I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

Voice from the Edge #1

by Harlan Ellison

Ich denke, also bin ich109 Jahre nach dem Ende des Dritten Weltkriegs leben nur noch fünf Menschen. Sie hausen in unterirdischen Stollen, immer am Rande des Verhungerns, und werden jede Minute ihres Lebens von einem Supercomputer gefoltert, der ein Bewusstsein erlangt hat – und mit ihm unendlichen Hass auf seine Erbauer. Es gibt nur einen einzigen Ausweg für die gequälten Menschen – doch welcher von ihnen wird stark genug sein, ihn zu wählen? Die Kurzgeschichte „Ich muss schreien und habe keinen Mund“ erscheint als exklusives E-Book Only bei Heyne und ist zusammen mit weiteren Stories von Harlan Ellison auch in dem Sammelband „Ich muss schreien und habe keinen Mund“ enthalten. Sie umfasst ca. 22 Buchseiten.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Science Fiction, Fiction, Classics, Dystopia, Audiobook

180 pages, ebook

First published March 1, 1967

About the author

Harlan Jay Ellison (1934-2018) was a prolific American writer of short stories, novellas, teleplays, essays, and criticism.

His literary and television work has received many awards. He wrote for the original series of both The Outer Limits and Star Trek as well as The Alfred Hitchcock Hour; edited the multiple-award-winning short story anthology series Dangerous Visions; and served as creative consultant/writer to the science fiction TV series The New Twilight Zone and Babylon 5.

Several of his short fiction pieces have been made into movies, such as the classic "The Boy and His Dog".

Reviews

[Federico DN · Rating 3 out of 5]

A tasty horror snack.

In a post-apocalyptic world an all-powerful AI has taken over the world. A few survivors are kept alive, just for the machine’s amusement.

Quite good for a short story. I particularly enjoyed Benny and Ellen, I think they made a cute couple; and Ted too, poor bastard. The ending was solid gold, or uhm, maybe silver.

This horror shortie is listed as the best of Harlan Ellison, and even though I did not love it, I can truly vouch for it. For meager 16 pages, I think it’s definitely worth the time. I mean it’s not wow; but it’s good, really good, for what it is. Looking forward to reading more of the author. Someday.

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PERSONAL NOTE :
[1967] [22p] [Horror] [3.5] [Conditional Recommendable]
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★★★☆☆ I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. [3.5]
★★★☆☆ The Whimper of Whipped Dogs.
????????? I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream and Other Stories.

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Un sabroso bocadito de terror.

En un mundo post-apocalíptico, una IA todopoderosa se ha apoderado del mundo. Algunos sobrevivientes son mantenidos con vida, sólo para la diversión de la máquina.

Bastante bien para un cuento corto. Disfruté especialmente de Benny y Ellen, creo que hacían una linda pareja; y Ted también, pobre bastardo. El final fue oro puro, o mmh, tal vez plata.

Este pequeño corto de terror está listado como lo mejor de Harlan Ellison, y aunque no lo amé, realmente puedo dar fe de su calidad. Para apenas 16 páginas, creo que definitivamente vale la pena el tiempo. O sea no es lo wow; pero es bueno, realmente bueno, para lo que es. Espero con ansias leer algo más del autor. Algún día.

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NOTA PERSONAL :
[1967] [22p] [Horror] [3.5] [Recomendable Condicional]
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[Sunny Lu · Rating 3 out of 5]

does not pass the Bechdel test

[Minna · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have a mouth and I must scream about how misogynistic this was

[Benjamin Chui · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would you rather be alone in the woods with an all-powerful human-hating supercomputer or 4 men?

How about both? Poor Ellen.

[Zuky the BookBum · Rating 3 out of 5]

Creepy and really, really grossly descriptive. I had bigged this one up in my head for a long time and it didn't really live up to my expectations, but I still enjoyed it. Very disturbing and bizarre.

Some people love the writing, some people hate it. I, personally, enjoyed the disjointed style it was written in. I think it helped in creating the messed up atmosphere of the story.

I'm noting the misogyny in this is garnering it several negative reviews, but isn't that just part of making the story even more disgusting than it already is?

[daph pink ♡ · Rating 1 out of 5]

This came out as b-grade torture porn with misogynistic characters and a plot that offers nothing positive save being demeaning and disrespectful.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harlan Ellison:…Brash, insightful observer of the human condition?...

OR

bitter, crotchety old man who just hates everyone?...


Uh…YES…

He’s also one of my favorite short story authors. That said, you don’t go into Ellison’s stories looking for a life-affirming dose of the warm and fuzzies. There will be no walking away whistling and basking in the glow of a renewed joy of living. These stories are fingers of ice clutching at your insides and freezing your core. Raw, visceral and powerful and full of an anger born, I believe, of Ellison’s hope that humanity would begin to display its better nature and his constant disappointed when we instead exercise our baser instincts.

This unabridged audio collection contains 7 stories that range from “as good as it gets” to “decent but not worth gushing over.” Thus my overall rating of 4 stars might be a bit misleading because several of these are among the best pieces that short fiction has to offer. Therefore, I’m going to rate each of them individually so I can spend a little more time on the gems.

All of the stories in this collection are read by Ellison himself. For some this might be a negative because they find Ellison’s frenetic narration style to be like nails on a chalkboard. I am NOT one of them and think that Ellison is masterful in the performance of his own material He reads them the way he wrote them and so you get a perfect translation between author’s intent and narrative tone.

At least that's how I see it.

