Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards: A science fiction classic about an antiestablishment rebel set on overthrowing the totalitarian society of the future. One of science fiction’s most antiestablishment authors rails against the accepted order while questioning blind obedience to the state in this unique pairing of short story and essay. “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” is set in a dystopian future society in which time is regulated by a heavy bureaucratic hand known as the Ticktockman. The rebellious Everett C. Marm flouts convention, masquerading as the anarchic Harlequin, disrupting the precise schedule with bullhorns and jellybeans in a world where being late is nothing short of a crime. But when his love, Pretty Alice, betrays Everett out of a desire to return to the punctuality to which she is programmed, he is forced to face the Ticktockman and his gauntlet of consequences. The bonus essay included in this volume, “Stealing Tomorrow,” is a hard-to-find Harlan Ellison masterwork, an exploration of the rebellious nature of the writer’s soul. Waxing poetic on humankind’s intellectual capabilities versus its emotional shortcomings, the author depicts an inner self that guides his words against the established bureaucracies, assuring us that the intent of his soul is to “come lumbering into town on a pink-and-yellow elephant, fast as Pegasus, and throw down on the established order.” Winner of the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award, “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” has become one of the most reprinted short stories in the English language. Fans of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World will delight in this antiestablishment vision of a Big Brother society and the rebel determined to take it down. The perfect complement, “Stealing Tomorrow” is a hidden gem that reinforces Ellison’s belief in humankind’s inner nobility and the necessity to buck totalitarian forces that hamper our steady evolution.

In a society that has surrendered personal freedom for the "safety " of conformity and punctuality, the perpetually late Harlequin is the ultimate rebel.

Robert Heinlein says, 'This book is raw corn liquor - you should serve a whiskbroom with each shot so the customer can brush the sawdust off after he gets up from the floor.' Perhaps a mooring cable might also be added as necessary equipment for reading these eight wonderful stories: They not only knock you down...they raise you to the stars. Passion is the keynote as you encounter the Harlequin and his nemesis, the dreaded Tictockman, in one of the most reprinted and widely taught stories in the English language; a pyretic who creates fire merely by willing it; the last surgeon in a world of robot physicians; a spaceship filled with hideous mutants rejected by the world that gave them birth. Touching and gentle and shocking stories from an incomparable master of impossible dreams and troubling truths.

A Study Guide for Harlan Ellison's "''Repent, Harlequin!'' Said the Ticktockman," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

Beautifully written speculative fiction from Metaphorosis magazine. Snow queens and their daughters, invisible giants pining for vanished lovers, transformations, searches, quests, and voyages of all kinds. The best science fiction and fantasy stories from Metaphorosis magazine's second year.

"But something was stirring, something was wakening in that nexus of energy. And in The Cleveland News of June 7th, little more than a week after he turned fifteen, Harlan Ellison's first professional writing appeared in print: the initial installment of a five-part adventure serial (liberally cribbed from Sir Walter Scott) titled "The Sword of Parmagon."".

In the first ever book-length manifesto of Peak Oil Philosophy, Chad Haag argues that the transition to Fossil Fuel Modernity replaced the herds of megafauna of the Hunter Gatherer Worldview and the cyclically-harvested grain of the Agrarian Worldview with a single immensely powerful but quickly vanishing substance: oil. Everything we do is a euphemism for burning vast amounts of fossil fuels. Haag provides an original hierarchy of transcendental standards of meaning to reveal the extent to which our mythologies, systems, counter sense objects, and deep memes are just so many incomplete revelations of our Phenomenological awareness of petroleum. But as the globe already hit Peak Oil in 2005 and has been on the downward slope of depletion ever since, these higher order meanings have begun to collapse into falsity. Oil's peculiar role in sustaining systems of meaning precisely through imposing a hard physical limit to existence therefore requires a novel Ontology of Limitation. Haag reawakens the Heideggerian quest for Being by suggesting that even the subject itself must be understood as a limitation sustained through the limitation of, in our era, fossil fuels. Haag introduces a new table of 15 modes of truth to explicate how Peak Oil defies a simple binary of truth and falsity, given that even truth under Fossil Fuels is just a euphemism for oil's presence. Combining the Peak Oil insights of John Michael Greer and the anti-technological theories of Ted Kaczynski with the philosophical rigor of Heidegger, Aristotle, Zizek, Plato, Husserl, Descartes, and Jordan Peterson, Haag crafts a truly unique response to the challenge of joining Peak Oil and Philosophy.

Winner of the World Fantasy Award for best short story collection, this volume by one of the most acclaimed authors of the 20th century takes an intense look at how the specter of death haunts everyday life.