I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

I grabbed this one off the shelf because I was on my way to Comic Con and I wanted a lightweight paperback to read in and out of various queues. I first read it at least 10 years ago, and I've been a Harlan Ellison fan ever since. The way he weaves a story in a very limited number of pages is mystifying, and it's easy to see why he remains a king of SFF short stories.

The only story that really stuck with me through the years is the title one. I remember being absolutely terrified the first time, and the added years of personal experience coupled with acceleration in the field of artificial intelligence make this story relevant even long after the Cold War that inspired it. While I have mixed feelings on the way women are treated in this story and others (misogynist characters to don't make a misogynist writer, but they are deeply troubling), I think their core stands the test of time.

A common theme in this collection is death and what happens after. From the deathless prisoners in the title story, to the afterlife challenge of “Delusions of a Dragon Slayer” to the tragic tale of Maggie Moneyeyes and the men who follow her, each story shows Ellison approaching the idea of death from a different angle, no two interpretations alike. It's a remarkable degree of variation on one of the oldest themes in literature.

I've been away from Ellison for a while, but rereading this collection makes me want to dig out a few more. Summer means lots of quick trips where a good short story is the brain's best friend.

This collection of short sci-fi stories (almost always dark and depressing) left me with a mixed taste after I finished it.
The titular short story is one of the best sci-fi stories I've ever read, period (tied, for me, with The Last Question by Asimov). It makes HAL, from Kubrick's 2001:A Space Odyssey look like a cuddly teddy bear in comparison. Since all of them are extremely short stories, any detail will just be a spoiler, but let's just say Ellison attention to mental torture is much more unsettling than it has any right to be.
The rest of the stories are all over the place, much to my disappointment, the best amongst them being ‘Delusion of a Dragon Slayer', which describes a person for whom heaven is hell, and the worst being ‘Eyes of Dust', which is just plain boring, and has a premise which intends to shock but just dulls instead.
What struck me after finishing the work though, were three things.
Firstly, Ellison is a magnificent writer, with his writing, prose and his ideas making him a sheer delight to read.
Secondly, Ellison has one of the worst egos I've ever encountered in writing, and his ego practically oozes from every word of the story (along with not-quite-humble remarks in his prefaces to every story, in which he describes himself as a magnificent ‘man of Stature', whatever that means). If egoistic writing is unsuited to your tastes, it's not a bad idea to skip this.
Thirdly, Ellison is also the brand of extreme misogynist that would be labelled as an incel nowadays. If there are any women in the story, you can rest assured that nothing good will happen to them (even considering he writes dark tales, the fates of women in his stories range from bad to horrific). His prefaces are littered with women being treated as objects again and again, and at some point you want to just tell him to get on with the story. His three-page preface to his last story straight up said that his story was based on a woman he met in Vegas (guess what - the woman has a bad ending, and gets a good ending by manipulating the naive man).
So there's a lot of good (prose, ideas, wackiness) and a lot of bad (misogyny, ego). If you can stomach the bad, this is a beautiful sci-fi collection.