“I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” can be said to have marked a sea-change in Ellison’s writing. It served as the title story of a paperback anthology printed a mere month after the story’s first appearance, and registers as one of Ellison’s better collections, with stories like “Lonelyache” and “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” that are nearly as powerful as the book’s headliner. It remains the most famous of Ellison’s works, having won a Hugo award in 1968 and been reprinted countless times (Ellison once claimed he could “buy Ethiopia” with the money he made from those reprints). It was written either in a single night or over the course of a year-and-a-half in various hotel rooms (those being competing claims made by Ellison himself), and published with select alterations by Pohl. Originating in the March 1967 issue of IF, under the editorship of Frederick Pohl, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” was inspired by a pair of illustrations by the California artist Dennis Smith.

Another would be the late Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” which is often dubbed science fiction’s darkest story.

One such would be 1968’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, with its depiction of the HAL 9000 AI, the fictional forerunner to Siri, Alexa and Cortana, malfunctioning (with “What are You Doing, Dave?” having become a mini-meme). In light of recent instances of AIs threatening and/or falling in love with their users, it seems we’ve reached an age foreseen by many science fiction narratives.

I have no mouth but i must scream book