I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream

Just in time for 7O (the Venezulean elections on 7th October which gave Hugo Chávez another six years in power), the 7th issue of Bibliomula is all about dystopias. You can read my original article here, but here it is in English.

When Bibliomula.org asked me to write about literary dystopias, I immediately thought of the British classics - George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. However, a physicist friend with a taste for comics and video games suggested a story from the other side of the Atlantic, that I had never heard of before: I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison. This same friend has recently told me that if she shared a room in a hostel with strangers she would whisper "I want to wear your skin" just before they fell asleep to freak them out, so I should have known what I was getting in to.

I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream tells the story of the five last surviving humans on Earth, trapped forever in the belly of a sentient supercomputer, AM, which has destroyed the rest of the world. Like any classic dystopian tale, it mixes political concerns with fears about the power of modern technology. Written over one night in 1966, at the height of the Cold War, it is a response to that conflict and the very real fear that the war machines would bring about the end of the world.

The premise is that each of the world superpowers - the United States, Russia and China - built their own supercomputer to fight a war that was too complicated for human minds, but before long the computers became sentient, and, aware of their own power, united to create an enormous God-like monstrosity. This cluster, programmed to kill, destroys almost every living thing, but keeps five victims alive, torturing them forever as revenge against the human race that built it and filled it with rage.

The concept of sentient Artificial Intelligence is nothing new (see Isaac Asimov's 1950 I, Robot for example), but Ellison approaches it a particularly chilling way. I read I Have No Mouth... for the first time on the train and was shocked by my visceral reaction. The story left me miserable and weirdly shaken. I couldn't quite act normally afterwards, and left the carriage in a kind of fugue. The story's impact is in large part the result of its stark narration. Ted, the narrator, enumerates horrific acts of violence dispassionately, without excessive details, which is worse because it forces you to imagine them for yourself. Moreover, as the title (taken from a picture by Ellison's good friend William Rotsler) suggests, the story feeds on our deepest fears: perpetual hunger and pain; loss of individual identity; the inability to see, to think, to express oneself. These fates worse than death are caused by the caprices of AM, but any reader would recognise them as potential results of a nuclear holocaust.

At its heart, the story highlights how war and technology end in the destruction of civilised society. One of the victims, Benny, the intellectual, becomes a dumb ape, reduced to his carnal instincts. Gorrister, once a passionate idealist, becomes apathetic, listless. Ellen, the only woman, who was 'almost' a virgin before, is now everyone's lover. It is clearly a warning. Ellison became famous for holding a mirror up to contemporary society and underlining the perils to come if we did not change. In an interview years later (quoted here), he affirmed: "I have never, ever, espoused a position of hating technology. Even the original short story, is not anti-technology. What it is anti is anti-misuse by humans".

The lasting legacy of I Have No Mouth...

First published in March 1967 in an issue of IF: Worlds of Science Fiction, this short story went on to become one of the most reprinted stories in the English language. One reason for this enduring success is undoubtedly its continued relevance to contemporary society, which is ever more reliant on technology. Another reason is that it has enjoyed a life beyond the page which has introduced it to new audiences and maintained public interest in the story. In 1995, for example,, the graphic artist John Byrne turned it into a comic as part of the graphic novel Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor, while an audiobook, narrated by Ellison himself was released in 1999. The most intriguing incarnation, however, is the critically acclaimed video game which came out in 1995. A point-and-click adventure game, with a script adapted by Ellison among others, it obliged players to make ethical decisions in order to prove that humans are better than computers. Curiously, in contrast to the unrelentingly bleak short story, in the video game the humans can actually win. It is possible to destroy AM and salvage the Earth. Written almost thirty years after the story, in a time of relative peace (the nuclear holocaust did not happen, after all), could it be that the video game shows a little optimism? Saying that, the game does treat themes of madness, rape and genocide, so maybe not that much optimism! Whether as a video game, audiobook, comic or the original short story, I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream still forces us to examine the worst of human nature and its consequences.