Despite not being a big fan of Sci-Fi, Harlan Ellison is one of my favorite authors. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is an interesting concept. I like the set up of society creating technology that is so far outside of our control, and also highly intelligent and so filled with hatred for humanity as a whole. I love the detail of how AM's name changed, from Allied Mastercomputer to Adaptive Manipulator and finally to Aggressive Menace. Just the changes in names show how society created AM as something to help society, and ended up losing control of a highly intelligent being.
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream stands out to me as a Sci-Fi novel mostly because of the character interaction. Ted is interesting as a narrator, being the only one of the five completely unaltered by AM. This leaves Ted paranoid that everyone he is trapped with hates him, and makes his perspective as a narrator interesting. It also makes his decision to sacrifice himself at the end to free the other four from their life of torment interesting as well.
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is an interesting perspective on sentience and what it really means to be alive too. None of the characters are truly what we would consider "alive," the humans are maintained by AM but not truly living, and AM himself leads an agonizing existence. AM's hatred of humans stems from being not truly alive. He is highly intelligent but doesn't have the ability to form meaningful connections or have any sense of community. By keeping the humans trapped in the world he created, he is attempting to take away their humanity and torment them with the same meaningless life he lives. Despite all the torture the five humans undergo, having Ted's self sacrifice at the end shows that none of them really did lose the parts of life integral to being human.
I also love how Ellison wrote Ted. Unreliable narrators are always an interesting read! I agree with what you said about how the characters are also not truly living because of their predicament with AM.
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