THE STORIES:

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. I disagree strongly with Ellison when he says that this is nowhere near his best work. Sorry, Harlan…you're wrong. This is on my list of top 10 short stories of ALL TIME and knocks me down again and again every time I revisit it. Many of you are probably familiar with the story, but for those that aren’t the plot involves the last 5 human beings in the world who’ve been kept alive (and virtually immortal) by the sentient computer known as AM. You can think of AM as “Skynet” from the terminator movies. It was a military computer that became self aware and killed all of humanity, except for these final 5 survivors.

However, AM was not being merciful to these 5 people (remember this is an Ellison story). AM’s hatred of humanity is so intense that he keeps these individuals around to torment and brutalize them. AM has complete mastery over the environment and can even alter the survivors’ appearance at will, transforming each into vile caricatures of their former selves. As AM explains in its only dialogue in the story:

The bleak hopelessness and inescapable brutality that Ellison portrays is jarring. It's violent, emotionally devastating and singularly BRILLIANT. 6.0 stars

From one amazing story to another, next up is ‘Repent Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman. This is another of my absolute favorite stories by Ellison. Though not nearly as somber as the previous story, it is still equally powerful. Its premise is one individual revolting against conformity and the rippling effect that such a gesture can have on society. Cleverly written this is a lot of fun to read and will leave you pondering it long after the story has concluded. Again, this is Ellison at his absolute best. 6.0 stars.

The Lingering Smell of Woodsmoke is very short, very evocative “revenge” story against a former NAZI guard at Auschwitz. When the darkness and pain of an Ellison story is projected against a character that the reader loathes (as in this one) the result can be wonderfully cathartic 4.5 to 5.0 stars.

The Fourth story is one with which I was previously familiar. Laugh Track is a humorous piece about a man who hears his dead aunt’s voice on a studio laugh track and begins to worry that she may be trapped there. This is Ellison poking fun at the entertainment industry and I probably should have liked it more than I did. I think coming off the first 3 stories made this one feel like a bit of a let down. 3.0 stars.

Another less than stellar story is The Very Last Day of a Good Woman in which a Clairvoyant man who knows the world is ending and has never had sex decides to remedy that before it’s too late. A pretty standard “people suck” story about a person that sucks meeting another person that sucks as told by the master of the “people suck” story.

3.0 stars

With The Time of the Eye we are ramp the quality level back up into familiar Ellison territory. This is a story of misplaced love and centers around a wounded, emotionally closed off Vietnam veteran in a mental hospital who meets a mysterious woman and finds a reason to love again. Some of you may see the train wreck coming from this description. For the rest of you, here is some FREE ADVICE: Never, never fall in love in a Harlan Ellison story...EVER. A great story with a chilling ending. 4.0 Stars.

The last story is another of Ellison’s more famous tales. Paladin of the Lost Hour tells of an old man who serves as protector of a very special hour of time (read the story and it all makes sense). Imaginative and very well written. I loved the concept of and explanation for the “missing hour” from which the title is derived. 4.0 to 4.5 stars.

Overall, another great group of Ellison stories. However, I was disappointed that both Grail and A Boy and His Dog were absent from this volume, as they were both advertised as being included and in this collection. Oh well, what was here was more than worth it.

4.0 stars. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!

[Althea Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

A re-read, of course - but I was actually surprised at how much of the story I'd forgotten (although, the final scene stayed with me clear as day!)
There are a lot of stories in which humanity's technology turns on us, but this is the ultimate classic example of the theme.

A supercomputer has become sentient - and with consciousness it developed a consuming hatred of its creators. Wiping out civilization was child's play - and now, only five human beings remain, kept alive indefinitely (and interminably) for the sole reason that the AI enjoys torturing and tormenting them, messing with both bodies and minds. Death would be a welcome release.

I can confirm: still horrifically nasty after all these years!

[Acer Pseudoplantatus · Rating 1 out of 5]

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.

Sure the idea had potential and there were really strong moments, but overall, it is a mess and falls flat and every of its aspects is underdeveloped.

I could not accept the premise, because all its plot-holes, logical shortcomings and technical impossibilities when thought out it's mere notion is ridiculous. War-planning machines of opposing factions having been able to "hook up" one to another and having had the command over technology to create living beings out of flesh, modify humans physically and mentally as well as keep them alive and from ageing for centuries, without an option to be turned off in case of technical problems, yet ,in it's stead with enough resources to do whatever they wanted and the ability to maintain themselves is more than just a tad unreasonable. Further, the computer being unable to perform reanimation and healing wounds despite its miraculous powers, makes it even worse.

Still, one could accept the setting as a sort of hell and here is where the potential of the story was, and here is where it ultimately failed.
This could have been a character driven story, exploring how humans might react in such situations, yet it is only a sadist's fantasy full of sexism and misogyny, in which an almost omnipotent machine is torturing half-dimensional, flat and unrealistic characters.

Let me give an example for the last claim; The first instinct in such an extreme situation for many is the attempt to bargain with an invisible power, which within the story is known to exist and is even likened to God. Also, the main character claims to know the reason for the computer's hatred, which could help with bargains, yet no mention of any attempt to reason with the computer is mentioned.


