Better never to have been

This book by Oxford University Press looks very interesting. From its Amazon editorial review:

David Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm. Although the good things in one's life make one's life go better than it otherwise would have gone, one could not have been deprived by their absence if one had not existed. Those who never exist cannot be deprived. However, by coming into existence one does suffer quite serious harms that could not have befallen one had one not come into existence. [...] The author then argues for the 'anti-natal' view -that it is always wrong to have children- and he shows that combining the anti-natal view with common pro-choice views about foetal moral status yield a 'pro-death' view about abortion (at the earlier stages of gestation). Anti-natalism also implies that it would be better if humanity became extinct. Although counter-intuitive for many, that implication is defended, not least by showing that it solves many conundrums of moral theory about population.

I suppose the conundrums referred to are things like the Repugnant Conclusion. From the entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Christoph Fehige (1998) has suggested, in the tradition of Schopenhauer, that there are no lives with a positive well-being. In his account, only frustrated preferences count, and they count negatively, whereas satisfaction of preferences has no positive value. Since it is possible that a population with very high welfare only involves lives with complete preference satisfaction, the Repugnant Conclusion is avoided since any population with complete preference satisfaction is better than any population involving at least one frustrated preference. More troubling, however, is that this view implies a strong version of the Reversed Repugnant Conclusion: A population with very high positive welfare can be worse than an empty population. Since most lives with very high welfare can be assumed to have at least one frustrated preference, such lives are worse than non-existence according to Fehige's theory. Moreover, a theory about welfare that denies the possibility of lives worth living is quite counter-intuitive (Ryberg 1996a).

The user reviews are not uniformly positive: "A suicide note in book form", "Intergalactic cosmic spam", "You need a PhD to be this stupid". I suspect the adverse reactions come from fanaticised pro-existence zealots. However, members of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement should love the book (I used to think the VHEMT was a joke, now I'm not so sure).

The short story Mutation Planet, by Barrington J. Bayley, features an alien race who collectively aspires to never to have been:

"And you," Eliot demanded, "What do you seek?"

"We," answered Zeed with an icy lack of hesitation, "seek NULLITY. Not merely to die [...] but to wipe out the past, never to have been." [...] "On my planet..." Zeed seemed to hesitate, "we regard it as an act of compassion to kill our offspring at birth. The unlucky ones are spared to answer nature's call to perpetuate the species. [...] We believe that ever since the first nervous system developed, the subconscious feeling has been present that it has all been a mistake."

A bit later, the same character declares:

"We all inhabit a vast dark," he repeated, "in which there is neither rhyme nor reason."