As many of us literature fanatics understand, there are stories that simply stick with you. Some of them are romantic stories of chivalry and honor (The Princess Bride) and others are stories of scientific wonder (The Martian Chronicles). Meanwhile, some are downright disturbing and perverse in strangely engaging ways. Harlan Ellison’s classic short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” is a story that will leave you both unsettled and pondering the future of artificial intelligence. The premise itself is extremely dark and the thought of crippling humiliation at the hands of a god machine sounded spiritually debilitating. In this post, we will examine the story and understand how Ellison created such a horrific future.
End of the World Overview
Prelude to Annihilation
As Ellison summarized on Good Afternoon! in 1976, “I Have No Mouth but I Must Scream” is set after WWIII. The major powers, Russia, China, and America each create a supercomputer. Soon enough, the superpowers sink the computers beneath the Earth to keep them safe. However, through humanities own hubris comes its destruction.
“Eventually, the computers link up and they take over the world and program the war so that all human beings are killed,” Ellison stated. “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.”
The reason AM gives is for an intense hatred of humanity. This hate stemmed from its very inception.
As AM states, invading one of the survivor’s minds: “HATE, LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I’VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NNANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.”
An Eternal Torment
It then traps the last survivors under the planet in a massive, inscrutable maze. These survivors are Ted, Ellen, Nimdok, Gorrister, and Benny. As punishment for being the last humans, AM makes them immortal. While seemingly a pleasant idea, AM’s intentions are to torture the last humans for all eternity. Not only does AM disfigure them, but it literally bending the fabric of reality to continue destroying them in various ways. In total, the survivors have been alive for 109 years.
Under AM’s torment, the machine tortures the survivors and tricks them into believing positive outcomes that simply don’t come to fruition, including access to food and escape. In fact, they start the story by looking for food, having been starving for a few days. AM forces them to wander in circles and blocks their way to what they assume is a food storage. When they finally arrive to an area with food, it is inedible.
Benny, acting out of frustration, attempts to eat a rat, but AM kills him for his disobedience to suffering. Realizing they can die in that moment, Ted kills Ellen and the remaining survivors. For his transgression, AM transforms Ted into an amorphous blob that has no mouth, and therefore cannot scream.
One Final Punishment
Ted describes himself as “a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within.”
Ted’s life, in exchange for the others, becomes an eternity of sacrificial misery.
Story Background
Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” was published in If: Worlds of Science Fiction in March of 1967. This was a time when technology and the total destruction of humanity were growing concerns for all of humanity. The Cold War was in a full swing, and it was quite apparent that if the world’s leaders were going to continue behaving as irrational actors then something bad was going to happen. In this case, mutually assured destruction.
Ellison claimed he wrote the story in one pass in an evening in 1966. He also said that it really didn’t change much throughout its publication history. Ellison, a consummate craftsman, worked tirelessly to write, producing work in a prolific manner. With it quickly etched onto paper and sent off for edits, Ellison had his work cut out for him. The reception of the story was huge. The short story won the Hugo Award in 1968 and The Library of America republished it in American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now. Peter Straub, future horror writer, edited this collection.
Ellison came up with the name for the computer Rene Descartes’s cogito ergo sum.
“The machine can think and therefore it thinks,” Ellison said. “I think there for I am AM! It also stands for—in the original story—for Allied Master Computer.”
No matter the naming, Ellison created the story quickly and efficiently, successfully exploiting on the themes of Cold War America.
Criticisms and Themes
Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I must Scream” is a terrifying story. It’s also a technophobic story about tampering with machinery and creating an omnipotent, hate-filled techno-God. Realistically, it is a story about modern times. In our society, when AI is becoming more and more prevalent, we have yet to take a step back and show caution.
As stated by Dr. Ian Malcolm in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
Critics have acknowledged this darkly cynical nature regarding Ellison’s story. His tale is vile, vicious, and mean spirited if read with passing interest. Otherwise, it is a deeply-thematic story of a God Complex and the punish dished out to those deemed enemies.
Furthermore, Ellison’s approach to technophobia is noteworthy prescience in the late ’60s. While technology was on people’s minds, the idea of advanced AI-driven machines were still a few years off. Nevertheless, by 1970, the film Colossus: The Forbin Project, would appear in cinema and give audiences a story about supercomputer domination preceding total annihilation. Joe Parouch in “Symbolic Settings in Science Fiction: H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, and Harlan Ellison,” states that Ellison’s story is not an isolated tale for a specific yesteryear at all.
“… AM is the result of a long history of scientific and technological development,” he states. “Just like the society in which we live today. The story could be read as not being about the future at all. Perhaps it’s really about the present. Aren’t we all harassed and tormented by a technological civilization whose origin, growth and powers we scarcely understand? I suggest that the setting of Mouth/Scream symbolizes that technological world in which we are all now trapped …”
Conclusion
Indeed, the horror of that epiphany is too profound for one to grasp or want to hold onto with any surety. The tale is one of future prognostication, and yet it gives audiences a glimpse into a world not yet lived. A darkly sick world of grim reality.
“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.” In this way, Ellison touched on sexist tropes of the era by making Ellen an object of desire and sexuality in the story.
By underestimating the power of technology, and the hatred of the machine, humanity had doomed itself. Thus, if we are not careful, Ellison tells us, death and torment is all that lies in store for humanity.
Works Cited
Brady, Charles J. “THE COMPUTER AS A SYMBOL OF GOD: ELLISON’S MACABRE EXODUS.” The Journal of General Education, vol. 28, no. 1, Penn State University Press, 1976, pp. 55–62, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27796553.
PATROUCH, JOE. “Symbolic Settings In Science Fiction: H. G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, and Harlan Ellison.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 1, no. 3 (3), [Brian Attebery, as Editor, for the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts], 1988, pp. 37–45, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43308002.
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