion: The question was which is most morbid, and FAT with its cynical tone fits the bill quite nicely...

FAT was very emotionally effective, not only because of its tone, but because of its plausibility. It read like real history, except that every little thing that could go wrong did. By the time you hear about the French Emperor Bokassa importing long pig from Africa en masse and half of Russia coming down with AIDS, it seems almost plausible.

 

[David bar Elias]

FAT was very emotionally effective, not only because of its tone, but because of its plausibility. It read like real history, except that every little thing that could go wrong did. By the time you hear about the French Emperor Bokassa importing long pig from Africa en masse and half of Russia coming down with AIDS, it seems almost plausible.

To say nothing of America's horrible string of Presidents (I mean, Jim Jones as President--you can't get more insane than that), England succeding from the UK, France collapsing into a plethora of micro-states, or China and Russia obliterating each other in a gigantic nuclear war (and every country seems to get nukes in that TL). Or the massive race riots in the USA between blacks, Jews, latinos, and, well, everyone else towards the end.

 

[Scarecrow]

FAT was very emotionally effective, not only because of its tone, but because of its plausibility. It read like real history, except that every little thing that could go wrong did. By the time you hear about the French Emperor Bokassa importing long pig from Africa en masse and half of Russia coming down with AIDS, it seems almost plausible.

I think part of FAT's success at being emotinally effective was the use of OTL characters, such as (as David bar Elias mentioned) having Jim Jones become president of the US has far more of an effect on the reader then Random Presidental Candidate X.