Another I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream Thread

[doc labyrinth]

Has anyone read the short story by Harlan Ellison? I read it last night and it is quite incredible. The more Harlan Ellison I read the farther up he crawls on my list of favorite authors.

[md5]

I've read parts of it, it's quite strange. At some points he reminds me of Lovecraft and Stephen King. He does have some very weird notions, and the ending is very dark, horrifying and pessimistic

[clem]

I read it - yeah, it's a quite gloomy story, I really liked it.

Coincidentally I'm also reading a short story collection by Philip K. Dick at the moment, the themes there are similar.

[Arantor]

I did too - I actually found it in an anthology of Ellison's work. I thought I'd check it out by reading a couple of pages before buying, unfortunately I got so engrossed I actually read the whole short story in the shop

The idea of a computer holding humans captive isn't especially new but the idea of the computer acting the way AM does seems fairly unique to me - why hasn't more been done in the SF fiction libraries? (Not that I want to encourage me-toos or anything but this is an idea that surely can do with more development)

(And just before anyone quotes the Matrix films at me - the actions taken by the Matrix aren't the same; they're largely a self-defence type of mechanism, to ensure the status quo remains, rather than subjugation followed by what amounts to sadistic torture by AM.)

[doc labyrinth]

I read it - yeah, it's a quite gloomy story, I really liked it.

Coincidentally I'm also reading a short story collection by Philip K. Dick at the moment, the themes there are similar.

He's one of my favorites as well, as you may be able to tell from my handle.

[Jorpho]

I'd rather like to play the game and see its slightly more optimistic approach.

I understand many editions of the short story have some sort of braille/punch tape pictorial motif running through them?

[doc labyrinth]

Indeed they do. I was trying to decode them but I had nowhere to start. I haven't played much of the game yet, except to check it out. But I think pessimism more often than not paints a more vivid picture.

[Robot_Maker20]

I'd rather like to play the game and see its slightly more optimistic approach.

Be prepared for a certain amount of disappointment; the production quality of the game is extremely variable. Some voice acting is professional-quality, some of it is pure ham. Background art is pretty good, there are a handful of CGI cutscenes that are quite impressive for the era, but other aspects of the art are unbelievably crude in comparison - particularly the sprite based animation.

Most importantly, evidently very little playtesting was done, or it wasn't done properly - if you follow the correct path all the way through, you won't notice much in the way of goofs, but experimentation leading to incorrect puzzle attempts (which is of course guaranteed if you're actually trying to play the game properly, without a walkthrough in hand right from the start) will often show up glaring bugs - using one object on another in a way the designers didn't expect will, noticably often, yield a totally wrong or inappropriate comment from the character, for example.

[sev]

Be prepared for a certain amount of disappointment;

At least we fixed original script bugs in ScummVM which lead to wrong responces.


Eugene

[samwise]

I understand many editions of the short story have some sort of braille/punch tape pictorial motif running through them?

Indeed they do. I was trying to decode them but I had nowhere to start. I haven't played much of the game yet, except to check it out. But I think pessimism more often than not paints a more vivid picture.

Interestingly, the dots in the printing of the story in The Official Strategy Guide are different to the Second Printing of the 1983 Ace paperback. I wonder if that suggests the dots are random. I've asked the question on the Harlan Ellison fan-site forum.

Sam.

[samwise]

Well, after not getting a definitive answer there either, I thoroughly embarrassed myself by asking Harlan himself and, as one would suspect, it's a FAQ ...

Here's one I was pointed to after the event ...

http://www.islets.net/faq.html#Anchor-What-23240

Essentially the punch tape alternates between

i think, therefore i am

and

cogito ergo sum

... the Latin equivalent of the same phrase.

I hope the damage to my reputation was worth it to satisfy the collective curiosity!

Sam.

[Jorpho]

Well, after not getting a definitive answer there either, I thoroughly embarrassed myself by asking Harlan himself and, as one would suspect, it's a FAQ ...

Heh. I hear Mr. Ellison is a dangerous fellow when he's upset.

(Suddenly it's in the wikipedia article too.)

[samwise]

Indeed - I was well aware I was facing down a tiger, when I brought it up.

And, my, my, isn't that a co-incidence ... ?



Sam.

[samwise]

I've updated the Wikipedia article with scans of the Punchcode Tape Messages as Harlan Ellison originally intended. It appears many publications, particularly pre-1991 suffered from publishers not understanding that the dots actually represented a message, and mistakenly replaced them with random dots.

You can check your copy of the short story against the article to see if you have the correct punchcode tape messages, before attempting to decode them.

The Original Strategy Guide for the computer game has the correct punchcode tape messages, as does The Essential Ellison (1991) anthology.

Sam.