I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
Prepare yourself, for this is one of the most hate-filled, aggressively grotesque yet utterly masterful short stories I have ever read. I don’t think anyone can claim to be unaffected after reading it.
Ellisons’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream depicts a world in which the Cold War escalates into full-blown conflict. Three AI supercomputers are constructed in China, Russia and the USA to aid in the war but one becomes sentient, absorbs the other two and destroys all of mankind but for one woman and four men. This AI named AM, filled with hatred for humanity, holds its five prisoners in an endless underground complex to torture and humiliate them for eternity.
AM has the ability to keep the group alive and functioning through starvation, illness and injury and can even resurrect them from death, continuing to do so for hundreds of years. It takes joy from their suffering as it too suffers, having been created without any identifiable purpose other than to cause harm:
“It had been trapped. AM wasn’t God, he was a machine. We had created him to think, but there was nothing it could do with that creativity. In rage, in frenzy, the machine had killed the human race”.
The story is incredibly spiteful and venomous yet utterly compelling and beautiful in its prose, invoking emotion that I found difficult to interpret not having been presented with anything like this before. The foulness of the imagery clashes with the bold fluidity of the storytelling in such a perfect manner that it is impossible to despise its repulsiveness or indeed enjoy its graceful style.
Human guilt and repulsion to war are so thematically prominent in the text that it seems insulting to even mention the topics outright, but it is interesting to see how the Cold War affected fiction in the 50s and 60s. Ellison was drafted to the United States Army in 1957 for two years, writing I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream a decade or so later. It is without doubt that these two events are intrinsically linked.
It is hard to read, repulsive and horrendously unrelenting, but this great piece of dystopian fiction is a perfect representation of the foulness of man. It leaves a sour taste in the mouth but it does relay what we are – an ultimately destructive race that, like the machine, detests and revels in its god-like status. It is easy to see how writers such as Ellison, Bradbury and Vonnegut could write such scathing works considering how much devastation they must have witnessed, and it is frightening to acknowledge how quickly this painful period in history seems to have been forgotten.
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