If you consider yourself to be a sci-fi fan and you haven’t read Harlan Ellison’s short story about an artificial intelligence at the end of human history, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” you should do everything in your power to amend that error. Not all of Ellison’s work is aging well, but this story is the rare sci-fi classic that feels more relevant here in the far-flung future than it did on its publication.(It’s also a noteworthy work because it has one of the best titles in the entire history of fiction.)
There’s a fancy new edition of the story in a standalone volume with all the special-edition clichés—supplementary documentation, a look at the history of the story and its impacts over time, that kind of thing.
Unfortunately, this new edition also includes a piece in which sci-fi author J. Michael Straczynski interviews an AI about “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and reverentially reports back the AI’s hackneyed observations. It’s the kind of flighty idea that might have been forgiven had it been published three years ago when LLMs first made a big splash, but at this late date, when authors and artists are actively protesting everything that AI stands for, it feels weirdly credulous and incurious. It’s a shame that the latest publication of Ellison’s classic story has the stink of Straczynski’s essay stuck to its shoe.