# I'm looking for stories in which a people decide to go gentle into that good night. **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [November 4, 2014, 4:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-looking-for-stories-in-which-a-people-decide-to-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/703635 "2014-11-04T16:25:44Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2014, 9:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-looking-for-stories-in-which-a-people-decide-to-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/703635/21 "2014-11-04T21:05:01Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > Just because **Skald** hates it when people post non-book suggestions in his threads. In the first place, as well you know, I hate _everything_, except for things and people on the List of Things Skald Doesn’t Hate. In the second place, I start threads about television and movies all the time. Why only last week I not only started a thread about 2 BROKE GIRLS but included links to skin shots of both Beth Behrs and the girl with the big boobs whose name I don’t know. In the third place, video games are for Autobots and Carthaginians, certainly not decent folk. In the fourth place I have no objection to people posting even video game references: I just won’t respond to them, as I don’t know anything about video games, so there’d be no point. In the last place, because of your insolence I have ordered the Mess to put you on a strict Brown Betty & rum diet until you apologize. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2014, 9:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-looking-for-stories-in-which-a-people-decide-to-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/703635/22 "2014-11-04T21:22:53Z")
> [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](#): > > In the last place, because of your insolence I have ordered the Mess to put you on a strict Brown Betty & rum diet until you apologize. Oof! Right in the br’er patch! ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2014, 9:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-looking-for-stories-in-which-a-people-decide-to-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/703635/23 "2014-11-04T21:57:57Z")
An important historical background detail in _Decision at Doona_ is humanity’s encounter with the Siwannese, who reacted to contact with humanity with a species wide mass suicide. ---
**Author:** ![Dendarii\_Dame](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/bbce88/32.png) [@Dendarii\_Dame](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dendarii_Dame)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2014, 10:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-looking-for-stories-in-which-a-people-decide-to-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/703635/24 "2014-11-04T22:04:08Z")
Something similar to what Skald is asking for happens in Anne McCaffrey’s short story “The Ship Who Killed.” An entire world’s population yearns for death, and is headed in the direction of a species-wide suicide. ---
**Author:** ![kaylasdad99](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kaylasdad99/32/3398_2.png) [@kaylasdad99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kaylasdad99)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2014, 11:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-looking-for-stories-in-which-a-people-decide-to-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/703635/25 "2014-11-04T23:20:03Z")
Mike Resnick’s [Birthright: The Book of Man](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthright:_The_Book_of_Man) offers a series of vignettes in which the human race, over the span of nearly 17 millennia, explores, expands into, and conquers the galaxy. And then declines. The last story-but-one tells of a small band of the last surviving humans in the galaxy, on the verge of losing a war of extinction against virtually every alien race which they once subjugated. The victors have the humans holed up in a cave, without sufficient food and/or water to possibly wait it out, no means of escape, and a small thermonuclear device (enough to take out the humans AND the besieging force). Given the option to surrender (with imprisonment in zoo-like conditions for the remainder of their lives, IIRC), they detonate the device. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2014, 11:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-looking-for-stories-in-which-a-people-decide-to-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/703635/26 "2014-11-04T23:35:29Z")
> [@muldoonthief](#): > > That’s not really accurate. The Overlords were working under orders from the Overmind, and studied all the species it was helping join the Overmind in an effort to learn what was different about themselves, and how to eventually join the Overmind as well. The Overlords were certainly studying the Overmind’s and those races that joined it, but their purpose was more to get out from under the Overmind’s thumb, than to join it (The chief Overlord would much rather being studying mathematics than administrating the Earth, but what the Overmind says goes). Now the humans do seem to accept their eventual extinction with quiet resignation once their children show they’re not human anymore. ---
**Author:** ![davidw](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/c4cdca/32.png) [@davidw](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/davidw)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2014, 12:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-looking-for-stories-in-which-a-people-decide-to-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/703635/27 "2014-11-05T00:27:49Z")
There’s **The White Boy Shuffle** , by Paul Beatty. This is from the intro: > [@](#): > > If a movie mogul buys the film rights to my life, the _TV Guide_ synopsis will read: In the struggle for freedom, a reluctant young poet convinces black Americans to give up hope and kill themselves in a climactic crash ‘n’ burn finale. Full of laughs and high jinks. Some violence and adult language. Definitely full of laughs, though by the end it’s mostly of the “laugh to keep from crying” variety. ---
**Author:** ![Peter\_Morris](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/peter_morris/32/359_2.png) [@Peter\_Morris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peter_Morris)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2014, 6:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-looking-for-stories-in-which-a-people-decide-to-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/703635/28 "2014-11-05T06:15:32Z")
Barry B. Longyear, The Jaren. > **[Manifest Destiny](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2519952.Manifest_Destiny)** > > Manifest Destiny— Humankind’s early reach for the   “T… ---
**Author:** ![Penfeather](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/penfeather/32/384_2.png) [@Penfeather](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Penfeather)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2014, 8:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-looking-for-stories-in-which-a-people-decide-to-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/703635/29 "2014-11-05T08:50:32Z")
If we’re counting comics, Nemesis the Warlock Book 6. In the far distant future, as the sun is slowly dying the human race has decided that it’s tired of doing stuff and just wants to rest, and walks _en masse_ into the sea to return to the primordial ooze. This doesn’t sit well with a bunch of warmongering human time travellers from their past, who decide that a/ this is weak-kneed pusillanimity and b/ such a potent source of energy could be powering their war machines, and promptly starting pumping and refining the human ooze. It doesn’t end well. ---
