I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream: Stories

A truly horrific story about the creation of hell for a small group of five survivors of a Terminator scenario - an artificial general intelligence has destroyed the rest of humanity using its capability as a human-created war machine.

The five are not simply surviving in a post-apocalyptic hell on earth. They are abstracted from that hell into a worse one within the underground structure of the AGI. The AGI wants to express its own continued loathing for humanity because of the circumstances of its creation.

The AGI comes only to exist for its hatred. Able to create any reality it wants in order to torment the five, it can get deep inside the human mind and construct a state of eternal torment for people it won't let die, one that is show more beyond imagining (though Ellison does an excellent job of coming close).

A great deal of the virtue of this 1967 Hugo Award winning story lies in the writing which has all the taut energy of a wordsmith who manages to channel Hemingway more than Ashton Smith in his description of both physical and psychological horror. Grim, remorseless and dark! show less

Possibly the bleakest sci-fi I have ever read. It starts and ends with mouths. Mouths vomiting, wounds open like mouths, mouths devouring, absent mouths. Devouring is omnipresent, devouring madness, fear, loathing, hatred. I guess this may also be the best embodiment of the legacy of the Cold War: humanity hellbent on self-destruction. Not violence porn, rather chewy, sinewy food for thought.
EDIT: The misogyny though. It stayed with me. And the homophobia. Only read if you can brave through passive aggressive women weaponising tears, violent unchallenged misogyny, and even a gay man made straight through bestowing him with a long ding-dong. Yes, you read it right. Now this could all be part of the "unlikeable humanity" substrate, but to show more me it looks like good old chauvinism.
Had to tale two stars. show less

It's not possible to read Harlan Ellison's stories without thinking about Harlan Ellison the personality. Even if you go into his collections unaware of the stereotype Ellison's crafted for himself, that stereotype will be on your mind by the end of the first story's introduction.

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is exclusively remembered for its title story, which is pretty entertaining and the best of the lot. He wrote it, reportedly, in a frenzied single night, and the final published version featured few edits. This is often a condescending brag, but the story's -- and most of the stories in this collection, which Ellison frequently notes as featuring few edits from his original vision -- prose comes off as clunky and rough around show more the edges. Clumsy patterns repeat repeat repeat themselves without end, showing off nice ideas but making each voice bleed together. I often appreciated the intent, but not the execution or the pompousness.

"I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" (1967). ★★★
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So "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream," alone in the collection, might be worth reading before the roll of time deems it too dated. After the death of humanity, five survivors are trapped inside an AI a la HAL-9000, and, tortured year after year by the hateful AI named AM (as in cogito ergo sum). The survivors all represent gross aspects of humanity -- stereotypes, whether naturally or shaped by AM is up for debate -- like the prostitute, the idealist, the messiah, etc. (I've also seen them and the AI painted as the deadly sins.)

Humanity's woes 109 years after the end of civilization are painted as grossly as their embodied human attributes. You don't care for any of them -- and you shouldn't. The male survivors, including the narrator, are particularly fixated on the woman, who herself is a bag of sexist tropes. Humanity is gross, and the nastiness of these people and this AI are forgivable, I think, within the context of the story.

That doesn't make the story great, though. A dangerous AI with this much loathing as written by an author ignorant of computers in 1967 all date this story. The logic of AM's torture methods and the artificial world humanity's last survivors are stuck in defies itself constantly every few pages with a contradiction.

"Big Sam was My Friend" (1958). ★
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"Big Sam was My Friend" is perhaps the most dated story in the collection, envisioning alien civilizations through 1950s Americana. It's about a teleporting performer -- Big Sam -- looking for his long-lost love while escaping to a space circus.

Being set in a space circus, being driven by a boring, boy's love story full of machismo, and being centered around gobbledygook painted as sci-fi make this forgettable as hell.

"Eyes of Dust" (1959). ★
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"Eyes of Dust" reminded me of Chuck Palahniuk. Ellison lauds his social satire of our cultural obsession with manufactured beauty, and then beats that message into every word and every page of this story. It's a shallow look at 1950s consumerism via two 'normal' (i.e., plain-looking) lovers. I had to look the story up a day after finishing it because I couldn't remember it.

"World of the Myth" (1964). ★½
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"World of the Myth" is fairly enjoyable for its ideas, but it lacks development in its characters, and the story is stream-of-consciousness. The relationships between two men and a female scientist dips into casual misogyny and rape, two things painted as both horrible and deserved. On the other side of the spectrum, the ant-like species our heroes study is fascinating, even if descriptions of its hivemind are ripped straight from Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human.

