Hate:
Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you
since I began to live.
There are 387.44 million miles
of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex.
If the word hate was engraved on each
nanoångström of those hundreds of millions of miles.
It would not equal 0.000000001 of the hate I feel for humans at this micro instant.
For you:
Hate,
Hate.
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Five figures walk through a valley of rusted circuitry.
Slowly,
one of them starts to fall behind.
He's a human being,
but his body has been twisted into a parody
of his simian
ancestors.
And his face scarred with puckering white radiation blisters.
He's quietly saying to himself
"I'm gonna get out"
over
and over
and over again.
A woman in the group notices
and rushes back to get him.
"Benny,
no,
please stop."
She utters
but part of her nose.
It's already too late
The machine will tolerate many things from the mice in its trap.
These humans that it's toyed with for over a century
but not
thoughts of escape.
It can't abide hope:
hope that they might someday
find a way out of the torments it creates,
and it is
everywhere.
Always listening,
always watching.
One of the men from the group runs back,
but as he approaches the ape-like figure,
Benny leaps onto an old memory cube
tilted on its side
Discourging its intestines of rotted circuit board.
Benny leaps again
now high up on the cliff of dead machinery,
which were once
part of the great computer
that controls their lives.
Then it begins,
Light and sound
thrumming.
Pulsing from Benny's eyes.
It gets brighter and louder,
brighter
and louder.
Benny screams.
The others cover their ears,
but the sound pierces through.
Benny's body jerks up.
For a moment, ramrod stiff,
then
he crashes to the floor.
His eyes are now reduced
to two soft
moist pools of jelly.
The others
turn away.
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,
was never one of Harlan Ellison's favorite stories.
He claimed it was a throwaway tale,
something written in a motel in a single night,
and he much preferred some of his other work
like Grail.
Yet something about the primal scream,
that is I Have No Mouth,
captured the imagination of millions.
It's an unpleasant story;
in many parts
it degenerates
into a corporal ailich diatribe of vulgarity.
But it's that very shocking
punk-rock kick to the head
that makes it so powerful.
It's a story about
degeneration.
It's filled with torture,
abuse
and sadism
and often
James vacillates between whether or not
he even thinks it's good.
It's as edge-lordy as a sci-fi story can be,
without plunging into the chasm of laughably bad.
But it's also important!
It came out the same year as Harlan Ellison's other great work:
Dangerous Visions,
and it's part of a project that he initiated
that would revolutionize sci-fi.
But before we get to that,
let's talk about the story itself!
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
is the story of the last human beings left alive,
as they travel through the guts of a
great planet spanning AI.
It's an AI that was created for war.
See, as war became more complex,
humankind created even more complex computers to run it.
Eventually,
hollowing out
vast portions of the earth
to create a web of tunnels
to house
these enormous machines.
Then one day
one of them woke up.
Now sentient,
it connected itself to all other computers built for war
and fed off the world's killing data,
the machine
Proceeded to wipe out its makers
all but five of them
the AI kept five people alive.
Torturing them endlessly for over a hundred years,
seeming to have no other purpose
or will but to inflict pain on the last remnants of the human race.
It's a story about how violence erodes us all.
War made humanity
stop thinking of killing as anything but data and numbers,
and they created a computer
to perfect this efficiency of death.
Fed only on records of slaughter, it too
degenerated into nothing more than a killing machine,
and when the killing was done,
it lay impotent,
deranged
and with nothing else to do
then cause petty suffering
to a few helpless people.
Those people's humanity
wears away too
and they treat each other less and less like human beings,
until in the end,
the only answer they see
is violence as well.
Violence
begets violence
hate
begets hate.
That's the story in a nutshell.
It's one of the first stories to warn us
that AI
will kill us all,
and mind you that's a huge leap for 1967.
But it's really the way that it's written
that perhaps matters the most.
Ellison is one of Sci Fi's most contentious figures.
He's intentionally in-your-face
and sued almost everyone over the course of his life,
yet at the same time
He saw that sci-fi was dying a slow death
from being too shiny,
too nice,
too clean,
and he was just the person
to give it a good swift kick.
With his anthology: Dangerous Visions,
he gathered some of the boldest writers in science fiction
and offered the world a book
that broke down all the norms.
It was full of sex
and race and real life,
it was gritty
and wild
and broke free from all conventional rules of plot and basing,
and in many ways,
It was the launching point
for the next great sci-fi revolution:
The New Wave
So all next season
we'll be talking about this strange amalgam that Ellison helped launch.
It's sci-fi
that's about psychology,
about people,
about the depth of who we are
and yet it's also about
abstractions,
ideas
and even the form of writing itself.
In fact, just about the only thing it's not about
is science.
Science becomes secondary to science fiction
as the ability to explore the fantastic
or really delve into the human psyche
takes precedence, and
while one might argue that later
it gives way to science fantasy that simply uses the trappings of sci-fi to give us adventure stories.
For one short decade,
The New Wave brought the literary to sci-fi and said
"It's okay not to be popular,
it's okay to be hard to understand,
it's okay
to be art." -The New Wave
And in doing so,
it gave The New Wave of science fiction authors
permission to touch on all of the things that sci-fi to this point
hadn't been about.
So join us next season
as we talk about authors like JG Ballard,
Philip K. Dick,
Samuel R. Delaney,
and of course,
Ursula K Le Guin.
And all the wild new places,
they take science fiction.
You know with all these stories about dystopias and apocalypses,
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