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Harlan Ellison: where to start reading

He wrote more than 1,700 stories, film and TV scripts – so here are five of the best by a giant of speculative fiction, who has died aged 84

Related: Science fiction writer Harlan Ellison dies aged 84

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
This nightmarish short story – published in 1967 and winner of a Hugo – comes from a “special place of anguish”, Ellison said. It is set in a future where a supercomputer, AM – Allied Mastercomputer – has wiped out all of humanity apart from five people, and spends its time devising tortures for them underground. “There was virtually nothing out there; had been nothing that could be considered anything for over 100 years. Only the blasted skin of what had once been the home of billions. Now there were only five of us, down here inside, alone with AM,” the narrator explains. “He would never let us go. We were his belly slaves. We were all he had to do with his forever time. We would be forever with him, with the cavern-filling bulk of the creature machine, with the all-mind soulless world he had become.” Gruesomely, brilliantly disturbing.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2tQBpm6
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