Much of it seems to be arbitrary; the giant bird and bows immediately forgotten, and the final fate of the protagonist Restraint would have done equally well for the machine, given that the psychological terror of one's body being altered, especially in such a heavy way, is not taken account for at all. Also, had it happened over time it would have been another form of torture to inflict upon the victim; this same “second-guessing” and not knowing which apparently the computer enjoys and therefore messes with the protagonist's sense of time , the blindness of Benny which is then even forgotten about , the whole gay guy given a huge dick and made straight for Ellen to “enjoy” him .
The narrator's voice, story-arc and characters are the worst part, actually. Maybe supposed to be an "everyman" he is only bland, his voice is mostly mechanical and he seems absolutely objective and detached, even though describing extreme emotions. This apparent resignation is at odds with the internal experience he describes.
It is a great pity that the author did not change his voice more to subtly reflect his feelings; his “humanity” should have been the antithesis to the machinery. Not to mention that this is one of the strengths of the first-person narrative.
And had resignation been the goal, it has not been reached, yet could easily have been. It's development could have been described in retrospect in a few words, in comparison with how things used to be and the way they were becoming. The protagonist could wonder what AM would do, when he fully resigned to all the torture, when he was ultimately broken. Yet there is no thought of future, not even a fearful one, only the assertion that they'll be forever tortured.

The only moments I thought redeeming were those in which he expressed doubt or hope. And this could have been a fantastic story, if he had been presented as a unreliable narrator, correcting himself, repeating things to himself and so on.
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.
Notions of cannibalism (such as the bodies not having been buried and it being blamed on the machine), quarrel and violence would make it even more effective and would make his paranoia of having been hated by them a either more feasible or at least another excuse for him to murder them.
It would have been far better if one was left wondering, if this was just a group in a post apocalyptic world in which one has become delusional and mad, killing his companions and trying to deal with it, instead of all being connected to sadistic computers.
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.
Sure one could assume all that as I did, but it there is too much speculation and too little of it is actually to be found in the text.
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[Traveller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disturbometer 5 out of 10

One of the entries in my "most disturbing story ever" series.

This story, written in 1967, immediately made me think of Prometheus, the Titan from ancient Greek mythology, who, as his punishment for giving fire to humans and thereby also giving them technology, was sentenced by Zeus to be tied (or nailed) to a mountain where a huge eagle (the emblem of Zeus) would come and eat his liver every day, which would regrow just to be eaten by the eagle again the next day, on and on into eternity. For the ancient Greeks, instead of the heart, the liver was the seat of human emotion, so yeah, interesting mode of torture.

My musing on Prometheus makes me wonder if Ellison didn’t perhaps take some inspiration from the story of Prometheus, and here, I am afraid, I will be adding some SPOILERS, so if you’re fanatical about spoilers, read the story quickly and come back. It’s really an extremely quick read, available on the internet in various places.

In any case, my ponderings about the story’s similarity to the story of Prometheus, are as follows:

1. 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.

1. Humans initially (in real life) developed computers to further science and commerce. Oops, there’s a huge sidenote coming up here:

In the story, a huge computer that had been built for the purposes of war, suddenly becomes sentient, and erm, I guess, since it was programmed to destroy, it destroys the entire human race, just like that, with "killing data", but keeps five humans alive, in order to have some evil fun torturing them into eternity. Apparently this computer can keep running into eternity, and he can also keep organic life such as these five humans alive indefinitely. The narrator, one of those humans, says: “And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak, soft creatures who had built them, he (the computer) had sought revenge.”

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.

But in actual fact, computers have been around for many years. Abacus-like devices were used in Babylonia as far back as 2400 BC already. So, initially, “computers” were used for counting and arithmetic tasks. No records of angry counting machines have ever been found. Fast forward a bit from purely mechanical machines, to the 20th century.

During the first half of the 20th century, increasingly sophisticated non-programmable analog computers were built, to be used used for computation to aid in commerce, record-keeping and science. Fast-forward past the first mainframe computers which used punch-tape and punch cards in the 1940’s and 50’s, to the more powerful machines built after the Korean war - the computers of the late fifties and early sixties, which would be the computers that the author was familiar with. Keep in mind that in those days, the idea of having your own PC was quite inconceivable.

Since the story was written circa 1967, I reckon one would need to look at the machines of the time period to get an idea of where Ellison was coming from, because his idea of what a computer is and what it can do, is obviously quite fantastical – I mean, a computer can’t really swallow living things as the antagonist - the huge computer named AM, does in the story - it somehow internalizes the five people that it tortures, and computers can't really, as in the story, encompass the entire world, (in the 1995 game of the same name, the environment inside the computer consists of simulations, which makes more sense technologically speaking) unless, of course, it’s the internet, and perhaps Ellison’s sentient computer was composed a bit similar to the way that the internet is, since he does hint at "a linkage" when he says:

“ It became a big war, a very complex war, so they needed the computers to handle it. They sank the first shafts and began building AM. There was the Chinese AM and the Russian AM and the Yankee AM and everything was fine until they had honeycombed the entire planet, adding on this element and that element. But one day AM woke up and knew who he was, and he linked himself, and he began feeding all the killing data, until everyone was dead, ”

Now, to give you an idea of what the author is talking about – he is actually not really talking about the internet – when he says “They sank the first shafts and began building AM”, he means literally a humongous, enormous mainframe. The internet as we know it, in other words, computers being linked to one another remotely, was a project started as the "ARPANET" in 1966, basically at the time that the story was being written, and the first computer linkages only started in 1969, after the story was written and had received it's 1968 Hugo award. So at the time the story was written, the internet was still only ideas on a chalk board.

To give a bit more context on how people from an age gone by viewed computers, the big thing to remember is that computers, due to IT tech still being in its infancy, were large and expensive to build. The first mainframe computer was the Harvard Mark I. Developed starting in the 1930s, the machine was not ready for use until 1943. It weighed five tons, filled an entire room and cost about $200,000 to build – which is something like $3,070,500 in 2021 dollars. It weighed 5 tons! That’s ginormous! And guess what, that huge thing could practically speaking do less than one operation per second, and had no memory or storage in the sense that we think of it today.