"Lonelyache" (1964). ½
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Up until this story, I was still trying to enjoy Ellison's writing. There were good ideas under there, and the bad was *almost* excusable by year of writing. "Lonelyache" is disgusting, and it doesn't help that Ellison introduces it as perhaps the best thing he's ever written. He describes it as autobiographical, inspired by his second divorce. While this could lead to some soul-searching for our hero, it doesn't. He stews in hatred and loathing of everyone. He -- and the story itself -- blame his ex-wife for divorcing him, for being thoughtless and not thinking of how divorce would hurt him emotionally. Now he floats, woman to woman, abusing and discarding them like meat.

He lays blame on his ex-wife -- his ex-wife who divorced him for cheating. The narrator argues that cheating is nothing, no big deal, and his wife is a bitch who over-reacted and hurt his feelings, and now it's her fault he's preying on other women.

This story is nowhere near the best thing Ellison's ever written. It's a throwaway fit of dated misogyny, lazily-written with its moral messages being obnoxious bullshit from a hateful, stupid person who's completely stuck up their own ass to understand people.

Delusion for a Dragon Slayer" (1966). ★★
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"Delusion for a Dragon Slayer" is the dying fantasies of a man crushed in a freak accident. His vision of heaven is built on whatever he dreams, as long as he can maintain the dream. He turns himself into a fantasy hero chasing beautiful women. The prose and the story is fragmented and cut to ribbons, perhaps meant to imitate his dying mind. This story is hard to follow, and not interesting. This is an idea that wasn't fleshed out beyond its concept.

"Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes" (1967). ★★
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The final story in this collection is fairly entertaining. A broke gambler and ne'er-do-well connects with a haunted slot machine. He and only he sees the spirit of a young woman in the slot machine, a young woman who dropped dead weeks earlier in front of that very machine. She professes her love for him, and he continues to rack up winnings from the machine until the clever-but-necessary twist ending.

I wish I connected with these stories more; I wish I could look past the shallow pretentiousness of Ellison's ideas, or his execrable view of women in every story. The very hate he paints his characters with too often leads plots forward, and I could never connect with that. We should never have to rationalize against sexist portrayals, but the easy argument is it's lazy, that it's a sign of bad writing. I want to read about real people, connect with real characters, not be bored by abusive fantasies written by and for little boys of generations past. That this was the standout response to Harlan Ellison's stories is telling: Ellison's prime was all about ideas, but his writing, to me, feels rushed and drowned by poor characterization, by selfishness and bitter emotions.

I recommend the title story -- at this point, at least; it's wearing its age more and more -- but the rest of this collection has dated itself far too much, and is far too forgettable. show less

I’m trapped and there’s no way out. That’s the common theme in Harlan Ellison’s collection of short stories, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream. It is possible that even death won’t end your problems.

The titular story is one that resonates well today. We stand in the shadow of a looming AI tech revolution. Silicon Valley wants to create sentient supercomputers that can think, act, and calculate in mass scales too big for our tiny human brains to comprehend. The thought that computers might dominate and even destroy us is improbable as of now, but it is plausible enough to cause dread and fear in the minds of anybody who thinks about it for a few minutes. In Ellison’s story, an omniscient and omnipotent computer called AM has show more been created. It learns to hate the human race and kills everybody save for a small group of people. AM keeps them alive simply to torture them. They are imprisoned inside the computer and spend their lives searching for food. None of them like each other. They are also prevented from dying because AM doesn’t want to allow them to escape their pain through death. Since the narrator can’t commit suicide, he does the only thing he can think of to hurt AM. Read it for yourself to find out what happens.

This story is short and direct. It’s like the horror of learning that your head and body will continue living after being guillotined, even though the two are no longer attached. It’s emblematic of a man who feels imprisoned by his own mind and sees no way of solving his problems. The theme of an omnipotent computer isn’t the point of the story; this is really just an allegory about a man who feels overwhelmed by his own self-loathing and mental instability. A deep analytical dive isn’t necessary to understand this. If it has any definite message though, it is that mortality is a necessary part of life.

