Harlan Ellison's Hall of Fame Acceptance Remarks

"'Repent, Harlequin,' said the Ticktock Man," wins 2015 Hall of Fame

I'm enormously pleased to be getting this award.

I came up here to begin speaking to you to show you that if you live long enough, whether you are worthy of it or not, … they will give you a pocket watch or an award.

These are Hugos, these are Edgar Allan Poe awards from the Mystery Writers of America, the World Fantasy convention awards … and these are the Horror awards that I designed. And on the wall behind me are the Writers' Guild awards.

All of these are very important to me. And as you can see, I have staged them. On the wall over there, you can't see it in this shot, are all the Nebulas.

Now if you come with us downstairs, I'll show you my Grand Master awards to put all of this in perspective.

I bring you now to two awards that are very important to me. This one is my Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America. I keep it on a lucite shelf behind me, of great stature along with the one given to Alfred Bester on his death bed. I consider it to be a great honor to be on a shelf with Alfred Bester!

When I received the initial nomination for the Prometheus Hall of Fame award, I was enormously impressed by the people I was in competition with: And I had it framed thus: George Orwell, Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster…

That's pretty stiff company to be in!

It's now 2015, it's four years later, and I am enormously pleased to be getting the Prometheus Award.

It will be framed as impressively as I can, along with this initial notice.

There was a recent, email internet (blog) description posted (in Reason magazine.)

The guy said:

"Ellison was for many years in my pre- and early-teens my very favorite writer. I never saw him, and am sure he never saw himself, as libertarian in the movement sense. If you must pigeonhole him politically, he's more a cranky New Deal liberal with civil rights movement and women's liberation radical cred"

I love pigeonholing!

I have never been a Republican, I've never been a Democrat, communist, socialist, fascist or anything else…

If you want to call me a libertarian, I have no objection.

We'll spend some time, and we'll have our discussions.

But in the meantime, to be able to come to you , in front of you today, Mr. Stoddard, Mr. Hibbert and all the rest of you I cannot see, thank you ever so much. Harlan Ellison's transcript of his video acceptance speech for Prometheus Hall of Fame. Mr Ellison gave his remarks while showing his awards in different rooms of his house in the Los Angeles area.