I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream | Created in the Image of God: The Narrator and the Computer in Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
In the following essay, the author compares various versions of ‘‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,’’ and finds that the narrator, Ted, is more completely divine and human than the computer.
And man has actually invented God . . . the marvel is that such an idea . . . could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man.
If the devil doesn’t exist, but man created him, he has created him in his own image.—Fyodor Dostoevsky
‘‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’’ first appeared in If: Worlds of Science Fiction in March 1967, bought and edited by Frederik Pohl. It was printed without the now-familiar computer ‘‘talk- fields’’ and also was edited in several places: Ellison calls this ‘‘the Bowdlerizing...
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