The fiction of ideas

A fantastic example of a story illustrating the fiction of ideas is, "I have no mouth, and I must scream".  A central idea and theme for this week was mind experiments and just how far fetched ideas could be and still make sense within the fiction. While beginning, " I have no mouth, and I must scream", you are dropped into this world with no back story or real context to characters or setting and expected to keep up in this tumultuous world filled with pain, agony, and torture. You begin to put together this tale of a dystopian future, ran by a form of AI, or in this case, AM. I found it to be very curious, this story being written in the year 1967 and has so many common themes of today with artificial intelligence taking over the world as we know it.  This story was written after the red scare was pretty much over with, but it takes on the setting and back story, as we come to find out, of a world where the war against communistic countries waged on and eventually did go nuclear and the aftermath of this then with the development of AI. Aside from this theme which isn't that far away from home, there are many fantastical yet horrifying interactions and events that occur within the story. Such as, when AM creeps into the main characters mind and ultimately shows him why the machine has entrapped the 5 of these characters there in the realm of insanity, for it's own purpose and function. Humankind had created AM to think, and in a desolate world that had no more humans, AM needed specimen to think with, to torture, to expend energy on. 
Also, the use of the author's writing style makes all the difference in the world. This story is told in first person, so you can hear and learn all the things going on inside his head which adds to the insane, unsettling, illustrating of the mind experiment which this tale embodies.

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