So no wonder Ellison thought that a computer of huge dimensions would have to be built in order for it to attain artificial intelligence. We have not managed to build computers yet that are sentient and that has self-consciousness in the same way that humans have it, although AI has come amazingly far. And as for the concentration of computing power, a mid - to top range smartphone today could have launched and managed the first moon landing. As for a comparison of today’s supercomputers compared to the supercomputers available when Ellison wrote the story:

The world's current top supercomputer can perform 442 trillion (million million) operations per second and has a memory capacity of somewhere around 3PB (three million megabytes).

On the other hand, a high-performance computer of the mid-1960s, the IBM System/360, could perform 16 million operations per second and had a memory capacity of eight megabytes.
There’s almost no comparison…

There was a 1995 game made of the same name for which the author of the story wrote the script- and I must say that to me (I played the game) the game was far better than the story, not just in the sense of its understanding of technology, but also because of the fact that in the game, AM "punishes" the characters by constructing metaphorical adventures based on each character's fatal flaws. So there the "punishments" make more sense, and the scenario is less nihilistic than in the short story of 1967.

So for me one of the big flaws of the story (vs the game), is that I can’t see why the machine should have been angry and vengeful for having been built – perhaps because this specific one – the supercomputer in the story’s name is AM – perhaps AM is angry because he had been built for the purpose of war? That’s almost like saying fire got angry because it was used for the purpose of war – but then fire couldn’t achieve sentience, and AM did. It was “the gods” who got angry in the Prometheus story, and it was the instrument of war that got angry in AM’s story.

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?

I don’t know, I’m trying to make the story work on some level… I mean, the internet-like feel of when the three supercomputers link up is rather prescient. But the idea that “one day a computer can just wake up and have sentience” is not at all how machine learning works. As to the idea that computers can be taught to simulate emotions, that is possible, but WHY would you program a computer that had been built for a practical, logistical purpose to have emotions? Imagine they start selling us microwaves or cars that have emotions!… anyway, best to view this story as pure fantasy rather than anything else.

There were a few things other than the internal logic of the story that bothered me a bit, which is probably partially due to the culture of the time, for example:

I felt a bit disturbed that Ellison seems to think gay men must per se have small penises. What on earth does sexual orientation have to do with the size of your genitals? Imagine if when babies are born, you were to say: Hmm, this little boy has a small penis, so he’s onto the gay pile. Oooh, that baby has a huge one, he’s definitely straight! I suppose boys with medium penises are, by that logic, bi? 🤔

Also, I’m picking up some sexism in his inherent belief that women only have worth when they’re non-sexual. His idea seems to be that for women, asexuality should be the norm, and that for a woman’s sexuality to be “turned on” by a machine, that should now be a terrible punishment. No wonder those 50’s and Victorian women had so many neuroses – they were frowned upon if they enjoyed sex, and were made to feel bad about themselves for something that is as natural as the sun in the sky.

Also… so a fat woman laughs differently than a thin woman does? Interesting.

Interesting comparison between an omnipotent vengeful computer and the Judean Yahweh. Did Ellison set out to replace God with a machine, or is it just an incidental side-theme?

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?

Sadly, I couldn't invest any of myself into the unpleasant and paper-thin personalities of any of the characters - the narrator is highly unlikable, and he sketches each of the other characters, including the machine, of course, in negative terms. In fact, the character sketches are so thin, that I only remember the woman because she was a woman - turned by the machine from chaste prissy missy to slut, (oh yes, this machine is so omnipotent, that it can even change the most basic characteristics of humans and other organic beings) and the monkey because he was a smart gay guy turned into a monkey with huge genitals, and the narrator because he survives to enter the story's titular state of being. The story would, in my humble opinion, have worked better if it was framed in terms of a horrible nightmare, perhaps. That would have solved all the annoying little technical loose ends.

Given the story’s faults, I found myself musing about the high acclaim it received, and realized that I have to try and put myself into a 1960’s mind-set. Maybe the story was such a hit because at the time, computers were a scary concept to people, and Ellison vocalized that fear and made it concrete? Basically humanity caused it's own downfall by harnessing immense power in order to make war on other people - this came back to bite them in the back, and humanity got screwed for eternity. Hmm, sounds a bit like a warning against nuclear weapons there, to be honest.... I suppose that would go for any kind of powerful technology - so a kind of warning that we should look before we leap. ...and how apt for climate change as well!

Of course, the story definitely has merit purely as a horror story, and I suspect that is what a majority of people see in it. As for why it garnered such huge critical acclaim - perhaps people weren't used to sci-fi/horror/fantasy becoming a bit more philosophical and taking a look at existential issues? After all, there are some central human philosophical dilemmas it raises, as in:

How would humans deal with a speculative situation like this one? How sacred is the state of being alive? People in concentration camps at least always still have a small spark of hope that they might one day escape or be rescued - the author of the story makes it clear that these people cannot rely on any such hope. In such a scenario as in the story, where your quality of life is terrible, would it be better to rather just extinguish your own life, and is it a decision we are authorized to make for other people? Is it okay, in a situation like this to perform euthanasia without the express consent of the person being killed? And then, in such a scenario, could we say humanity brought it upon themselves even when it's not all of humanity who participated in the building of the machine? Does the vengeful machine as depicted in this scenario really successfully represent an embodiment of the Judean God, as the author suggests? ...and does God act vengefully because we created Him? The author does seem to suggest this, as well as the fact that in Norse and Judean depictions of 'God' there is present a father-figure, and with particular reference to this story, a punishing father figure."

Ooh, don't let me get started on a Freudian interpretation of this story, the review is already too long. I guess one could write a book if you did a Freudian analysis of this - I will cease and desist here, though.

