![]() On the other side of the spectrum, the ant-like species our heroes study is fascinating, even if descriptions of its hivemind are ripped straight from Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human. The relationships between two men and a female scientist dips into casual misogyny and rape, two things painted as both horrible and deserved. “World of the Myth” is fairly enjoyable for its ideas, but it lacks development in its characters, and the story is stream-of-consciousness. I had to look the story up a day after finishing it because I couldn’t remember it. It’s a shallow look at 1950s consumerism via two ‘normal’ (i.e., plain-looking) lovers. Ellison lauds his own social satire of our cultural obsession with manufactured beauty, and then beats that message into every word and every page of this story. “Eyes of Dust” reminded me of Chuck Palahniuk. It’s about a teleporting performer - Big Sam - looking for his long-lost love while escaping to a space circus.īeing set in a space circus, being driven by a boring, boy’s love story full of machismo, and being centered around gobbledygook painted as sci-fi make this forgettable as hell. “Big Sam was My Friend” is perhaps the most dated story in the collection, envisioning alien civilizations through 1950s Americana. It truly reads like a story written in a frenzy, even if the idea’s good. There’s no consistent logic to AM’s torture methods, or to the artificial world these stereotypes find themselves in. A dangerous AI with this much loathing as written by an author ignorant of computers in 1967 all date this story. That doesn’t make the story great, though. I never finished it, but what I remember was enjoyable! This ’60s cybertale was adapted into a point-‘n’-click adventure game in the ’90s. Humanity is gross, and the nastiness of these people and this AI are forgivable, I think, within the context of the story. The male survivors, including the narrator, are particularly fixated on the woman, who herself is a bag of sexist tropes. ![]() You don’t care for any of them - and you shouldn’t. Humanity’s woes 109 years after the end of civilization are painted as grossly as their embodied human attributes. (I’ve also seen them and the AI painted as the deadly sins, but what difference would that make?) The survivors all represent gross aspects of humanity - stereotypes, whether naturally or shaped by AM is up for debate - like the prostitute, the idealist, the messiah, etc. After the death of humanity, five survivors are trapped inside an AI (a la HAL-9000), and, tortured year after year by the hateful, artificial god named AM (as in cogito ergo sum). So “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” alone in the collection, might be worth reading before the roll of time deems it too dated. "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" (1967) I often appreciated the intent, but not the execution or the pompousness with which the introductions make plain. Clumsy patterns repeat repeat repeat themselves between stories, showing off nice ideas but making each voice bleed together. This is often mentioned as a condescending brag, but the story’s - and most of the stories in this collection, which Ellison frequently notes as featuring few edits from his original vision - prose comes off as clunky and rough around the edges to my mind. He wrote it, reportedly, in a frenzied single night, and the final published version featured few edits. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is primarily remembered for its title story, a cyberthriller so apocalyptic and sadistic in tone, it has few stylistic peers. It’s not possible to read Harlan Ellison’s stories without thinking about Harlan Ellison the personality - he’s made a reputation marketing that personality as an unstoppable mixture of pretension and insincerity.
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