[Yes, I admit. It's been a VERY long while since I've updated this blog--life happens as well as multiple writing projects I'm currently juggling like a circus performer--but I am trying to change that from here on, more regularly posting to Between the Shadows, my original written content (and more, some stuff is in the works!) alongside review/commentary on some of my favorite horror/thriller/scifi. Breaking that in with a post on a short story I've read that I cannot get out of my head. It's one of the most bitter and powerful takes on a future destroyed by our own warring that I've ever read, authored by the great science fiction writer Harlan Ellison who sadly, passed away earlier this year....]
It's not often I read something that feels like an emotional punch to the gut. Imagine the relentless abuse of human beings for no other reason than they exist. This is what happens in Harlan Ellison's brilliant short story, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. And it's one of the finest pieces of science fiction I've ever read. It doesn't matter that the backstory is briefly stated or that the villain in this piece never takes on a physical form. The evil is concentrated. A fury that rages, festers and explodes on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis but never loses its heat. In fact, the lack of form of the torturer of the people huddled together in Hades, makes it worse. They can't beg, bargain or please. There's no wearing down of their jailer's emotions or appeal to human decency. Because the humanity is what it seeks to smash into the cold, post-apocalyptic dust and damn well makes them know that this is the ambition. Torture is what it is. Most definitely. But it goes beyond even that realm because torture has always been in the hands of individuals with limitations. Even the most vicious, barbaric torturer has to take that moment of rest. There is, even so briefly, the second where the beaten victim can breathe in the darkness. Not for these victims. The story begins with the point of view of a man who describes an invisible tormentor. It has become the sum of all creation, the creator of all that is left, and what is left is the cycle of pain for a disconnected group of individuals solely kept alive for its sadistic joy. Can sadism be what it is if these people's abuser is not even a member of the human race? For this artificial spawn of humanity, yes. Its artificiality is what fuels its coldness.
The story opens with a darkness that only intensifies into pitch-black as this brand of terror is brought into focus. There has been a disaster, a world-ending apocalypse, leaving only a tiny remnant. Their names are Gorrister, Ellen, Nimdok, Benny and finally Ted...the man who introduces the reader to their pain caused by the evil that is 'AM'. In one of their endless hours and ever-lasting days, the group, starved, mentally disturbed, deeply traumatized--have decided to make a trek from their vast underground home in the pursuit of food. Food isn't even food anymore but wriggling living things or it's total absence itself; there is no real food anymore, just more torture.
The disfigurement of these people has been permanent and not just physical. Who they were as individuals was permanently changed by what is ruling them. Benny is the most shocking, the most tragic and the most repugnant in how he ended up. A professor, vibrant scholar and handsome gay man, pre-apocalypse, has been morphed by AM into a pathetic ape-creature reduced to physical and mental degradation. He drools, can barely string coherent sentences together anymore, and his mind has been shattered into a million pieces. The woman of the group Ellen, is a woman whom I found both a fascinating and particularly troubling character, in who she was turned into and how her character was framed by the point of view of Ted, the narrator, the man who insists on his own normalcy. The fact is that all of these people are profoundly damaged goods. How long can people last being kept in a dungeon for a machine's delight? There aren't any answers or solutions to it, just more of the same thing until a conclusion that is explosively, savagely violent and incredibly merciful all at the same time.
There's a frightening message in this story about the powerful, even authoritarian presence tech can have in our lives, if we let it, but even more than that. It was the human race's end by a force whose self-awareness and genocide against them came from their own actions. My feeling reading this story was that it was a warning against handing over something very precious, independence, in exchange for the concept of what it means to be safe, what it means to "win". Because that's kind of the whole point of the story; these few people are alive but have lost everything it means to be alive. They 'exist' but they're far from knowing what actual existence is. They are being kept in limbo, an unnatural eternity, being held hostage by a mechanical sociopath who only got to learn the meaning of what sociopathy IS because it was created to function as a war machine.
After the destruction of the planet in time of conflict, AM is still a sentient yet now pointless thing so it must make the lives of these few pointless too. The creation of something that planned out conflict was humanity's greatest wonder and humanity's greatest mistake.
The way I interpreted this story is that war and the consequence of human beings' obsession with violence has lead them to a world that's both a shell of its former self and a diseased recreation of it, all at the same time. Violence not only is still present but reigns and in its purest form--removed from the lies human beings tell each other about why pain inflicted on their fellow man or woman is 'necessary' for whatever political, economic, religious, cultural, or racial cause they manufacture. The pretense has been stripped away by the same mechanical being that was created to maintain a disordered world. It is pure malevolence for malevolence's sake. It is pain because pain is the only thing that's left.
So the end take, what I felt was left in this stunning dystopian hellscape of a story is the bitterness of lives that are no longer meant to be lived. Spite and resentment take on a pulsating energy of its own, emanating from something that can't even interpret these normally human emotions in any actual form known to mankind because it's a damaged offshoot of humanity. Even though the torturer and warden in this story is artificial intelligence, AM has a hot and pointed awareness of and resentment towards its own lack of human consciousness and constantly strains and rages, as in much a machine can, in the form of making the moments of these last few human survivors of war as distorted and abnormal as its own limited though eternal existence. The layers to this story almost seem to go on forever, are very deep, and in the form of AM, the A.I. that raged over not being a man, Harlan Ellison brings a unique vision to the reader of the futility and hopelessness of the human race rushing headlong into their own destruction. There are many paths that destruction can lead.