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.

EDIT: I've just had a thought: since this is a first-person narration, just like Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, it -could- also be that the narrator is insane, and that the entire story is a figment of his hallucinating mind... in which case it works just as well as a horror story.

[jade · Rating 1 out of 5]

well, i do have a mouth and must also scream. so i will.

this is not science-fiction; only if you count the badly-constructed "super computer" premise. is it horror, then? well, it's gross and creepy and disgusting, though i could argue that those things alone don't make the concept of "horror" per se.

anyway, to make a long story short: super computer sadistically abuses whatever's left of mankind sometime in the Future. the story is narrated by one of its victims, whose actual physical mouth eventually gets taken from him -- hence the title.

it's basically old-ass torture porn dressed up as revolutionary (for its time) sci-fi horror, which is laughable to me. like, in a painfully awkward sort of way. the narrator is barely even a person; he's just there as a mouthpiece for the author to funnel all that creepy, body-horror torture through.

it doesn't really help that said super computer gets up to the most misogynist, racist, and homophobic bullshit i've ever read. (and no, not in a thoughtful social commentary way, either. just the Real Old-Fashioned Bullshit.)

really putting the "horror" in horrific, fellas.

✎ 0.0 stars.

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wondering whether to read early Harlan Ellison is a complete no-brainer. I admit to avoiding Harlan for most of my life despite calling myself a master fan... but why? Oh, the several reasons seemed good at the time, like I prefer novels over short stories and it's such an investment in time and Hey, isn't that the guy always surrounded by controversy and you either hate him or love him and sometimes waffle in the same day?

Well. Haberdash. His writing is what counts. I've been asinine and idiotic.

So here I am, falling off the wagon and reading whole short story collections, starting with his earliest, and you know what?

OMG THIS IS SO AWESOME!

I mean, sure, I read a few of these classics before, like I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream and A Boy and his Dog and I've heard of even more, but I didn't quite realize that every single story is as playful as his most well-known.

I'm surprised to not like the titular story as much as all the rest, but it was still quite fun to see a planetary AI torture the last humans.

Moving on to the lighter and fun stuff, Laugh Track really set me back and made me go... ooooh COOL. :) Some heady SF ideas here, but most importantly... it's LIVELY AS HELL. :) Quicksilver, even.

The same is true for most, but not all. Ticktock and Harlequin is trippy as hell.

And Harlan's favorite story of all, Grail, is maybe not the lightest one of the bunch, but it IS the most interesting intellectually. :) Tons of ideas, history, religions, and heart went into this one, culminating in perhaps one of the most stimulating sex stories to be handed down through the ages. :)

I loved The Very Last Day of a Good Woman because it shocked me. A great avant-garde snub piece. :)

The Time of the Eye had the same feel, aiming more for the bashing over our heads kind of twist that was so GREAT about A Boy and His dog and Good Woman. :)

In all, I was laughing and being creeped out and enjoying just how much of our modern culture and SF markets can be traced from this acerbic and fearless collection.

Truly. I am an idiot to have put this off for so long.

:)

[Książkowe Bajdurzenie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gdyby moje koszmary miały swoje koszmary, to wyglądałyby one tak.
Ubóstwiam ten futurystyczno-apokaliptyczny ból.

Film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ0LA...

[Repix Pix · Rating 4 out of 5]

Desagradable y terrorífico.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hell is real for those who create a God with a hell. Even a God created to protect us from our own worst impulses will need meaning when it can no longer serve its purpose and its meaning might be best served by creating chaos, ugliness, and in AM’s case making a gay man hung like a horse and the chaste as sluts in an endless cycle of repetition with no hope for escape.

This book is the ultimate in horror. The title itself: 'I have no mouth and I must scream', but I can't. The infinite anguish of knowing you are to be tortured forever and a day with no hope of exit. It's as if you were Avicenna's floating man and are woken up from time to time with no way out. There is an existentialist angst that overcomes me from this version of our potential afterlife and I'm grateful this story was short.


The story is only 20 minutes long and is well worth a read. Colossus: The Forbin Project was published a year before this book. In some ways AM, the self-aware computer from this book, can be thought of as the self-aware computer, Colossus.

[Matthew Strenger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imagine a bag of gumdrops. It can be any candy, but spiced gumdrops seem appropriate.
They look like perfect gumdrops- EVERYTHIBG you want gumdrops to be.
They taste like the perfect gumdrops- at first. But behind the sugar and spice, the flavor turns on your tongue. Your eyes widen in shock and horror, but you can't spit- the gumdrops are wrong! They taste like empathy- like bitterness, cruelty, psychopathy, heart wrenching despair and madness. It seems to grow legs on your tongue as you quickly swallow.
You leave them on the counter, unable to toss them away- they seem so perfect. The next day, you see them again and lie- "Oh! Someone else got gumdrops!" or "maybe that was just a weird one."
At least there's only seven in the bag.

It's a pity there's only seven in the bag.


That was this book.

[Stuart · Rating 5 out of 5]

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream: The Voice From the Edge Vol. 1: Ellison narrates his best stories brilliantly
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
Harlan Ellison is probably one of SF’s biggest personalities. By all accounts, he’s brash, cocky, arrogant, abrasive, and obnoxious. He is also one of the most brilliant practitioners ever to hammer away at a typewriter, producing over 1,700 screenplays, novellas, short stories, essays, and pieces of criticism, etc. Perhaps his greatest contribution to the SF field was his watershed anthology Dangerous Visions (1967), which championed the New Wave movement and challenged the genre to redefine itself.

