I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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A villainous supercomputer appears in Harlan Ellison's 1963 short story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. In that story, the computer, called AM, is the amalgamation of three military supercomputers run by governments across the world designed to fight World War III which arose from the Cold War. The Soviet, Chinese, and American military computers eventually attained sentience and linked to one another, becoming a singular artificial intelligence. AM then turned all the strategies once used by the nations to fight each other on all of humanity as a whole, destroying the entire human population save for five, which it imprisoned within the underground labyrinth in which AM's hardware resides. |
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"I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi short story by Harlan Ellison. It was first published in the March 1967 issue of IF: Worlds of Science Fiction.
It won a Hugo Award in 1968. The name was also used for a short story collection of Ellison's work, featuring this story. It was recently reprinted by the Library of America, collected in volume two (Terror and the Uncanny, from the 1940s to Now) of American Fantastic Tales (2009).
