32 pages • 1 hour read
Harlan EllisonI Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1967A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Harlan Ellison
Harlan Ellison was born in 1934 to a Jewish family living in Cleveland, Ohio. He published his first two short stories in 1949. Later, he served in the US Army from 1957 to 1959, during which time he published his first novel. In 1962, he began writing screenplays and scripts in California. He sold scripts to several shows, including Star Trek, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. While writing for television and movies, he published some of his most popular short stories, including “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktock Man” (1965) and “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” (1967). Additionally, he wrote the critically-acclaimed postapocalyptic story “A Boy and His Dog,” which was made into a film starring Don Johnson in 1975.
Ellison is known as one of the most prolific and influential science fiction writers in American culture, having written more than 1,700 different pieces of literature, including plays, novellas, scripts, screenplays, short stories, novels, comic book scripts, essays, and criticism. Ellison also won many distinguished awards for his science fiction work, including eight Hugo Awards and a record-setting four Nebula Awards.
Ellison was also known for his explosive temperament, often stirring up controversy through his comments on cultural events and his willingness to file lawsuits against anyone he perceived as stealing or corrupting his work. He was a vociferous defender of human rights, participating in two of the three civil rights marches from Selma to Montgomery led by Martin Luther King Jr. Additionally, he protested against the Vietnam War throughout its duration.
Ellison died in 2014 in Los Angeles.
Sociohistorical Context: The Cold War and Vietnam War
“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” was published in 1967, amid the prolonged Cold War (1947-1991) and the Vietnam War (1955-1975). The story posits a hypothetical future in which the Cold War turns into World War III, resulting in a global apocalypse, leaving humanity destroyed and its machines alone, continuing their work. While this may seem far-fetched and overblown to contemporary readers, in 1967, the fear of nuclear apocalypse hung over the heads of the world’s citizens. The constant tension between the USSR, China, and the United States constantly threatened to send the planet back to the chaos of World War II, a fate that all the nations worked to avoid. However, the era’s geopolitical tensions led to complex international relations that overwhelmed ordinary citizens. This complexity likely informed Ellison’s portrayal of AM as a system that could handle such a nuanced web of geopolitics: “It became a big war, a very complex war, so they needed the computers to handle it” (4).
Additionally, the Cold War was unique in that larger nations utilized proxy allies under the umbrellas of the Western and Eastern blocs. The Western bloc, led by the United States and other first-world nations, fought the coalition of the Eastern bloc, led by the Soviet Union. This led to US citizens like Ellison feeling detached from the conflicts and unsure of the status of their nation’s allies and enemies. Ellison, who served in the US Army in the late 1950s, was likely influenced by this proxy war and used that experience to conceive of AM as a computer that found itself fighting other versions of itself, using humans to kill other identical humans at the order of detached and distant creators.
Additionally, in this era, technological innovation accelerated, partly due to the competition between the Cold War rivals, the USSR, China, and the United States. Culturally, the sense of unease over the growing societal dependence on technology that very few people truly understood contributed to the rise of dystopian, apocalyptic, and postapocalyptic media.
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