What to say about I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream? My rating is based on having started reading this collection once before, then going back and re-reading/finishing it this time around. In the foreword to the collections, Ellison concedes to a criticism that in the details, on a line-to-line basis, his stories don't benefit from re-reading - that they are, as he puts it, attacks, or explosions, rather than intricate statues to be contemplatively admired. He's right. I was blown away (cf. What to say about I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream? My rating is based on having started reading this collection once before, then going back and re-reading/finishing it this time around. In the foreword to the collections, Ellison concedes to a criticism that in the details, on a line-to-line basis, his stories don't benefit from re-reading - that they are, as he puts it, attacks, or explosions, rather than intricate statues to be contemplatively admired. He's right. I was blown away (cf. explosions carried along like a ship riding a mile-high wave, as Ellison might put it, the first time I read Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes and especially Delusions of a Dragon Slayer. I was less impressed on re-reading, but fair enough - I can hardly criticize the stories for functioning exactly as Ellison intends them to. Other reviewers have predictably, inevitably mentioned the misogyny in these stories. When I began writing this review, I meant to address this in very simple terms. There's no question that sexual availability is overwhelmingly the main character trait of the women portrayed throughout this collection and, paradoxically, a trait for which they're mostly judged in the harshest terms. But it's not entirely that simple. The title character of Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes, for one, is a degree more nuanced, and the story does explore (in the most bizarre terms) the reality that women's.
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.
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