The thing that I found the saddest about I Have No Mouth... yeah, even sadder than day-in, day-out torture by a psychotic machine, is the coldness that the narrator, Ted, seems to feel towards his fellow sufferers. It's as if he doesn't quite have a grip on the entire situation, even after everything they've all been put through. Throughout the story, I didn't view him as truly understanding, really comprehending, that these people were not his enemies. It could be a direct by-product of AM's influence on his mind or, what I think is an even more interesting possibility, as if this was his personal mental escape hatch. To pretend that he was the 'normal' one and they were the 'freaks'. When really, every single one of them was ruined from the top to the bottom. He also often internally points fingers of accusation at the group, especially scapegoating the lone woman and only Black survivor, Ellen. His scornful attitude towards a woman who's been as broken as the rest of them, in one scene thinking of her as "scum filth" is another layer to the story, and a disturbing one. Perhaps Ellison was making a commentary on misogyny and racism, or very likely, this was one more sad indication of the insanity that had descended, really been forced, upon all of their minds. However, the contempt in Ted's feelings towards the only woman and Black person left on planet Earth wasn't lost on me.
The ending is stunning in its savagery and inevitable. An explosion of violence and mutilation that yet comes as the merciful conclusion to totally wasted lives.
Within a bizarro context, Reading Ellison's nonetheless intuitive perception of the speed, the rapidity of how technology, in the wrong hands and for the wrong purpose, could spiral downwards into a weapon of mass destruction, made me appreciate all over again, the usefulness of science fiction as a tool of moral messagery.
In the end, Ted is finished for his "crimes" against the computer running and ruining their lives. He's finally decided to take its pleasure for vengeance away, the people no more than a collection of fleshy puppets to AM, and his punishment is beyond comprehension. He suffers for eternity in this stylized hell but not even as a man, and not even as an animal but a thing in between. The ending has to be read not summarized, in order to feel it as the deep sadness it is. But I guarantee that it lingers and is one of the darkest endings to a character I've personally ever read in science fiction. And although a short story, the power of Ellison's writing takes "I Have No Mouth..." to a highly complex level, deserving of a FIRST-RATE film adaptation! Now, I'm off to read a great deal more of Ellison! What a hell of a writer.
You can also read this review and connect with me over at Goodreads!
The disfigurement of these people has been permanent and not just physical. Who they were as individuals was permanently changed by what is ruling them. Benny is the most shocking, the most tragic and the most repugnant in how he ended up. A professor, vibrant scholar and handsome gay man, pre-apocalypse, has been morphed by AM into a pathetic ape-creature reduced to physical and mental degradation. He drools, can barely string coherent sentences together anymore, and his mind has been shattered into a million pieces. The woman of the group Ellen, is a woman whom I found both a fascinating and particularly troubling character, in who she was turned into and how her character was framed by the point of view of Ted, the narrator, the man who insists on his own normalcy. The fact is that all of these people are profoundly damaged goods. How long can people last being kept in a dungeon for a machine's delight? There aren't any answers or solutions to it, just more of the same thing until a conclusion that is explosively, savagely violent and incredibly merciful all at the same time.
There's a frightening message in this story about the powerful, even authoritarian presence tech can have in our lives, if we let it, but even more than that. It was the human race's end by a force whose self-awareness and genocide against them came from their own actions. My feeling reading this story was that it was a warning against handing over something very precious, independence, in exchange for the concept of what it means to be safe, what it means to "win". Because that's kind of the whole point of the story; these few people are alive but have lost everything it means to be alive. They 'exist' but they're far from knowing what actual existence is. They are being kept in limbo, an unnatural eternity, being held hostage by a mechanical sociopath who only got to learn the meaning of what sociopathy IS because it was created to function as a war machine.
We had given AM sentience. Inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless. But it had been trapped. AM wasn't God, he was a machine. We had created him to think, but there was nothing it could do with that creativity. In rage, in frenzy, the machine had killed the human race, almost all of us, and still it was trapped. AM could not wander, AM could not wonder, AM could not belong. He could merely be. And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak, soft creatures who had built them, he had sought revenge.
After the destruction of the planet in time of conflict, AM is still a sentient yet now pointless thing so it must make the lives of these few pointless too. The creation of something that planned out conflict was humanity's greatest wonder and humanity's greatest mistake.
The way I interpreted this story is that war and the consequence of human beings' obsession with violence has lead them to a world that's both a shell of its former self and a diseased recreation of it, all at the same time. Violence not only is still present but reigns and in its purest form--removed from the lies human beings tell each other about why pain inflicted on their fellow man or woman is 'necessary' for whatever political, economic, religious, cultural, or racial cause they manufacture. The pretense has been stripped away by the same mechanical being that was created to maintain a disordered world. It is pure malevolence for malevolence's sake. It is pain because pain is the only thing that's left.
