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In 1967, when “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” was published, the Cold War between the United States and the U.S.S.R. had reached an impasse. However, there was a deep fear that nuclear war was a real possibility. This worry ran through American life in the 1960s, and the conflict in Vietnam served as a proxy war for the forces of American capitalism and Soviet communism. Alongside this concern of nuclear war was the progress being made in computer technology. This was the environment that prompted Ellison to write his story.

Part of Ellison’s concerns about computing was the question of whether a machine can think, which was a question that computer scientists had been considering since the early 20th century, and most famously considered by Alan Turing with his “imitation game.” Combining nuclear proliferation and advances in computing, Ellison explored the troubling idea of a machine taught to think by those engaged in warfare and possessing the ability to annihilate the world and everything in it. What do the logical steps taken by a computer with that programming look like? In Ellison’s imagination, those who write the programs that allow the computer to learn and feed on the worst impulses of humanity are as much to blame as the machine. Even if the computer can learn, it is those who provide the curricula that are responsible for its education. Ellison saw how computers were affecting the great powers of the world in the 1960s, and his story is a nightmarish warning of what could happen if that power went unchecked and was allowed to run rampant over the whole world.

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