I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison - A Review

Well, I suppose in one word, depressing.

But I had to expand on that a bit.

I think the author definitely brings up, like, asks some interesting questions or sort of highlights some very interesting things about the sort of nature between humans and AI, and especially when this was written way back in the '60s, which I suppose is quite, quite relevant now with the sorta AI tech bubble and everything.

I thought, I thought it asked, um, asked some interesting questions just around how, how the relationship between sort of people and AI could, could turn out.

Now, I don't, I, well, I hope it doesn't turn out that desperately bad.

But, um, yeah, I think it's, it's a, it's a very interesting topic, and I think, you know, to do it in the short story format rather than sorta dragging it out actually really helped it.

Um, 'cause I think he prob- there probably are similar books with 10, 12-hour-long novels, but I think the fact that this is a nice sorta short and sweet 40, 45 minutes keeps it sorta quite streamlined, and, uh, gets qu- gets through quite a lot in that time I find.

But overall, yeah, it was a, it was a very interesting listen, definitely.

[laughs] You said that you listened to it in one sitting, so yeah, which is the good thing about short stories that while there are people out there who, like, power through 300-plus pages books, like, in one night, I don't think most people do that.

So it's kinda nice to, I think, have something that you can, like, fin- start and finish on the same day within the same listening session.

Yeah, it was a, it was an interesting drive home from work.

[laughs] I just wanna apologize to, to the listeners for my voice is a little bit croaky today.

I, I don't know why, because it was fine before we started recording, and then just now it's a little bit croaky.

But Jonathan, I'll go to you next.

What did you think about the story?

Well, just continuing or, like, to give thy two-word summary of what it was, Black Mirror.

I basically just thought this was, like, an episode of Black Mirror.

This, like, it c- it could easily fit into that.

You know, every episode of, like, Black Mirror is, like, some kind of technology and then also some depressing theme.

So I just thought that, that, that, that, that's kinda what I was thinking listening to it.

Overall, thought it was very interesting.

I actually [laughs] found it quite funny, to be honest.

Uh, just, just was kinda sitting there going like, "What, what, what is this AI doing?" [laughs] It's like, "This is just stupid." But yeah, no, it was, like you said, being a short story it was easy to consume, so I feel like even if someone didn't like this, at least you've only, you know, it was only 40 minutes you had to listen to this.

So yeah, just doing a little short story like this was just a c- a nice change.

Uh, especially most of our books now are 20-plus hours.