"Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman Review

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Note: I mistook another story I mentioned, “Harrison Bergeron,” for being written by Harlan Ellison, but it was actually written by Kurt Vonnegut.

Science fiction is no stranger to confronting the ways society controls us. Harlan Ellison himself isn’t a stranger to discussing this topic in his own stories. In his “Repent, Harlequin!” story, he asks what would happen if society controlled the time we spent.

Time to ramble. Ellison wrote the story within six hours for the Milford Writers’ Workshop. Published in Galaxy in 1965, it won both a Nebula and a Hugo. The story follows the infamous figure known as the Harlequin in a society where everyone’s time is controlled by another infamous figure called the Ticktockman. To keep everyone on schedule, citizens wear “cardioplates,” which make sure that no second of everyone’s routine goes unwanted in any way. The Ticktockman shortens or stops the time of whoever uses time incorrectly. So in this world, every second of someone’s life counts. The Harlequin, however, disrupts routine. He causes chaos throughout the city, sending all the clocks into chaos.

I think what struck me most about this story was the concept. It frankly terrified me a bit. Imagine someone controlling every minute of your life and dictating whether or not you used your time wisely that day. Imagine if that person were out there, watching, waiting for you to not be productive. Oh, wait. That’s basically real life at this point, just without getting killed for doomscrolling.

Like “Harrison Bergeron,” Ellison’s story deals with themes of conformity. But it also shows us a world where we’re not only slaves to our work and routines but also to the machines that dictate our time. In the modern age, machines tell us what to do all the time. We let it dictate everything about ourselves. So, like the best sci-fi, Ellison’s story reflects the reality we live in. I think it speaks volumes that it reflects our reality today when it was written years ago. It remains relevant because it reminds us of how we allocate our time. It also reminds us that machines, ironically, waste our time. We no longer have control over ourselves.

“Even in the cubicles of the hierarchy, where fear was generated, seldom suffered, he was called the Ticktockman.

But no one called him that to his mask.

You don’t call a man a hated name, not when that man, behind his mask, is capable of revoking the minutes, the hours, the days and nights, the years of your life. He was called the Master Timekeeper to his mask. It was safer that way.”

But I think my favorite aspect of this story was Ellison’s writing style. He used a very distinct, almost quirky way of giving us information. I haven’t seen a way of writing like this before. Let me give you a few examples.

“High above the third level of the city, he crouched on the humming aluminum-frame platform of the air-boat (foof! air-boat, indeed! swizzleskid is what it was, with a tow-rack jerry-rigged) and stared down at the neat Mondrian arrangement of the buildings.”

“Jelly beans! Millions and billions of purples and yellows and greens and licorice and grape and raspberry and mint and round and smooth and crunchy outside and soft-mealy inside and sugary and bouncing jouncing tumbling clittering clattering skittering fell on the heads and shoulders and hardhats and carapaces of the Timkin workers, tinkling on the slidewalk and bouncing away and rolling about underfoot and filling the sky on their way down with all the colors of joy and childhood and holidays, coming down in a steady rain, a solid wash, a torrent of color and sweetness out of the sky from above, and entering a universe of sanity and metronomic order with quite-mad coocoo newness. Jelly beans!“

The story also introduced characters and created descriptions that almost felt comical, in a good way. It might be a little light on the description, but that becomes a strength. Your brain starts to fill in the blanks. You imagine a sparse, modernized world and the chaos that comes with the Harlequin. The descriptions of the rubber balls, for one, add bursts of vivid color through the writing. And when the ending occurs (a sort of parody/homage to George Orwell’s 1984), you only need to imagine what must have happened. Less is more. But the ending has got to be one of my favorites. I won’t spoil it, obviously.

This story serves as a wonderful introduction to Harlan Ellison, as well as the New Wave of science fiction he popularized. It also offers a disturbing reflection on the modern age that I feel we don’t talk about enough. I recommend you check it out.

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