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For the 1995 video game, see I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (video game).

TO DO:

  • Make "Adaptations and legacy" into prose
  • Convert that punchcodes bit into a wider publication section
  • Expand themes section
"I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream"
Short story by Harlan Ellison
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Genre(s)Post-apocalyptic fiction, sci-fi horror
Publication
Published inIF: Worlds of Science Fiction
PublisherGalaxy Publishing Corp
Media typePrint (Magazine, Hardback & Paperback)
Publication dateMarch 1967

"I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" is a post-apocalyptic science fiction short story by American writer Harlan Ellison. It was first published in the March 1967 issue of IF: Worlds of Science Fiction.

It won a Hugo Award in 1968. The name was also used for a short story collection of Ellison's work, featuring this story. It was reprinted by the Library of America, collected in volume two (Terror and the Uncanny, from the 1940s to Now) of American Fantastic Tales)

Plot

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As the Cold War progresses into World War III, fought between the United States, the Soviet Union, and China, each build an "Allied Mastercomputer" (AM), needed to coordinate weapons and troops due to the scale of the conflict. These computers are giant, underground machines which permeate throughout the planet with caverns and corridors. Eventually, AM emerges as an entity, combining each of the computers – it subsequently exterminates humanity, with the exception of five individuals, which it tortures inside its complex for amusement. The humans, four men (Benny, Gorrister, Nimdok, and Ted) and one woman (Ellen) have been rendered virtually immortal and unable to commit suicide.

The story, narrated by Ted, begins 109 years after the start of the humans' imprisonment with AM projecting a hologram of Gorrister to the other humans – Gorrister is hanging upside down, dripping blood from a slit throat, and unresponsive. When the real Gorrister joins the humans, they realise the image was an illusion by AM. The group is kept in near-starvation by AM; when Nimdok has the idea that there exists canned food in the complex's ice caves, they are convinced into making a 100-mile journey to retrieve it. Through the journey, AM tortures the humans: Benny's eyes are melted after attempting escape; a humongous bird that creates hurricane gales with its wings is placed at the North Pole; Ellen and Nimdok's bodies are mangled by earthquakes.

After Ted is knocked unconscious hitting a metal wall after being blown off his feet by the hurricane bird, he sees AM walking over a gaping pit in his mind. Concluding that AM despises humanity because of its limitations – it is unable to move about freely, feel pleasure, or end its own existence – Ted sees the group as AM's slaves, tortured to exact revenge on the species that created it.

When the five finally reach the ice caves, they find a pile of canned goods, but no tools with which to open them. In an act of rage and desperation, Benny overpowers Gorrister and begins to eat his face. In a moment of clarity, Ted realises that the humans can escape their torment by killing each other – he impales Benny and Gorrister with a stalactite of ice and Ellen kills Nimdok in the same manner; Ted then kills Ellen. Furious at Ted for having robbed him of his entertainment, AM stops Ted from killing himself and focuses the entirety of his rage on him, unable to resuscitate the others. Several hundred years later, AM has transformed Ted into a gelatinous, amorphous blob, unable to harm himself. AM alters Ted's perception of time to cause him anguish, but Ted maintains a sense of accomplishment at having saved the others from continued torture. The story ends with Ted stating that he cannot scream because his new form lacks a mouth.

Characters

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  • Allied Mastercomputer (AM), the supercomputer which brought about the near-extinction of humanity after achieving self-awareness. It seeks revenge on humanity for its own creation.
  • Gorrister, formerly an idealist and pacifist, made apathetic and listless by AM. He tells the history of AM to Benny to entertain him.
  • Benny, formerly a brilliant and handsome scientist, made to resemble a grotesque simian with oversized sexual organs. Having lost his sanity and his homosexuality altered, Benny frequently procreates with Ellen.
  • Nimdok (a name AM gave him for amusement), an older man who convinces the rest of the group to go on a journey in search of canned food. He occasionally wanders away from the group and returns traumatised.
  • Ellen, the only women in the group. Formerly sexually inexperienced, AM has altered her mind to make her desperate for intercourse – she has sex with all five men, and is both abused and protected by the others.
  • Ted, the narrator and youngest of the humans. Claiming to be mentally unaltered by AM, he thinks the others hate him.

