![]() Now, for me, as a reader, this is not something I demand because it doesn't strike me as realistic. With good reason, because that's pretty much her entire presence in the story.) ( This study guide I found online for the story? Almost every mention of Ellen has the words "sex", "sexual", or "hypersexual" in the same sentence. Ellen's entire purpose in this story is for the four men to have a woman to have sex with over their 109-year confinement. And she never came, so why bother? But the machine giggled every time we did it. Maybe there’ll be some Bartlett pears or peaches. But then we have to immediately segue into the misogyny with the introduction of Ellen, who weighs in on a dispute about whether or not to go on an expedition to find canned goods:Įllen decided us. It's an effective opening that sealed my interest in the story. The story opens on four of the five survivors being shocked and horrified at the apparent suicide of a fifth member, before he shows up and it turns out to have been a cruel joke by the computer. And they're not enjoying themselves very much, because of all the torture. These humans have been kept alive, sorta-immortal, and physically and mentally altered, for 109 years. The computer carried out its job a little too efficiently, and salvaged the last five humans left in order to torture them for eternity and take out its/his hatred on the race that created it/him. IHNMAIMS is the story of the last five human beings on earth living trapped in underground caverns ruled by a sentient supercomputer who was created to destroy humanity during an escalating Cold War. Though it still wouldn't have been good, by my personal subjective standards. But from a purely literary standpoint, the author could have removed the one female character and the story would have been vastly improved right then and there. The misogynistic parts add nothing to the story whatsoever, although this is not to say that the added appeal of being able to hate women while reading sci-fi didn't necessarily contribute to the story's success when it was published. The tragedy is that it didn't need to be that way. I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream is the most misogynistic story I've read in a month of Sundays. I won't link to it directly, but it's linked on the TV Tropes page of the book here.) There is a free version online, but I can't tell if it's posted with author permission or not. (Note that I purchased my copy on Amazon. (Note that Connie Willis has won nine Hugo Awards, which is more than any other author has received, and that is kind of a big deal.) Ha ha, whoops! That probably should have clued me in that a super-classic science fiction masterpiece by this science fiction master author might possibly be served with a side of misogyny-potatoes! But, hey, just because someone gropes women in Real Life doesn't mean they can't turn out the occasional good short story sometimes, right? One problem, right off the bat, is that thanks to my pain pills making me have foggy-head, I had forgotten everything I know about Harlan Ellison, which is that he groped Connie Willis on-stage at the Hugo Awards. And I've always been intrigued by this trope, because I like creepy shit like that, so I decided it was about time to pick up the trope namer - a short story written in 1967 by Harlan Ellison and winner of the 1968 Hugo Award. But we go wiki-walking with the internet we have, rather than the internet we'd prefer, and I recently referenced the trope I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream in a Narnia post about how genuinely creepy it would be if Sir Goldistatue still retained his consciousness inside his transmogrified form. Long-time readers will recall that I'm a fan of TV Tropes the concept, even if I'm not much of a fan of TV Tropes the implementation. The next time I see some MUST READ classic work by a straight cis man written in the 60's or whatever, I'm just going to assume it's marinated in privilege-sauce and go read a book about lesbian trans women astronauts, or something equally more likely to be infinitely better.īecause I deserve to read good things (and Narnia and Twilight). There is too much really wonderful modern stuff out there - much of it written by women and people of color and non-Heterosexual Cis Privileged Men - for me to waste another minute of my life reading something that maybe once contained a germ of a good idea, but was buried from the beginning in shitty writing and misogyny so thick you could spread it on wonder bread, and which only became as famous as it did because of white male privilege and privileged gatekeepers. [Content Note: Misogyny, Homophobia, Racism, Rape, Suicide, Ableism, Fat Hatred.ĭear Old Mouldering Classic Science Fiction / Fantasy Works which "Everyone Must Read":
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