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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

And I am Joe McCormick. Over the years here on Stuff to Blow Your Mind, we've done a number of Halloween episodes that in one way or another pick from assorted tales, discuss those tales, and maybe pick apart some science or culture surrounding them. At one point, we did a series of episodes based on different creepypastas.

Then Joe and I turned to TV Har anthology episodes for a number of years.

And last year, we started a new tradition, one that sticks to shorter horror works, but also gets back into the written word, which I know many of our listeners miss from the days when we did summer reading episodes.

So, you know, written horror fiction often comes up on the show anyway, so it seemed like a solid direction to go in.

So this is our second grimoire of horror episode.

And so in this episode, yeah, we're going to be discussing a pair of horror short stories, both very different, but also, I guess it's just pure synchronicity here.

They both feature elements of the poles, the North Pole of the Arctic in one story, or what I

believe is supposed to be, the North Pole, and then the other tale, or what I believe is supposed to be the North Pole,

and then the other tale takes us to the Antarctic, and both ultimately contain a fair amount of

ice and coldness.

Hmm, yeah, and, you know, while I often fear that it's going to be hot on Halloween, just like

I often fear that it's going to be hot on Christmas. It has proven a little bit chilly this week

around my house. Yeah, yeah. It's a little cold here. It's a little wet here. I think it's going to

dry up a bit, and so hopefully we'll have a good night for trick-or-treating. So what's your tale of dread,

Rob? All right. I decided to go right for it, and I picked up a story that had been on my list of things that I felt like I should probably have read for many years. My selection is I have no mouth and I must scream by Harlan Ellison, a horrifying sci-fi short story about the dangers of artificial intelligence from way back in

1967. Kind of hard to imagine that writers in the 1960s were already personifying computers this

much. It feels like second nature now, but, you know, the computers of the time, there was a lot

more imagination involved to get across the gap in time and technology

from what they had then to the, to the, you know, Terminator or the, or the AM from I Have No

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