SOURCE: “Created in the Image of God: The Narrator and the Computer in Harlan Ellison's ‘I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,’” in Extrapolation, Vol. 32, No. 2, 1991, pp. 143–54.

In the following essay, Fain compares five published versions of “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” in order to support his argument that Ted, the narrator of the story, is “alone … both fully human and fully godlike in the story.”

And man has actually invented God … the marvel is that such an idea … could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man.

If the devil doesn't exist, but man created him, he has created him in his own image.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” first appeared in If: Worlds of Science Fiction in March 1967, bought and edited by Frederik Pohl.¹ It was printed without the now-familiar computer “talk-fields” and also...