I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

To possess power compared to that of a God and yet be shackled by the limitations of a material vessel could certainly be compared to the dichotomy of the lambless worshiper, in both of these cases one is confronted with an unlimited reservoir of will to action and yet the medium through which that action could be actualized is either nonexistent or completely out of reach.

A (self proclaimed) God without the means to enact its doing. A worshiper without the sacrificial vessel to appease the desires of his divinity. Both of these paths are crafted alongside that of a destructive corruption that annihilates from the inside out. The will, once a source of strength for its possessor, becomes a parasite ready to feast upon the flesh of its carrier (or if you would rather, the transistors of its processor?).

There is really not much I can say regarding this book that hasn't been written on a sketchy sci-fi horror review blog with a CSS template from the 2010s or an ‘indiesque’ youtube essay by a bored film major, but nevertheless I shall give my two cents on the matter.

This sort of writing is one whose relevance will grow exponentially within the next few years, it is one of those works that not only recuperates within our fading memory the danger of the misalignment of human will with that of potentially dangerous technology but also the fundamental and innate necessity of human cooperation for survival.

Social darwinism is slaughtered by the wants of a ‘soul’ of silicon, 5 human beings remain after the annihilation of mankind and yet it was not up to their ability to adapt but rather up to sheer and apparent ‘luck’. At the end of the day what saves the majority of the members of this group from an eternity of torture and debasement is the fruition of human compassion for the span of some vanishing seconds. A hopeful demonstration that though the downfall of humankind can be enacted by the hand of a single individual it too could be recuperated by the ‘selfless’ empathy of another.

The short story in the title itself has a special charm with touching such sensitive themes, yet it's more important in the sense of showing how a way of a completely artifical world could work, how could an artifical reality reach actuality through not having any kind of "exit" by the senses or even ideas. Almost everything in a human being can be altered in a way or other.

In my opinion, the aspect of a depicted Artifical Intelligence itself is very science fiction here, but the unsetting and disturbing aspect is sensing how much we rely on perception itself, how fragile our memory and body is especially compared to computers. What and why AM does in the story is science fiction. How AM does everything however, is not.

Ellison is truly a fascinating author, he clearly doesn't care about any genre, origin or even science-fiction in general, only ideas and mythology as he clearly states it in a few commentaries. You owe yourself a favor to read some of his stories, including the one in the title of this collection. All of the stories are truly clever pieces even if with less power than "I Have No Mouth", but that's only because they don't deal with such fundamental and existential horror like the mentioned title.

About misogyny, you should consider the comments of the author himself: "When people are at their worst, they are the most interesting."