i have no mouth and i must scream am quote

There is a lot more to the story, but that’s the brief distillation and I refuse to spoil the whole thing because you simply must go out of your way to read it whether you are an Ellison fan or not. And the story is about the last five human beings that are brought down into the center of the Earth into the belly of this giant computer that fills the earth, and it torments them endlessly.” Eventually, the computers link up and they take over the world and program the war so that all human beings are killed.

Fearing that they will be bombed, they sink them into the earth far down in caves. The background of the story is that the Third World War starts, and the three major powers (China, Russia, and America) find that the war is so complex that they cannot handle it just with people trying to program it, so they build giant computers to handle all of the tactics. It then traps the last survivors under the planet, makes them immortal (they have been kept alive for 109 years), horribly disfigures many of them, and then tortures them endlessly for its own amusement.Īs Ellison summarized on Good Afternoon! in 1976: The story is about a supercomputer, AM, who systematically destroys the planet due to its hate of humanity. I doubt I will say much new compared to what has already been said about the story, but it is disturbing on multiple levels, and yet gives us the POV of a maddened machine (which is unusual) and the many different perspectives of human insanity, while being drenched in allegory and religious subtext. “It is not a pretty story,” writes Charles Brady in “The Computer as a Symbol of God: Ellison’s Macabre Exodus.” “It deliberately violates the taboos on sexuality and violence imposed by an older generation of science fiction writers.” That’s pretty much the way I felt about Harlan Ellison’s classic short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” because the premise itself sounded extremely dark when it was first told to me, and the thought of crippling humiliation at the hands of a god machine sounded spiritually debilitating.

I have had lots of experiences in my life where somebody told me about a story or show that they had read or watched that disturbed them, and then I myself (being too emotionally disturbed from the telling) avoided whatever that work was for reasons related to my own personal well-being.

I have no mouth and i must scream am quote