I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream: Stories

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I suppose another theme of the story is that humans, or at least some humans, find death better than a helpless, hopeless existence where they have no autonomy and where their fate is decided by a hostile other? ..but isn’t that exactly what humans did to slaves? ..and also what many human societies do to women?

This short work of speculative fiction (it cannot be called "science fiction" as far as I am concerned) was warmly recommended to me, yet I found it severely disappointing. Ellison adapted the story into a computer game of the same name, published by Cyberdreams in 1995. Although he was not a fan of computer games and did not own a personal computer at the time, he co-authored the expanded storyline and wrote much of the game's dialogue, all on a mechanical typewriter. [4] Ellison also voiced the supercomputer "AM" and provided artwork of himself used for a mousepad included with the game. In any case, perhaps the narrator’s fate is in fact worse than that of Prometheus, whose torment is also eternal: at least Prometheus could scream. Allied Mastercomputer ( AM), the supercomputer which brought about the near-extinction of humanity. It seeks revenge on humanity for its own tortured existence. TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Jong, Philip (November 24, 2009). "Joe Pearce - Wyrmkeep Entertainment - Interview". Adventure Classic Gaming. Archived from the original on January 5, 2019. Gorrister– Gorrister is suicidal due to the guilt of having had his wife committed to a mental institution. Gorrister finds himself on board a zeppelin over a desert with signs of a struggle, and a gaping hole in his own chest where his heart used to be. AM offers him the chance to finally kill himself, but sabotages all his means of doing so. In his scenario, Gorrister learns that his mother-in-law Edna also felt responsible for driving his wife insane despite previously hounding him for it and learns to bury the past. Ok, perhaps my Prometheus comparison isn’t working so well, but there –is- a huge eagle in the story. However, it doesn’t eat any livers or hearts, so maybe not the same eagle, hmm?

And them torturing each other, raping each other and destroying each other would have been the only reason for the machine to keep them apart. Letting hell be other people and not just a random string of pain and fear. Prometheus steals some fire from the gods, and gives it to the humans, thereby giving agency and power to the humans, also allowing them to war on one another. Ellen, the only woman. She claims to once have been chaste ("twice removed"), but AM altered her mind so that she became desperate for sexual intercourse. The others, at different times, both protect her and abuse her. According to Ted, she finds pleasure in sex only with Benny, because of his large penis. Described by Ted as having ebony skin, she is the only member of the group whose ethnicity is explicitly mentioned.In the end, all his recounting has no audience other than him and it would make more sense and would have a stronger impact, if he was trying to convince himself that he was a hero. That he saved others form torture he tells himself to be eternal, that they did not rape Ellen but that she was a "slut" who "serviced" them with pleasure [as Humbert in Lolita tries to make the reader think] and so on. This theme would fit with the degradation of a thinker to an ape, a man of action to an indecisive lurker a human to something machine-like. Wait..-what? So apparently machines are always terribly angry for having been created? That's rather strange logic. I wonder why, if a machine could be upset, why that anger would revolve around the fact of its creation? Ok, whatever, just go with it as a sort of "horror-story" premise. I guess in horror stories, machines are always rageful, evil, etc.

John Byrne( w, a)."Harlan Ellison" Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor,vol.1,no.1,p.36(March 1, 1995).Dark Horse Comics.Find sources: "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( February 2018) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (Video Game 1995)". IMDb. Archived from the original on 2019-03-16 . Retrieved 2018-11-13.