‘Jeffty Is Five’ by Harlan Ellison

Another story about children, and a story about holding onto the past. Five-year-old Jeffty literally doesn’t grow up, but the rest of the world goes on around him, until it can’t. Now that I’ve had a five-year-old of my own I’m not convinced by Ellison’s portrayal of Jeffty, but his innocence and bewildered acceptance rings true. I feel sad thinking about his parents.

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in July 1977. Collected many times, including in The Top of the Volcano: The Award-Winning Stories of Harlan Ellison, Subterranean Press, 2015

‘All the Sounds of Fear’ by Harlan Ellison

When I was 12 or 13 my Dad signed me up to The Science Fiction Book Club, which sent an SF novel through the post once a month. I was introduced to Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (later filmed, stupefyingly, by Tarkovski as Stalker), An Infinite Summer by Christopher Priest, and Blackpool Vanishes by Richard Francis, but there was also a short story collection by the hack writer (I use the term with admiration) Harlan Ellison, called (and I beg forgiveness for Harlan here) Ellison Wonderland. The story that stuck with me was ‘All the Sounds of Fear’, which tells the tale of the terrible fate awaiting actor Richard Becker, known to the world as ‘The Man Who IS The Method’. The final scene left a visual impression which remains through to the present.

Ellison is maybe best known for his screenwriting, which included the classic Star Trek episode ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’. He cultivated a tough-guy, straight-talking writer-for-hire persona, personified by him sending a copy of every story he ever published to an Ohio State University professor who had denigrated his writing. Ellison punched him and was expelled. But this was a story Ellison told, and the boundary between Ellison the self-imagined writer and Ellison the living man is forever blurry. His short stories are madly imagined, overwrought and passionate. Perfect teenage reading, in other words.

First published in the UK in The Saint Detective Magazine, 1962. Collected in Ellison Wonderland, Paperback Library, 1962

‘Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman’ by Harlan Ellison

In Ellison’s satirical story, the world has become obsessed with punctuality and rigorous time-keeping, all under the watchful eye of the Ticktockman, who has the power to shorten lifespans as a punishment to those who cannot keep up with a scheduled society. The titular Harlequin works to undermine these carefully regimented routines, and in doing so, threatens the very fabric of the world, for such totalitarian societies rely heavily on threats and punishments to maintain conformity amongst the ranks. The Harlequin’s disruptions are whimsical rather than violent—showering factory workers with brightly coloured jellybeans, for example—and it is exactly this quality which so frightens the Ticktockman, and undermines his power and authority.

“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.”

First published in Galaxy Science Fiction magazine, 1965, and collected in Paingod and other Delusions, 1965, with various later editions. Also available in World’s Best Science Fiction: 1966, Ace Books, 1966)

‘How’s the Night Life on Cissalda?’ by Harlan Ellison

Harlan Ellison is mostly known for his SF, but by the late seventies was writing a wide range of speculative fiction. ‘How’s the Night Life on Cissalda?’ is a ribald tale of an astronaut who goes into space and comes into contact with an alien lifeform – but it’s more than contact – its sexual contact, and constant, as the creature has many penises and vaginas. Returning to earth, NASA is unable to pull them apart, and the creature, sends out a message to his species who all come down to earth and start shagging every human being. Its fair to say the story gets even more outrageous as it continues, with the whole of the human race being fucked by these disgusting aliens with an insatiable lust.

First published in Chrysalis, Zebra Books, 1977, reprinted in Shatterday, 1980

‘“Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman’ by Harlan Ellison

Ellison represents one of the two writers most important to my tragically not-misspent youth. (Kurt Vonnegut, who appears next, is the other.) There is no louder a ‘voice’ writer out there than Ellison, and I think the fact that I prize voice so highly is down to his influence. Ellison was also that now rarest of creatures: a self-declared short story writer. (He wrote a couple of unmemorable novels, and was a successful screenwriter for a while.) He was also as much a character as he was a writer of characters, and while he was probably loathed and loved in equal measure for his… exuberant personality, he wrote wonderful short stories. (Hearing him read his stories aloud was mesmerizing.) And in his often brilliant non-fiction – along with essays, he always wrote intros to the stories in his collections that were as interesting as the stories themselves – he presented his readers with a path to lots of other great writers in and out of genre.

As with others on this list, I could have chosen several of his stories – ‘The Deathbird’, ‘Jefty is Five’, ‘I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream’, etc – but ‘Repent, Harlequin!’ is the one that means the most to me. It won all kinds of awards, has been reprinted a zillion times (that’s a true statistic), and is a glorious excursion into Ellison’s world of wit, wordplay and wonderment. It offers typically Ellisonian excess, is probably just a tad juvenile – and is very funny.

First published in Galaxy Science Fiction, Dec 1965. Collected in Ellison’s Paingod and Other Delusions, Pyramid, 1965 and widely recollected and anthologised