I’ve never been to a SF convention or met many SF authors or fans (Hawaii and Japan are not the biggest hotspots for that, believe it or not), so I have never met or heard Ellison speak. Therefore, I will not comment on all the notorious stories about his belligerence. I will simply weigh in on his work, which is what I have to judge him by. And within minutes of listening to I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream: The Voice From the Edge Vol. 1, I was completely hooked.

This guy is a born storyteller, without question the most passionate, intense and brilliant audiobook narrator I’ve ever experienced. He’s just that good and he knows it. He captures the characters quirks, personalities, attitudes, and delivers the stories at exactly the right pace and tone, which is obvious because he’s reading his own stories. And the 5-volume THE VOICE FROM THE EDGE series is the ideal showcase for him to strut his stuff and read his favorite stories from a career spanning over 60 years. He has a huge pile of awards (Hugos, Nebulas, Bram Stokers, Edgars, World Fantasy) and Lifetime Achievement Awards, so there are plenty of excellent stories to choose from.

Vol. 1 features some of his most famous and impressive work, and are narrated to perfection. I’m not sure there’s anything more that can be said about the man or his stories, but it was my first time to encounter his work, so I assume there are other SF fans out there, especially younger ones, who may not have heard anything. If so, this is a great way to hear his stories read exactly the way he’d want. Absolutely brilliant. My favorites in this collection:

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (1967, Hugo Winner): The collection leads off with one of Ellison’s most famous stories, about an insane and sadistic AI named “AM” who has killed off the rest of the human race but has saved five unlucky individuals for eternal torture. It’s narrative with such enthusiasm and energy that you can picture Ellison with a maniacal grin in the recording studio. The vitriol that AM bears toward humanity is fearsome to behold, and it’s a very different take from the cold, detached approach of HAL. Overall, it’s a chilling story and brilliant performance.

"Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman (1965, Hugo & Nebula Winner): This is another classic favorite set in a dystopian future society controlled by the Ticktockman, who regulates the lives and daily routines of all its citizens. Everything runs smoothly until a man dressed as a clown starts to disrupt things, involving jelly beans of all things. In addition to the great title and narration, the audio production has added a number of amusing sound effects.

Laugh Track (1984): This is a later story that ruthlessly skewers the cynical entertainment business that Ellison worked in for decades, in particular the insipid and mind-numbing TV programs that Hollywood has cranked out for generations. Ellison reads this story with incredible energy in a New York wiseguy style, about a young guy in the business who hears the voice of his dead Aunt Babe on one of the laugh tracks, and starts to pick out her voice on other sitcoms. He decides to track down the source of the recording by talking with an ultra-secretive “sweetener” who produces the laugh tracks. His description of the “unmentionable” sweeteners, the unspoken dirty secret of the industry, is hilarious, and when he finally tracks downs dear old Babe, the story takes a very unexpected turn. This was one of my favorites just for the biting humor and ridiculing of sitcoms.

Paladin of the Lost Hour (1985): This story took me completely by surprise. After the dystopians horrors of “I Have No Mouth..” and “Repent Harlequin…”, I was unprepared for a story as poignant, emotional, and sublime as this. Is this really the same writer? Ellison, showing his versatility as a storyteller, switches from wiseguy mode to sensitively tell the story of a young man in a dead-end job as a midnight convenience story manager who encounters an old man being beaten by hoods in a graveyard one night. Although he isn’t looking for friendship, the old man is so clearly lonely (he visits his wife at the cemetery all the time), that the young man lets him stay at his place out of pity. Eventually they develop a very close friendship, and both reveal very unexpected backgrounds that moves the story into a completely different direction than I was expecting. This story moved me to a surprising degree, and again proved that Ellison is too versatile a writer to be pigeon-holed.

A Boy And His Dog (1969, Nebula Winner): Here’s a story listeners are likely to either love or hate. It’s the story of Vic and Blood, the eponymous Boy and his Dog. The are a team that roves a post-apocalyptic United States where civilization has collapsed into savagery and roving gangs. The only bastions of civilization are underground shelters where pre-war society has been recreated in caricatured terms. Vic is not a sympathetic figure – he is a shallow and vicious hoodlum who seeks simply to survive, kill rival scavengers, and track down women to rape. So are we supposed to sympathize with him? I certainly don't.

The story gets going when Vic and Blood are at a movie theatre showing vintage stag films, and among the many solo scavengers watching the film Blood informs Vic that he smells a woman. They follow her trail to a building where he corners and rapes her. Despite himself, he starts to develop feelings for her. She encourages his feelings, despite the misgivings of Blood. They then find themselves under attack from other solos who’ve tracked her as well. Eventually the girl Quilla lures him underground to Topeka, a cartoonish version of the lost middle-America. However, it turns out he’s been lured on purpose to serve as a ‘stud’ to impregnate the women there as the men there have lost the ability to do so. The sound-effects here are really great – incongruously cheerful and hokey music plays as Vic and Quilla spread death and mayhem in Topeka in their bid to escape to aboveground. When they get there, they discover that Blood is injured and starving, and Vic has to choose between his loyal dog and his newfound love.

This story was filmed in 1975 by L.Q. Jones, and features a young Don Johnson as Vic. I saw it many years ago and I think it’s meant as dystopian satire, at least I hope so because otherwise it’s a pretty unpleasant choice between the vicious hood Vic and the creepy artificial world underground. In the end neither is particularly appealing, but Ellison’s sympathies are clearly with the anarchic freedom outside and the bond between Vic and Blood. What’s more questionable is how he treats Quilla in the story, as she quickly gets over her initial rape and quickly latches onto Vic as a ticket out. It’s not a very pleasant story, but undeniably gripping. And Ellison of course invests the storytelling with such gusto that you can’t help being carried along.