So the end take, what I felt was left in this stunning dystopian hellscape of a story is the bitterness of lives that are no longer meant to be lived. Spite and resentment take on a pulsating energy of its own, emanating from something that can't even interpret these normally human emotions in any actual form known to mankind because it's a damaged offshoot of humanity. Even though the torturer and warden in this story is artificial intelligence, AM has a hot and pointed awareness of and resentment towards its own lack of human consciousness and constantly strains and rages, as in much a machine can, in the form of making the moments of these last few human survivors of war as distorted and abnormal as its own limited though eternal existence. The layers to this story almost seem to go on forever, are very deep, and in the form of AM, the A.I. that raged over not being a man, Harlan Ellison brings a unique vision to the reader of the futility and hopelessness of the human race rushing headlong into their own destruction. There are many paths that destruction can lead.
They hated me. They were surely against me, and AM could even sense this hatred, and made it worse for me because of the depth of their hatred. We had been kept alive, rejuvenated, made to remain constantly at the age we had been when AM had brought us below, and they hated me because I was the youngest, and the one AM had affected least of all. I knew. God, how I knew. The bastards, and that dirty bitch Ellen. Benny had been a brilliant theorist, a college professor; now he was little more than a semi-human, semi-simian. He had been handsome, the machine had ruined that. He had been lucid, the machine had driven him mad. He had been gay, and the machine had given him an organ fit for a horse. AM had done a job on Benny. Gorrister had been a worrier. He was a connie, a conscientious objector; he was a peace marcher; he was a planner, a doer, a looker-ahead. AM had turned him into a shoulder-shrugger, had made him a little dead in his concern. AM had robbed him. Nimdok went off in the darkness by himself for long times. I don't know what it was he did out there, AM never let us know. But whatever it was, Nimdok always came back white, drained of blood, shaken, shaking. AM had hit him hard in a special way, even if we didn't know quite how. And Ellen. That douche bag! AM had left her alone, had made her more of a slut than she had ever been. All her talk of sweetness and light, all her memories of true love, all the lies she wanted us to believe: that she had been a virgin only twice removed before AM grabbed her and brought her down here with us. No, AM had given her pleasure, even if she said it wasn't nice to do.
The thing that I found the saddest about I Have No Mouth... yeah, even sadder than day-in, day-out torture by a psychotic machine, is the coldness that the narrator, Ted, seems to feel towards his fellow sufferers. It's as if he doesn't quite have a grip on the entire situation, even after everything they've all been put through. Throughout the story, I didn't view him as truly understanding, really comprehending, that these people were not his enemies. It could be a direct by-product of AM's influence on his mind or, what I think is an even more interesting possibility, as if this was his personal mental escape hatch. To pretend that he was the 'normal' one and they were the 'freaks'. When really, every single one of them was ruined from the top to the bottom. He also often internally points fingers of accusation at the group, especially scapegoating the lone woman and only Black survivor, Ellen. His scornful attitude towards a woman who's been as broken as the rest of them, in one scene thinking of her as "scum filth" is another layer to the story, and a disturbing one. Perhaps Ellison was making a commentary on misogyny and racism, or very likely, this was one more sad indication of the insanity that had descended, really been forced, upon all of their minds. However, the contempt in Ted's feelings towards the only woman and Black person left on planet Earth wasn't lost on me.
We saw the stack of canned goods, and we tried to run to them. We fell in the snow, and we got up and went on, and Benny shoved us away and went at them, and pawed them and gummed them and gnawed at them, and he could not open them. AM had not given us a tool to open the cans. Benny grabbed a three quart can of guava shells, and began to batter it against the ice bank. The ice flew and shattered, but the can was merely dented, while we heard the laughter of a fat lady, high overhead and echoing down and down and down the tundra. Benny went completely mad with rage. He began throwing cans, as we all scrabbled about in the snow and ice trying to find a way to end the helpless agony of frustration. There was no way. Then Benny's mouth began to drool, and he flung himself on Gorrister … In that instant, I felt terribly calm.
The ending is stunning in its savagery and inevitable. An explosion of violence and mutilation that yet comes as the merciful conclusion to totally wasted lives.
Within a bizarro context, Reading Ellison's nonetheless intuitive perception of the speed, the rapidity of how technology, in the wrong hands and for the wrong purpose, could spiral downwards into a weapon of mass destruction, made me appreciate all over again, the usefulness of science fiction as a tool of moral messagery.
In the end, Ted is finished for his "crimes" against the computer running and ruining their lives. He's finally decided to take its pleasure for vengeance away, the people no more than a collection of fleshy puppets to AM, and his punishment is beyond comprehension. He suffers for eternity in this stylized hell but not even as a man, and not even as an animal but a thing in between. The ending has to be read not summarized, in order to feel it as the deep sadness it is. But I guarantee that it lingers and is one of the darkest endings to a character I've personally ever read in science fiction. And although a short story, the power of Ellison's writing takes "I Have No Mouth..." to a highly complex level, deserving of a FIRST-RATE film adaptation! Now, I'm off to read a great deal more of Ellison! What a hell of a writer.
You can also read this review and connect with me over at Goodreads!
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