**Author:** ![Aspidistra](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aspidistra/32/3894_2.png) [@Aspidistra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aspidistra)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2014, 10:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-looking-for-stories-in-which-a-people-decide-to-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/703635/30 "2014-11-05T10:56:13Z")
In Bob Shaw’s “A Wreath of Stars”, the inhabitants of the neutrino planet decide to stop reproducing when they learn of an unavoidable planetary catastrophe heading for them within a hundred years. They un-decide again when they change their minds about the “unavoidable” bit ---
**Author:** ![Ponderoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ponderoid/32/19221_2.png) [@Ponderoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ponderoid)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2014, 11:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-looking-for-stories-in-which-a-people-decide-to-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/703635/31 "2014-11-05T11:22:09Z")
I can think of two not yet mentioned. In David Brin’s _Brightness Reef_, a few different species have run away and hidden themselves from the galactic civilization in an attempt to _de-evolve_ out of sentience, with various degrees of success by the time of the novel’s events. I think that counts as a sort of voluntary extinction. In Greg Egan’s _Diaspora_, researchers who had uploaded their minds into computers find a way to transmit their intelligences into other universes. They find another uploaded race had preceded them from universe to universe and eventually due to cosmic ennui collectively decided to halt the processes running their minds, leaving the stored data frozen as a monument to themselves. ---
**Author:** ![Meurglys](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/258eb7/32.png) [@Meurglys](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Meurglys)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2014, 11:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-looking-for-stories-in-which-a-people-decide-to-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/703635/32 "2014-11-05T11:35:08Z")
I’ve not read it since it came out in 1981, but as I recall [Starship and Haiku](http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/s/somtow-sucharitkul/starship-and-haiku.htm) by Somtow Sucharitkul (aka S. P. Somtow) is set against the ongoing (but nearly complete) mass suicide of the entire Japanese race. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2014, 3:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-looking-for-stories-in-which-a-people-decide-to-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/703635/33 "2014-11-05T15:05:45Z")
Terry Pratchett’s _Strata_ makes passing mention of the alien predecessor terraformers\*, the _Great Spindle Kings_, who die out of injured pride when they discover they were not the first planet-shaping species. Although as the entire Universe is a fairly recent manufactured artifact, they didn’t really exist so there’s that. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2014, 6:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-looking-for-stories-in-which-a-people-decide-to-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/703635/34 "2014-11-05T18:19:40Z")
An early storyline in [Schlock Mercenary](http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2001-12-14) featured a race of nigh-immortals who have Been There and Done That, who are now basically dying of boredom. One symptom of which, of course, is that they don’t much care. ---
**Author:** ![Chingon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chingon/32/17645_2.png) [@Chingon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chingon)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2014, 9:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-looking-for-stories-in-which-a-people-decide-to-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/703635/35 "2014-11-07T21:12:46Z")
One could say that [Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yokohama_Kaidashi_Kik%C5%8D) is about that. Humanity is gently fading away, and is observed by a robot. I personally really love the series. ---
**Author:** ![Jonathan\_Chance](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jonathan_chance/32/701_2.png) [@Jonathan\_Chance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jonathan_Chance)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2014, 9:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-looking-for-stories-in-which-a-people-decide-to-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/703635/36 "2014-11-07T21:51:00Z")
Another Clarke one: It’s not a complete suicide but in ‘Songs of Distant Earth’ it posits that humanity discovered that the sun would go nova in the not too distant future. Those interested left and established colonies around other stars and those who didn’t just stayed - for generations - until the end. Gloomy dude, apparently, that Arthur C. Clarke. ---
**Author:** ![Peter\_Morris](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/peter_morris/32/359_2.png) [@Peter\_Morris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peter_Morris)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2014, 12:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-looking-for-stories-in-which-a-people-decide-to-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/703635/37 "2014-11-08T00:31:09Z")
If you’ll accept TV shows, there’s Star Trek’s [The Inner Light](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inner_Light_%28Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation%29). ---
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2014, 2:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-looking-for-stories-in-which-a-people-decide-to-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/703635/38 "2014-11-08T02:11:41Z")
> [@robert\_columbia](#): > > Isaac Asimov’s _The Last Question_ involves a humanity that recognizes that its existence as separate physical organisms that reproduce sexually is not sustainable, so they embark on a journey to become a collective, disembodied consciousness in hyperspace after the heat death of the universe. I never considered it as a conscious decision by humanity to try to evolve in that way; rather, over billions of years humanity evolves to the point where it merges with the Computer. ---
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2014, 2:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-looking-for-stories-in-which-a-people-decide-to-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/703635/39 "2014-11-08T02:27:50Z")
In _Omnilingual_ by H. Beam Piper (no relation 😉 ), a team of Earth archaeologists is excavating a dead city on Mars. They find that the Martians died out some 50,000 years ago due to atmosphere decay. In some buildings, they find the remains of groups of Martians who committed suicide by burning charcoal to release CO, rather than wait for the atmosphere to finish bleeding away. ---
**Author:** ![aceplace57](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aceplace57/32/3500_2.png) [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2014, 3:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-looking-for-stories-in-which-a-people-decide-to-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/703635/40 "2014-11-08T03:23:10Z")
The First Ones in Babylon 5 passed beyond the Rim. Where ever the hell that is. They Went to a better place, leaving the Shadows and Vorlons behind. I’m referring to the B5 books [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-looking-for-stories-in-which-a-people-decide-to-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/703635.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/im-looking-for-stories-in-which-a-people-decide-to-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/703635.md?page=3)