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[Ampersand]

I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream

I don't quite know why, either. Just something about it gets under my skin. Highly recommended, unless you're easily disturbed.

[JoshuaFH]

What's it about?

[Tahin]

Woah. Thanks for the link.

Read it. It's only a few pages, and it's worth it.

[Dragooble]

What's it about?

basically the matrix on steroids.

[Ampersand]

Not really, as they're not virtually inside the computer, they're actually inside of it in a literal sense.

[inaluct]

Mebbe spoilers:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The idea is that a massive worldcomputer that hates humanity has taken over the world and is keeping 5 people alive so that it can torture them.

Anyway, that was awesome.

[Raz]

The idea is quite alright I guess, but the story would be much more enjoyable if it wasn't writting so amateurishly.

[puke]

the video game was pretty awesome too, but the author hated it for some reason.

edit: well, harlan ellison isnt for everybody, but i think calling him ammaturish is a bit hasty.  he published this one in 1967, and sci-fi was a bit different back then.  granted hed only have been putting out published material for 16 years at that point, and thats a drop in the bucket considering that the old fucker is still writing now.  but i think ammaturish is probalby the wrong characterization.

its kind of the old nostolgic whif of the future that you get from people like heinlien and asimov and vonnegut.  a little bit amiss from how society and technology has advanced, but pretty insightfull when you consider the time of the writing and that they had no way to fathom how the concepts they were writing about would mature into tangeable things.

its easy to say "yeah, he really missed the boat on AI" or that he didnt understand the implications of the technology hes writing about, but the idea that he was invisioning it AT ALL in an era where it was barely a fantasy -- thats pretty good.

but you probalby meant his prose.  some people like it less than others, nothing to be done for that.

edit edit: i dont mean to be overzealous in my defense of mr. ellison, and please dont interperet my lengthy and multi-edited response as inflamatory.  though i enjoy some of his work, i really dont consider myself a fan.  its perfectly fine not to like his work and to think its sloppy.  thats totally cool.

but the story in question did take a Hugo.  along with a few other of his works.  http://harlanellison.com/awards.htm

[Ampersand]

Also in defense of Harlan, the version I posted is the only PDF version I could find. The one on the scifi archive is vastly better edited, but in HTML and so old some of the background images are missing making it extremely hard to read without straining your eyes.

Also in defense of Harlan, the story was written in first person, the intent of the style was to make the narrator seem just on the edge of sanity.

[Raz]

I'm not calling it amateurish because of that, but as in the style it was written. I thought it was written by a teenager at first.

[Ampersand]

Like I said, the style in which it is written is the whole point of the story.

[Earthquake Damage]

I'm not calling it amateurish because of that, but as in the style it was written. I thought it was written by a teenager at first.

Like I said, the style in which it is written is the whole point of the story.

So all I have to do to get some shoddy work published is say "I mean to do that"? 

[Ampersand]

Not a fair point. The story is good, the narration is just a bit strange. Like I said before, the posted version is the only readable version I could find, there was another, here;

http://web.archive.org/web/20070227202043/http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/ellison/ellison1.html

The reason I didn't post it is because, for me at least, due to the age of the page, certain graphics don't load and the color of background is split down the middle making the text impossible to read without highlighting or copy-pasting it somewhere else. In other words, more work than I'd care to do.

[puke]

So all I have to do to get some shoddy work published is say "I mean to do that"? 

not only, that, but its all you have to do to win a Hugo!

I'm critical of a lot of mr ellison's work, but really i have a hard time finding fault with this particular piece.  if someone is willing to write up an articulate criticism about what specifically you find fault with, i'd be interested to read it. 

the only thing that bothers me is the seemingly random historical exposition mid-way through the story.  sort of leave me fealing like "really?  thats the best you could do to explain the setting?  really?"

[Toady One]

Wikipedia said he wrote it in a night and barely revised it.  That was the roughly the same thing I thought when I read it.  Inspired, especially for the time, maybe (little experience with scifi), but it seems to have these sections, like the section where he is paranoid and hates the others, and the section with the exposition.  I don't know what would have happened if he went back and made those transitions smoother or sprinkled bits elsewhere, given the overall jarring-and-long-passage-of-months tone he might have wanted, but that was the thought I had reading it.

Other scifi people might know more about the history of the exposition in scifi shorts.  Was this more of a period thing?  I know clunky "told not shown" exposition is common and something they tell you not to do in general, but this sit down and tell me about it way of presenting stuff reminds me of vaguely of some other pieces written around the same time or earlier.  Perhaps things just weren't "there" yet, though clearly exposition has a long history in other formats.