Harlan Ellison is considered one of science fiction’s grand masters and I’ve heard praise for the title story in this collection, so I decided to give it a try.
“I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream” doesn’t have much of a plot. Basically, four men and one woman are being tortured by an artificial intelligence the whole time. The woman has sex with all the men even though they beat her and ignore her cries.
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When we first meet Cassiopeia, she lives in a small, repressive Catholic town in Mexico in 1927. She’s a Cinderella figure scrubbing floors and doing other household work at her cousin’s command. She also has to put up with an abusive grandfather. Her father has died and her mother is in the same position she’s in.
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The Black Vampyre was written in response to Polidori’s Vampyre. The edition I read contained a fascinating introduction which provided context for the story and numerous footnotes which explain the now-obscure references in the story.
The Black Vampyre was written anonymously, attributed to one Uriah Derick D’Arcy (this is an anagram of Richard Varick Dey, who may have been the actual author). Like Polidori, the author quotes lines about vampires from Byron’s “The Giaour” which compared Greece being subject to the Ottoman Empire to slavery. D’Arcy takes up this theme, applying it to African slaves in America.
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The world is better today because of the Enlightenment, yet people attack reason, science, humanism, and progress when these things should be celebrated.
One of the bits of wisdom from the Scientific Revolution is that misfortune is no one’s fault. Bad things sometimes happen for no reason other than the universe is indifferent to human suffering. There’s no point looking around for someone to blame when an earthquake happens. Entropy ensures there’s more ways for things to go wrong than for things to go right.
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“If there’s no word for it, how do you think about it?”
Twenty years after an invasion of the solar system, poet Rydra Wong (famous throughout the five explored galaxies) is called upon to help decode Babel-17, a language that has something to do with the invasion. Rydra is only 26 and in addition to being a famous poet, is also an expert in both human and extraterrestrial languages, to the extent she can even read people’s minds simply by observing their body language. There are nine space-faring species, some on each side of the war, but language barriers keep them from reality knowing each other even if they’re allied.
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In this alternate version of 1962, Roosevelt is assassinated during his first year in office which leads to the Japanese and Germans winning World War II. Germany and Japan divide the United States between them with the western US belonging to Japan and the eastern US belonging to Germany. While the Rocky Mountain states belong to Japan, they’re considered inconsequential and generally left to themselves. (Italy has a small empire in the Middle East, but generally didn’t benefit much from their alliance with Germany.)
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In the introduction, we’re given a description of Andrew Jackson Davis which would appeal to a phrenologist, as well as testimonials from his acquaintances. We’re told he was poor and barely educated, only attending a few months of school, so he only knows the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Although we’re also told he knows all the technical medical terms, so maybe he’s not as ignorant as they want us to believe. He’s only 20 years old.
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The moon explodes, breaking into seven large pieces and several smaller ones. It will continue breaking up until earth gains a ring like Saturn. However, in the meantime, bits of rock will rain down on the Earth for thousands of years, making the surface uninhabitable. Humanity can only survive by going into space or perhaps going underground.
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It’s unknown when exactly the Poem of Erra was written, but probably sometime between 1124BC to 652BC in response to one of the Sutian aggressions against Babylon. A lot of the introduction is devoted to arguing that this should not be called the Epic of Erra. The hero of the poem doesn’t fit the profile of a hero found in other epics, it’s too short to be an epic, etc.
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I can’t resist a good pun, and I’m a fan of corvids, so I just had to purchase this anthology which was released as a fundraiser to make up for all the money lost due to the covid-related cancellation of RavenCon.
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Mania Delight 