Medieval and Futuristic Hells: The Influence of Dante on Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”

Withers, Jeremy. "Medieval and Futuristic Hells: The Influence of Dante on Ellison's 'I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream." Studies in Medievalism 26 (2017): 117-130.<http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/engl_pubs/203/>.[1]

From the Abstract : "This essay explores the many ways in which one of the most well-known works of medieval literature – Dante Alighieri's early fourteenth-century poem Inferno – served as a powerful influence on one of the more famous texts to come out of the 1960s New Wave movement in sf: Harlan Ellison's fascinating and disturbing 1967 short story 'I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream'" Cites in passing (p. 5, footnote 7) Merritt Abrash's "Dante's Hell as an Ideal Mechanical Environment," q.v., and develops Dante's influence generally on "I Have No Mouth." Note Withers's observation the "the five survivors" retained alive for punishment in the figurative belly of the God-like super-computer AM "are paying the horrible price for previous human beings having created the individual supercomputers that eventually linked up to form AM, and hence they are paying the price for other people having created the sentience that AM so abhors" (p. 12).

RDE, Initial Compiler, 21-24Dec17