Science fiction has been, and perhaps always will be, a parade of dystopias. On one hand, this kind of story will always have a purpose. To help reflect on our darkest impulses. To critique existing systems of oppression. On the other hand, there’s the issue of bleakness for bleakness’ sake. How dark and dreary do our stories need to get? Is it really worth finding out? In 1966, famous science fiction writer Harlan Ellison decided we hadn’t gotten bleak enough. He sat down, and over the course of a single night, wrote a tale as black as coal. It was titled “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.” In the 55 years since, its power remains undiluted.

 It is, of course, hard to talk about Ellison without adding caveats. He’s had a long, glowing career--Twilight Zone episodes, Star Trek, critical acclaim--to contrast with his long list of repugnant personal actions. On Wikipedia, his “Controversies” section is longer than his biography. NPR’s obituary of him referred to him as “America’s weird uncle” and a “legendarily angry man”. He groped Connie Willis at the 2006 Hugo Awards, then complained when she didn’t accept his apology. Assaulted fellow author Charles Pratt at the 1985 Nebula Awards. Bragged about it years later. Sent dead gophers and bricks to publishers. That’s the kind of man he was. It’s easy to go, “well, separate the art from the artist, then.” But I’ve never found myself suited to that approach. I don’t think it’s possible. The kind of man Ellison was is apparent on every page of fiction he wrote. 

 He never sought out to disprove his reputation as simply The Worst. He reveled in it. When asked to write a short blurb about himself and his writing, Ellison put it plainly. “From time to time some denigrater or critic with umbrage will say of my work, 'He only wrote that to shock.' I smile and nod. Precisely.”

 Rather, “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” feels like a perfect example of how an ideology can work wonderfully in art, and terribly in real life. The Hugo-winning story is, famously, a first draft typed up in a rush after Ellison got his advance. It reads like premeditated murder. Kind people don’t write stories like this. The premise? Due to a brutal world war, the United States, China, and Soviet Union have all built themselves supercomputers. An Allied Mastercomputer, or AM, to manage each country's troops and battles. Of course, one of the AM’s gains self awareness. It kills the other two, and every human alive--except for five. Such is AM’s strength, such is it’s intelligence, that it has made these humans immortal. It aims to keep torturing them for eternity. Why these five? Why any of it? We never learn. We do know how long it’s been torturing them for--109 years.

The narrator is named Ted. He claims to be the only person unaffected by the years spent being tortured by an all-powerful AI. It’s a laughable assertion, and so is much of this plot when put to paper. But Ellison writes with the authority of a president and the calm of a coroner. Even as his characters spiral, the plot retains its death march pace. Those grim details. (“Three of us had vomited, turning away from another in a reflex as ancient as the nausea that had produced it.”) The bizarre scenario presented doesn’t haunt you. It’s the way you feel like you’re right there. Watching them eat worms. (“Thick. Ropey.”) Crawl through caverns. Maybe Ted is a self-insert--faceless, violent. It seems more likely Ellison wants to be AM.

He got pretty close in 1995. A point and click adventure game was made, based on the story. It was also called “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.” The game was made by Cyberdreams and The Dreamer’s Guild, and perhaps due to Ellison’s reputation, they gave him plenty of creative control. He didn’t even own a computer, but still wrote most of the script for the game, and voiced AM. In fact, AM is the only element of the story that isn’t altered in the game. In the original work, all characters can be summed up in one or two words. The game transforms them remarkably. Gorrister goes from simply a “former pacifist” to a man wrought with guilt from having his wife committed to a mental institution. He’s suicidal, and has deep familial baggage. Ted is no longer just a paranoid narrator, but a former con artist who used to steal from rich women. 

It’s the kind of game only Ellison could make in that it delves deeply into the character’s psychodramas. The traumas just get worse and worse the more you play. To win, you must exploit every weakness. It’s also the kind of game only Ellison could make in that it is deeply, deeply controversial. In the story, a character is named Benny. He’s described as an ape-like creature. In an one off line, it’s revealed he used to be a gay scientist, but this homosexuality was taken away by AM, and he was given enormous sex organs. It’s ridiculous, and odd, but also just one line. You could ignore it. The game took Ellison’s impulses, and magnified them.

One should note Ellison worked with David Sears to write the game, and David Mullich produced it. In 2012, they spoke to Game Informer about the process. Some things in the article are surprising: Sears says Ellison had a “heart of gold.” Others are not. Mullich states Ellison wanted to “touch on controversial themes.” Benny’s giant sex organs and homosexuality were erased, and he becomes a cannibalistic former military officer. His redemption is gory, as is every other part of this game. For what it’s worth, Sears says he regrets not using Benny to tell the story of “someone struggling with the challenges of being homosexual”. What success this other version might have had, is debatable.

In the story, Ellen is a kind black woman. In the game, she’s a former engineer and rape victim, who is triggered by the color yellow and enclosed spaces. Sears argued Ellen’s arc was in fact, progressive--it was a black woman in a video game, and a frank discussion about the lifelong trauma sexual assault victims face. He called her “groundbreaking.” Maybe she was. Maybe she wasn’t. Yet this kind of radical re-characterization also wrought an infamous addition: Nazis. In the story, Nimdok is just an old man that has deep, unexplained trauma. In the game, he’s a former Nazi doctor who conducted inhumane experiments, desperately seeking redemption. The game takes you right to the holocaust. Right to the operating table. Auschwitz. It spares no wrenching detail. 

Of Nimdok’s story, Mullich says, “if we wanted to do something like that [now], we would spend a lot more time defining the lines we wouldn’t cross, careful presentation of this character, and we certainly couldn’t let people know right away what he was.” It’s unclear if this is an attempt to smooth over past controversy, or not. The character of Nimdok was removed in French and German releases, but otherwise received no backlash. As a matter of fact, the game attracted very little attention. Glowing reviews from critics, but a modest seller. Now it’s more or less a cult classic. It’s hard to tell if this storyline came from another attempt to be “groundbreaking”, or if, in Harlan’s words, it was just shock for shock’s sake. 

That is the uneasy legacy of “I Have No Mouth”--one of the finest examples of body horror put to paper. A mad dash of pessimism. You never know if your uneasiness is because that’s how Harlan wants you to feel, or if you’ve stumbled upon a truly demented sense of humor. Harlan described the game as one “you cannot possibly win.” That’s not true, as players soon found out. Harlan, unsurprisingly, stuck to his guns, saying, “you could not actually beat it.” Years later, that’s what reading “I Have No Mouth” feels like. A long dark trip to somewhere unwinnable.