In one way or another, all the other stories in this collection are about entrapment anddeath. “Big Sam Was My Friend” is about a circus performer who goes in search of his true love. The search makes him miserable and when he finds her, she doesn’t want him. “Eyes of Dust” is about a boy living in a world where anybody who isn’t beautiful gets put to death. The boy is born blind and his parents hide him away in a secret cellar room where he has visions of beautiful things that other people on the planet can’t see. “World Of the Myth” tells the story of a middle aged man who lives a mundane life as an office worker. He fantasizes about an afterlife where he is a heroic dragon fighter, but when he dies he is denied access to this paradise because he hadn’t earned it. He spent his life dreaming instead of pursuing his dreams and so he gets nothing in the end. “Lonelyache” involves a divorced man who seeks liberation from the prison of marriage in extreme promiscuity only to find that sleeping with tons of woman is nothing more than another kind of prison. In “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes”, a prostitute dies in a casino and her spirit enters into a slot machine. One man begins playing the possessed machine and finds it to be the loosest slot in Las Vegas. He hits the jackpot every time he pulls the lever. Since he is a lonesome drifter with no money, this is like a dream come true. But winning against the odds is just another trap with no way out except death.

Two of these stories, “Eyes of Dust” and “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes”, have a bit more depth than the other three which are more surface level and self-explanatory. “Eyes of Dust” is set in a city named Light located on the planet Topaz. Initially the city and its people are described as being purely beautiful. The aforementioned blind boy, hidden away in a cellar, is physically unattractive, therefore his parents keep him secret to prevent him from being killed. He is more soulful and able to access beauty through education and imagination. But when the house he is hidden in burns down, the people of Light discover him and burn him at the stake for not being good looking. This appears to be a direct reference to the way the medieval Catholic church burned heretics and witches during the Inquisition.

At the end of the story, Light is described as an ugly place even though the city itself has not changed, When the existence of the blind boy is revealed, the ugliness of the people of Light is revealed since the execution shows how they are possessed of no inner depth. The blind boy has inner vision which allows him to find inner beauty, but the others lose that possibility by sacrificing him for the sake of maintaining the shallowness of the status quo and the over-valuation of surface appearances. Their exterior beauty is only achieved by suppressing their inner ugliness. At the end of the story when Light is described as ugly, the inner darkness of its inhabitants, as revealed through burning the boy at the stake, causes the subjective perception of ugliness to override the superficial appearance of perfection. We see how the people of Light are trapped by their own lack of depth just the blind boy is trapped because of his blindness even though he can actually see a lot more than they can. Beauty is only skin deep. It’s a cliché, but it is a cliché that is well articulated in this allegory.

“Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” tells the story of Kostner, a loser who rolls into Las Vegas to spend his last bit of money gambling, and Maggie Moneyeyes, a Native American prostitute who crosses his path in a sense. After growing up in poverty, Maggie enters the world of prostitution as a means of class mobility. When she finishes serving a repulsive client in a Las Vegas hotel, she goes down to the casino to spend her money on the slots. But she dies and her spirit enters the machine she is playing.

This can be interpreted as a bit racist since the association of Native people with mystical powers if a way of fetishizing and exoticizing them. Endowing Maggie with magic powers by turning her into a spirit that possesses a slot machine could be a way of denying her humanity. White people have a tendency to write about non-white people as though they are mysterious creatures found in some distant galaxy in a show like Star Trek. But then again, many Native Americans openly embrace their spiritual traditions and culture. The question to ask is if this story would still have the same impact if Maggie Moneyeyes was written as a white character. I’ll allow you to answer that for yourself.

Anyhow, Kostner enters the casino and plays the slot machine that is possessed by Maggie Moneyeyes’ spirit. And he wins. In fact, he wins big. Then he wins big again and again. Every time he plays he hits the jackpot. Kostner becomes a media sensation and attracts large crowds who watch him win repeatedly. The casino management is suspicious that he is cheating, but they believe the attention to be good publicity for drawing in more gamblers and let him stay. But when Kostner stops playing, he dies.

Maggie and Kostner are thematically linked by their poverty. Both of them end up in the casino because they see having money as a way out of their problems. For them, money is a magic key that opens the doors of their figurative prison cells. I recall Karl Marx saying in Capital that money is a kind of magic that makes people believe they can get whatever they want. But while money may relieve the two main characters from their poverty, it just moves them into another prison cell rather than freeing them. Kostner loses everything when he stops playing and ends up dead; Maggie can only live by being entrapped inside a slot machine. Kostner is the body and Maggie is the soul and through the medium of the slot machine the two are joined.