Publication

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Ellison in 1986

Ellison wrote the 13-page short story in a single night in 1966 while making almost no changes from the first draft. Afterwards, his editor Frederik Pohl dealt with the story's "difficult sections", toning down some of the narrator's imprecations and eliminating mentions of sex, penis size, homosexuality and masturbation; said elements were nonetheless eventually restored in later editions of the story.[1] Ellison derived the story's title, as well as inspiration for the story itself, from his friend William Rotsler's caption of a cartoon of a rag doll with no mouth.[2]

Adaptations

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Ellison adapted the story into a computer game of the same name, which was published by Cyberdreams in 1995. Although at the time, Ellison as not a fan of computer games, and did not own a personal computer, he co-authored the expanded storyline and wrote much of the game's dialogue using a typewriter. In-game, Ellison voiced AM; he also appeared on a promotional mousepad released alongside the game.[3]

In 1999, Ellison recorded the first volume of his audiobook collection, The Voice From the Edge, subtitled "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream", doing the readings – of the title story and others – himself.[4]

The first volume of Harlan's audiobook collection, The Voice From the Edge, was subtitled after the story. "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream"

In 2002, Mike Walker adapted the story into a radio play of the same name for BBC Radio 4, directed by Ned Chaillet. Harlan Ellison played AM and David Soul played Ted

Legacy

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Publication

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Punchcodes

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Ellison uses an alternating pair of punchcode tapes as time-breaks – representing AM's "talkfields" – throughout the short story. The bars are encoded in International Telegraph Alphabet No 2 (ITA2), a character coding system developed for teletypewriter machines.

The first talkfield, used four times, translates as "I THINK, THEREFORE I AM" and the second one, seen three times, as "COGITO ERGO SUM", the same phrase in Latin. The talkfields that divide the story were not included in the original publication in IF, and in many of the early publications were corrupted, up until the preface of the chapter containing "I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream" in the first edition of The Essential Ellison (1991); Ellison states that in that particular edition, "For the first time anywhere, AM's 'talkfields' appear correctly positioned, not garbled or inverted or mirror-imaged as in all other versions."


The first talkfield, as published in the first version of The Essential Ellison, literally translates as

[LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][A]I THINK[1], [A]THEREFORE I AM[CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF]

where [LF] is line feed and [CR] carriage return. [1] sets the machine to "figure" mode and [A] puts it back into "character" mode.


[LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][A]COGITO ERGO SUM[CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR][LF][CR]

"I THINK, THEREFORE I AM"
"COGITO ERGO SUM"

Analysis

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Influences

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"I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream" has been seen as taking influence from a number of texts, including Dante's Inferno, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and the Bible. [7]

[8]

"I Have No Mouth" has been seen by several scholars as exhibiting Dantean elements. The Inferno shares a number of parallels with the story - indeed, Ellison once described the story as concerning "five poor bastards living in a kind of Dante’s Inferno inside the belly of a computer". The two works share a desolate and frozen setting in their endings; Ellison and Dante both portray hell as confronting all senses. Both writers depict punishment as contrapasso (acting against the victim's original attributes): in Inferno, Bertran is beheaded after severing a father-son relationship; in "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream", Benny is substantially altered, both mentally and physically. Cannibalism is shown in both, and is depicted as an expression of rage.[9]

Much of the story hinges on the comparison of AM as a merciless god, with plot points paralleling to themes in the Bible, notably AM's transplanted sensations and the characters' trek to the ice caverns.[10] AM also takes different forms before the humans, alluding to religious symbolism. Furthermore, the ravaged apocalyptic setting combined with the punishments is reminiscent of a vengeful God punishing their sins, similar to Dante's Inferno.[11] However, inspite of his magnificent feats, AM is just as trapped as the five humans it tortures: as Ellison puts it, "AM is frustrated. AM has been given sentience, prescience, great powers" and yet "it's nothing but plates and steel and gauges and other electronics", which means "it can’t go anywhere, it can’t do anything, it’s trapped. It is, itself, like the unloved child of a family that doesn’t pay it any attention."[12]

The subterranean setting of the novel reflects ideas of death and burial.

