2025-06 Book dump

I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, Harlan Ellison

I liked the short book. More than the book itself, I was drawn to the concept it explored—the aftermath of AGI whose goals are twisted and misaligned with humanity.

That said, I couldn’t fully inhabit the characters. Perhaps the brevity of the story limited this, or perhaps the narrative served the concept rather than the other way around. Either way, it was a letdown for me as a reader—I like to be immersed in the story. It felt too much like an episode of Friday - Forbidden Tales, Bae Jin Soo ¹

That persistent sense of “I’m here for the concept, not the story” stayed with me throughout. Maybe I came in with inflated expectations, having heard good things about it. So the disappointment may stem less from the author’s execution than from my own assumptions.

Footnotes

1. Not a critique of the webtoon—I love it, and the format suits a focus on concepts with throwaway characters. That said, I think Bae Jin Soo does a good job avoiding narrative dissonance. ↩