Civil disobedience challenging repressive authority: Harlan Ellison’s subversive and satirical story “Repent Harlequin!’, Said the Ticktockman,” the 2015 Prometheus Hall of Fame winner

To highlight the Prometheus Awards’ four-decade-plus history and make clear why each winner deserves recognition as a pro-freedom and/or anti-authoritarian work, the Libertarian Futurist Society has been publishing since 2019 a series of Appreciations of past award-winners.

Here is an Appreciation of Harlan Ellison’s “Repent Harlequin!’, Said the Ticktockman,” the 2015 Prometheus Hall of Fame winner for Best Classic Fiction.

By Michael Grossberg

The ticking of a clock and a tight schedule controls the future world in “Repent Harlequin!’, Said the Ticktockman,” one of Harlan Ellison’s best and most iconic stories.

The satirical and dystopian tale, which opens with quotes from Henry David Thoreau’s classic work on Civil Disobedience, lampoons the excesses and absurdities of regimentation.

The 1965 story, which introduces the mythic and scary Ticktockman, challenges repressive authority and celebrates civil disobedience.

Ellison was known throughout his life and career for his anti-authoritarian views and provocative personality – and this story very much embodies his libertarian spirit.

What gave this story such impact in the 1960s and why it remains widely admired today is its passion, style, imagination and unusual rule-breaking narrative structure. For example, the story opens in the middle, moves to the beginning and then the end – all without flashbacks.

Ellison, a wild and rebellious individualist who both sparked and reflected the rising Question Authority counterculture of the younger generation in the late 1960s, reveled in portraying one man’s surrealist rebellion against a repressive future society obsessed with timeliness and dominated by dull technology.

He conceived the iconic character of the Ticktockman as a robot-like figure with the power to shorten or end anyone’s life if they dare to run late. For most, however many minutes they run late are automatically deducted from their life – a drastic penalty enforced by the Master Timekeeper, or Ticktockman, who uses a “cardioplate” device to stop people’s hearts once their time has run out.

Opposing the Ticktockman is the similarly mythic and anarchical Harlequin, a flamboyantly dressed comic hero who threatens the status quo with a whimsical rebellion. For instance, he throws thousands of multicolored jelly beans at workers to distract them as they change shifts.

At once dark and humorous, Ellison’s story has been compared to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. As in the latter Prometheus-winning novel, which ends tragically when the central character Winston Smith is converted to blind obedience and capitulates to the State, Ellison’s story incorporates a similarly dark twist when the Harlequin is captured, ordered to repent and is sent to a place called Coventry, where his anti-authoritarian rebelliousness is squelched.

Originally published in Galaxy in December 1965, when it won Ellison both a 1966 Nebula and Hugo award, Ellison’s cautionary tale of mechanical tyranny has captured the imagination and spirit of generations of readers. It continues to resonate today.

Note: American sf writer Harlan Ellison (1934-2018), known for his outspoken personality and his prolific work in New Wave sf, published more than 1,700 short stories, teleplays, essays, novellas, screenplays and criticism and edited Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, influential sf anthologies of New Wave fiction.

“The City on the Edge of Forever,” his time-traveling screenplay for an episode of Star Trek, is considered the best episode of the original series.