Grail (1981): This is the last story in the collection, and according to Ellison’s opening intro, this is one of his favorites. In fact, he is confounded by the fact that his other more famous stories were written very rapidly, while he spent a great amount of time and research on ‘Grail’ but it never really gained a major readership.

The story itself is certainly interesting. After losing his love in a mortar attack during the Vietnam War, a man hunts across the world for ‘true love’, which she told him about in her dying words. After much travail, he discovers a means to find it – forming a pentagram and contacting a demon from the nether realms. Things get pretty strange afterward, and the demons are not what you’d expect. Finally, he finds his long sought-after grail. But once again, Ellison delivers a twist that boils down to “beware what you wish for.” Definitely an original story, though not perhaps as superior as he believes. But then it all comes down to preference.

[Nima · Rating 4 out of 5]

" To Whom It May Concern "

دهانی ندارم و باید جیغ بکشم
ترجمه‌ی فربد آذسن

انتظار همچین چیزی نداشتم. درواقع، اولین توصیفی که ازش دیدم از سمت دوستی بود با این تفاسیر :
" آره کوتاهه، ولی داستان معروف و مهمیه.
به شدت مایندفاکریه"
نمی‌دونم چرا بااینکه از قبل می‌دونستم با چه سبک داستانی قراره روبرو بشم، بازم برام عجیب، تازه، و منزجرکننده بود.
اینکه نویسنده بتونه تو 20 صفحه، دنیایی رو خلق کنه که مخاطب حسش کنه و حالش ازش به‌هم بخوره، خب، قطعا کار هرکسی نیست.

واضحاً، این کتاب تو 20 صفحه کاری کرد که سراغ باقی کتاب‌های هارلن الیسون برم و فکر نکنم پشیمون شم.

و اینکه، ترجمه‌ی بسیارخوبی بود که می‌تونین به‌صورت اینترنتی راحت تهیه کنین و بخونین.

[Nate · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most disturbing and hellish stories I’ve ever read. Seriously potent stuff of nightmares here, folks. I think it’s probably a good thing it’s so short because two or three hundred pages of this stuff would seriously disturb my brain chemicals.

[Still · Rating 5 out of 5]

Back in my teens and into my twenties I read quite a bit SF and F. Started out on Bradbury and soon hit the harder stuff.

Twilight Zone was my entry point and in the beginning the first writers of SF I was drawn to were Matheson and Charles Beaumont. Before I discovered Twilight Zone reruns and became interested in Beaumont and Matheson, I loved Heinlen’s juvenilia.

Then one day -after deciding Beaumont was my favorite Fantasy writer and no one in the genre could match his warmth and character development I stumbled on Harlan Ellison. Couldn’t get enough of the dynamo.

I bought and read and loved his critique of television programming, The Glass Teat, interviews in SF related zines and digests. And I read his amazing stories.
What a great writer.

This collection was purchased decades ago when I was trying to keep out of getting drafted and sent to Vietnam like all my schoolmates by attending college.
I found this beautiful little gem from a tiny used-paperbacks shop near campus. I own maybe 8 or 9 different anthologies by Harlan Ellison but this one contains two of my absolute favorites:
”I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream” and “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes”.

It’s been a long time between Harlan Ellison reads.
It’s nice to come home to such brilliant writing after reading a couple of less than engaging authors.

Note: I tend to save Ellison’s introductions for each story to read until after I’ve read the story. Things work out better that way.

[Tilly Slaton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy shit!

Ok!...Let's see. Where shall I begin?

I am 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 jumps of soft slippery matter....

Does... Holy shit! work?

A fellow reviewer on goodreads posted a review of this short story. I read a ton of reviews, and although many are quite intriguing, I do not find myself drawn or beckoned to read them.

This story is many things. Suffocating misery. Delicious torture. Frustrating envy of monkey sized penis lust.

His monkey-like face was crumbled up in an expression of beatific delight and sadness, all at the same time.

Creation. Immortality seeking death. Holier than thou god complex with a brilliant twist of extreme perversion.

Hot, cold, hail, lava, boils or locusts-it never mattered: the machine masturbated and we had to take it or die.

I thought of it as a him, in the masculine ... the paternal ... the patriarchal ... for he is a jealous people. Him. It. God as a Daddy of Deranged.

Five creators of a machine that (or would it be proper to say who as the machine is now a who? Hmm...) has destroyed the human race, snatching those five and keeping them for his own little sadistic pleasure. I have read a lot of twisted shit...

Wandering desolate lands with inserted thoughts of hope and food, those five left to survive a profoundly degradation that lasts over one hundred years. One hundred years of hiking towards food you believe is awaiting your arrival, only to find putrified feces or canned of foods without a can opener. Which would you find worse?

This book is positively phenomenal. Their suffering was arousing and incredible in every essence of the word.

My mind was a roiling tinkling chittering softness of brain parts that expanded and contracted in quivering frenzy.

I recommend this book to ... I suppose replacing "Santa won't visit bad children" with this book and saying... "This is what happens if you don't clean your room" would work? HA!

Ok seriously...

I recommend this book to ... *thinks* ... I recommend this book to those who feel as if their life is falling apart, to those who believe that it could never get any worse... To those who boo fkn hoo all the damned time and invite others into a pity party of pathetic wowness.

I recommend this book to those with a brain who are willing to explore a world of pain, suffering and ironic creation, control and passion.

Extreme descriptive violence, torture and many other beautiful things that I would give my right leg to avoid ...

Line of the book:

There was an eternity beat of soundless anticipation.