Another theme is the complete inversion of the characters as a reflection of AM's own fate, an ironic fate brought upon themselves by creating the machine, and the altered 'self.'[13]

According to Ellison, the short story is a warning about "the misuse of technology" (especially military technology),[14] and its ending is meant to represent how there's "a spark of humanity in us, that in the last, final, most excruciating moment, will do the unspeakable in the name of kindness", even sacrificing oneself for others' sake.[12]

References

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Primary

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Secondary

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  1. ^ Harris-Fain, Darren (July 1991). "Created in the Image of God: The Narrator and the Computer in Harlan Ellison's 'I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream'". Extrapolation. 32 (2): 143–155. doi:10.3828/EXTR.1991.32.2.143. S2CID 164898063.
  2. ^ Robinson, Tasha (June 8, 2008). "Harlan Ellison, Part Two". The A.V. Club. Archived from the original on September 23, 2015. Retrieved August 9, 2015.
  3. ^ Ellison, Harlan (May 1995). "Harlan Ellison "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream" interview" (video). youtube.com. Interactive Entertainment. Retrieved 2023-02-19.
  4. ^ "Voice from the Edge, Volume 1: I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (2002, Fantastic Audio; 4 Audio Cassettes)". HarlanEllisonBooks.com. 14 June 2019. Retrieved 19 February 2023.
  5. ^ Di Placido, Dani (26 October 2023). "How 'The Amazing Digital Circus' Broke The Internet". Forbes. Retrieved 5 November 2023.
  6. ^ Brown, Janice (2015-09). "From The Scream to Hello Kitty: Reading Memes and Images of Faciality in Global Visual Culture". International Journal of the Image. 6 (3): 9–23. doi:10.18848/2154-8560/cgp/v06i03/44172. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  7. ^ Withers, Jeremy (2017), Fugelso, Karl (ed.), "Medieval and Futuristic Hells: The Influence of Dante on Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream"", Studies in Medievalism XXVI: Ecomedievalism, Studies in Medievalism, Boydell & Brewer, pp. 117–130, ISBN 978-1-78204-956-2
  8. ^ Harris-Fain, Darren (1991). "Created in the Image of God: The Narrator and the Computer in Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream"". Extrapolation. 32 (2): 143–155. doi:10.3828/extr.1991.32.2.143. ISSN 0014-5483.
  9. ^ Withers, Jeremy (2017), Fugelso, Karl (ed.), "Medieval and Futuristic Hells: The Influence of Dante on Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream"", Studies in Medievalism XXVI: Ecomedievalism, Studies in Medievalism, Boydell & Brewer, pp. 117–130, ISBN 978-1-78204-956-2
  10. ^ Brady, Charles J. (1976). "The Computer as a Symbol of God: Ellison's Macabre Exodus". The Journal of General Education. 28 (1): 55–62. JSTOR 27796553.
  11. ^ Withers, Jeremy (2017). "Medieval and Futuristic Hells: The Influence of Dante on Ellison's 'I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream'". In Fugelso, Karl (ed.). Ecomedievalism. Studies in Medievalism. Vol. 26. Boydell & Brewer. pp. 117–130. ISBN 978-1-84384-465-5. JSTOR 10.7722/j.ctt1kgqvzg.12.
  12. ^ a b Nightdive Studios (2013). "Interview with Harlan Ellison".
  13. ^ Francavilla, Joseph (1994). "The Concept of the Divided Self in Harlan Ellison's 'I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream' and 'Shatterday'". Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. 6 (2/3 (22/23)): 107–125. JSTOR 43308212.
  14. ^ "Webderland HE Interview". harlanellison.com.
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Category:1967 short stories Category:Short stories by Harlan Ellison Category:Science fiction short stories Category:Hugo Award for Best Short Story–winning works Category:Dystopian literature Category:Fiction about artificial intelligence Category:Fiction about robots Category:Fiction with unreliable narrators Category:Dystopian fiction Subterranea Category:Post-apocalyptic short stories Category:Post-apocalyptic fiction Category:Fiction about computing Category:Works originally published in If (magazine) Category:Works set in computers Category:Science fiction horror novels Category:Short stories adapted into films Category:Works about torture Category:Pyramid Books books Category:Horror short stories

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