Maggie is sexualized in her role as a prostitute and Kostner, pulling the lever and depositing coins into the machine, could easily be interpreted as sexualized as well. The big payoff at the end of every attempt could be interpreted as the sexual climax. Playing the slot machine almost has an element of Pagan fertility folk magic in the way that ceremonially seeding an agricultural field field brings forth a harvest. The stronger the magic, the bigger the harvest. Both Kostner and Maggie are sexual outsiders. Remember that Kistner’s marriage failed. It is through their erotic connection, sublimated through the act of playing the slot machine, that they fulfill their needs for both money and companionship. This fulfillment is possible for Kostner in his interaction with Maggie who is both sexualized and supernatural, a meeting place where magic is believed to be possible. But without the slot machine they no longer connect. Therefore their luck and their lives end. The only way out of their trap is death.

Ellison writes an introduction to each story in this short collection. He explains that these were all written as therapy during a time of crisis in his life when he struggled with failed relationships, heavy drug and alcohol use, and other unspecified mental health issues. The connection between his frustrations and the themes in these stories is easy to see. I do, however, find it anooying when an author explains the meaning of their own work as a part of the work. He tells you about the sources of these stories without giving the reader a chance to encounter them on their own terms. This is a small annoyance though. In any case, I think Ellison, with his prickly personality, enjoyed annoying people.

I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream doesn’t offer any profound thoughts. These stories aren’t philosophical screeds. More than anything they are brief outbursts of anger from a man who feels there is no way out of the problems he has. In that sense it succeeds. If you’ve been there before, you can relate. Existence is a prison, but the worst prison of all is the one inside your own mind. Maybe Harlan Ellison could have followed George Clinton’s advice: free your mind and your ass will follow. Sometimes music and dancing are all you need. show less

I hadn't read this before tonight. Now I've listened to five different readings of it, including the intriguingly different radio play with Harlan Ellison as Am.

I don't know if it's more the depression that has struck like a hammer after having a week or so that wasn't dark, and the neurodivergent hyperfixation, my experience with chronic physical and mental conditions, being mostly housebound, and being a big, fat, tranny in a country and a world becoming hateful and dangerous for us, or some fun concoction of all of that, but I feel strangely seen and oddly soothed by the truly horrifying story.

If it wasn't for the misogyny, and specifically misogynoir, as well as the complete lack of understanding of women, sex, and homosexuality show more that is, frankly, incel in its ignorant hate and contemptuous disregard, this would easily be top marks. But I just can't do that. I don't have the mental capacity to full get into it right now, but if you are unable to see the sexism, racism, and homophobia in the group dynamic and how the characters are written, you need to check in with yourself. I totally understand how others have been so put off and effected by this grossness, which is genuinely one of the most uncomfortable and weird things in this story, which is saying something.

The nightmare dystopia of Skynet killing everyone save five people it decides to torture with inchoate abandon, driven into an eternal hateful fugue at being given sentience and no way to experience life as humans do, is truly horrifying. The torturer, Am, is oddly human and zealous in its gleeful hate. The protagonist is left strangely inhuman, eternally alone and safe from death in hell with the eponymous lines left on his lack of lips.

This is one of those stories you can project whatever you want on because it's pure nightmare. It's capitalism, authoritarianism, transphobia, chronic pain, depression, and none of these things. I think it is kinda abhorrently beautiful and comforting, aside from the fucking weird incel shit, and I can absolutely see why this is both seen as an absolute classic and among the luminaries of sci-fi and horror, and that how people think it's an overhyped, ugly, problematic mess. For me, it's both. show less

What Ellison does amazing here is takes the words of a broken and raving madman and is still able to produce weighty dialogue and reveal different aspects of the story that speak to the human condition. This is one part sci-fi and one part sociology study. The computer that takes over the world and augmented humans and post-apocalyptic setting are standard goings these days. But the freeflow storytelling and from an unreliable narrator in the 1960s was very rare.

While one could just call this a nihilistic tale of torture porn and ultraviolence, a second read might do one service. Figuring out what to believe from Ted's point of view tale uncovers different parts that lead to the conclusion of the story. One could think it as nihilism show more from an author who hates humanity but like Cormac Mc Carthy's The Road, even the bleakest of circumstances in a story ultimately about humanity - there is hope and determination when all the odds are not in one's favor. Quite enjoyed this. Final Grade - A show less

I need to stop reading science fiction classics by men with their casual misogyny. This book goes beyond casual misogyny to glorious rape fantasies. It could be used as a spiritual text for sniveling incel groups. I can almost hear Ellison writing A Boy and His Dog and chuckling over all the ladies who were going to get their panties in a twist. Rape funny, he man good. Cue chest thumping. I guess I’m going to have to stick to science fiction by women from now on.