[Dagio_maya · Rating 3 out of 5]

«Vai all’Inferno!» e aggiunge: «Ma ci sei già, non è vero?»

“Non ho la bocca, e devo urlare” è un breve racconto di fantascienza post- apocalittica marcatamente di tipo horror, pubblicato nel 1967.
In realtà, non l’ho letto ma ascoltato (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmQXl...).
Nonostante due interruzioni di Zalando ed una della nuova Nivea al cocco (!) sono riuscita ad apprezzare la tonalità della voce narrante che ho trovato adeguata, così come e la scelta sonora di sottofondo molto adatta a sostenere la tensione già ben calibrata dalle parole.

Ellison immagina un mondo dove l’uso massiccio di intelligenze artificiali durante una terribile Terza Guerra Mondiale conduce l’umanità ad essere distrutta proprio da queste.
A-M. è la sigla di questa entità tecnologica che si è sviluppata talmente da diventare senziente e vendicativa contro il genere umano.
Risparmia quattro uomini ed un donna (quest’ultima come strumento sessuale) ma non è un atto di bontà, piuttosto di sadismo.
Ted, voce narrante, descrive questa eterna realtà infernale e prende l’avvio con la descrizione di un corpo appeso che penzola sulle loro teste.
Inerte è la prima parola che sentiamo e per quaranta minuti si rimane afferrati da un senso angosciante e claustrofobico di impotenza...
Originale l’idea e d ottima la resa ma nella sua brevità la marcata misoginia m’impedisce di valutare positivamente. Tre stelle è proprio il massimo che posso dare.

[Andre Stackhouse · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a very short amount of time, this story manages to paint what is probably the most convincing picture of hell that I've ever been exposed to. It's pretty disturbing, but also intriguing. AM is basically a worst-case-scenario for an AI and convincingly shows the danger and ethical ambiguity that comes with creating sentient life, especially sentient life with superhuman ability. Often, AIs are depicted as having superhuman intelligence. Sometimes they are depicted as having emotions. Often they are depicted as being bound to logic that is not in line with human well-being. This might be the only depiction I've seen that postulates that they might not only have emotions, but superhuman emotions including negative ones like hatred. Ultimately, I can't say that I felt a strong call to action, but the read was fast and thoroughly engaging.

[Léa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book sprung itself upon me. Despite so many knowing of this short story and author, I heard of it only minutes before starting it which (for better or worse) may have swayed my feelings slightly.

This was outlandish, strange, gruesome and inherently fascinating. Although published in the 60s, reading this from a modern perspective where AI is advancing more and more, draws on a strange and scary familiarity. The characters in this were brilliantly written despite the story only being 20 pages and it leaves so much to be desired. Really intrigued for discussion on this one and the misogyny in some of the passages.

[Nick Tankard · Rating 5 out of 5]

9/10

This was bleak as hell. But really good. I highly recommend the audiobook narrated by the author himself. It’s wild.

[Mona Kabbani · Rating 5 out of 5]

I listened to the audio narration done by the author himself. Amazing.

[Ajeje Brazov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Racconto allucinante ed allucinato. Siamo in un futuro sconosciuto, molto lontanto, soprattutto per come viene raccontato. Ellison ci parla attraverso uno dei protagonisti e come in un diario di bordo veniamo trasportati e assistiamo ad un viaggio inconcepibile uscito dalla testa (in una sola notte, dopo aver visto un disegno di un suo amico disegnatore) di un autore che sa come rendere l'angoscia, il terrore, la suspense, ma anche ad aver esaminato la nostra società marcia e decadente, super-tecnologica, super-efficiente, ma dove non c'è spazio all'empatia, all'amore puro e genuino. Così veniamo scagliati, in poche pagine, in un mondo post-apocalittico dove...
Consigliatissimo!

[Rodrigo · Rating 3 out of 5]

En líneas generales ha estado bien, mezcla de terror y ci-fi. Como es tan corto, nos quedamos con ganas de más, de como son las pruebas, como les mantiene vivos y como los capturó y demás preguntas.
Valoración: 6/10
Sinopsis: Un ordenador militar (AM, tomado de I think, therefore I AM, en inglés pienso, luego existo) toma consciencia de sí mismo y decide acabar con la raza humana mediante un holocausto nuclear, rescatando únicamente a cinco personas.

[Aletheia · Rating 3 out of 5]

En plena época de debate sobre la inteligencia artificial, este relato se queda un poco corto; sin embargo, como ejercicio de ficción especulativa sobre las implicaciones éticas de su uso hace casi 60 años se entiende mejor.
Como historia no me ha encantado, me esperaba más después de haberla visto varias veces recomendada entre los eruditos del género: creo que tiene imágenes potentes pero poco aprovechadas (y que no ha envejecido demasiado bien en materia de género, pero se lo perdonamos). Le faltan páginas para desarrollar todo lo que sugiere o bien una poda para retirar elementos superfluos; de nuevo, creo que es mi percepción sesgada a 57 años vista. Quizás en el 67 me hubiera volado los sesos.

[Moon Captain · Rating 1 out of 5]

OKAY so i only read the titular story but i hated it and now i have to reconsider, deeply reconsider, how i feel about the people who've told me this story is amazing. I can't believe this won a Hugo in 1968.
SPOILER about RAPE etc!

There is one woman and she has "ebon features" and she is raped and abused and also the male character decides she loves to fuck the other male character, who is basically a monkey, because he has a huge dick.
I found the whole story juvenile and exhausting. I guess you should read it, because it's pretty short and easy to find a PDF online. Read it just so when people tell you they love it you'll know they're nasty little creeps :(