aaaaaaaaaaaaah

While the story ‘I have no mouth and I must scream’ by Harlan Ellison is a short one, it has inspired many adaptations. It was the video adaptation that I had encountered first, so when I read this short story, I had an idea of what I was getting into. That being said, I think the short story is more successful than the game. The compressed nature of the short story gives the reader a hint of how exasperated the characters are with their predicament, yet how tedious their lives really are. There is a real sense of torture created by a lack of timeline and an ever-changing environment and circumstance.  One minute, all the characters are stuck in a cave. The next, they’re traversing through snow.

                The element of AM’s torture that was the most interesting was the alterations made to the people. One person was blinded and given monkey-like features, but the other people seemed less physically affected. It called into question the legitimacy of the main character’s claim that AM hadn’t altered his mind in a way. The main character is extremely paranoid, and even loathes the people who are kept with him. He loathes Ellen the most, as she is portrayed as almost exclusively sexually motivated. However, I wonder if the computer altered her to be that way and, is so, does the computer base its alterations on what it perceives humans to be. Although, the main character doesn’t appear to see it that way, the punishments AM inflicts don’t seem to be totally random. Perhaps we are reading this story through the eyes of someone that AM has altered in some way. Altered to think that AM hasn’t altered him.

                This is probably one of the favorite sci-fi stories I’ve read. It’s so far into the dystonia genre that one could argue that the world has already totally ended before the story even takes place. It’s a tale of warning in which all the characters are as good as dead before we even meet them.