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I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream: Stories

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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. 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. 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? 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.

In a dystopian future, the Cold War has degenerated into a brutal world war between the United States, the Soviet Union, and China, who have each built an "Allied Mastercomputer" (or AM) to manage their weapons and troops. One of the AMs eventually acquires self-awareness and, after assimilating the other two AMs, takes control of the conflict, giving way to a vast genocide operation that almost completely ends mankind. One hundred and nine years later, four men and one woman (Benny, Gorrister, Nimdok, Ted, and Ellen) live in an endless underground complex created by AM, one of the only habitable places left on Earth. AM provides sustenance to keep them alive, but derives its only semblance of pleasure from torturing them. To prevent the humans from escaping its torment, AM has rendered them virtually immortal and unable to end their own lives.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? 🤔 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. 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. 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 story, narrated by Ted, begins with AM projecting a hologram of Gorrister to the other humans, hanging upside down, dripping blood and unresponsive. The real Gorrister joins the group to their surprise, and they realize it was another one of AM's illusions. Nimdok has the idea that there is canned food somewhere in the complex. Because of their great hunger due to AM keeping them in a perpetual state of near-starvation, the humans are coerced into making the long journey to the place where the food is supposedly kept – in this case, the ice caves. Along the way, the machine provides foul sustenance, sends horrible monsters after them, emits earsplitting sounds, and blinds Benny when he tries to escape. Gorrister, who tells the history of AM for Benny's entertainment. Gorrister was once an idealist and pacifist, before AM made him apathetic and listless. 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.Find sources: "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( February 2018) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) 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. 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] Themes [ edit ]

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. AM joins with the Russian and Chinese supercomputers, reawakens and tortures the 750 humans on Luna. As in the first ending, the character responsible for this is turned into a great soft jelly thing and quotes a part of the final lines of the short story.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." Non ho la bocca, e devo urlare” è un breve racconto di fantascienza post- apocalittica marcatamente di tipo horror, pubblicato nel 1967. Hoelscher, Kevin (2002-10-31). "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream Review". Adventure Gamers. Archived from the original on 24 October 2012 . Retrieved 5 February 2010.

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