Ellison's wild style, his unfinished sentences, his tumbling, driving pace, his mad, mixed metaphors and symbols and similes have exploded in all sorts of markets—mostly minor: girlie books, record-review columns, mystery and detective pulps, novels, radio and TV and the movies. But he began in and with science fiction; and his latest collection, Paingod, provides a fascinating study of what he was, and what he is becoming. What he is becoming is great. What he is having is a ball. He has now reached a point where the very worst he can become is the most sharply focused image-maker of contemporary homo sap….

Ellison can be excruciatingly bad;… [but to dwell on examples] would be to commit a foolishness, for Ellison is a growing entity. One may recognize that a youth is not yet an adult; one does not, however, blame him for it. Buy Paingod and...