Exuberance, an attractive and abundant quality in science fiction, is comparatively rare among its writers, as anyone attending an sf convention soon notices. (p. 405)

The most notable exception among contemporary writers of sf is Harlan Ellison, an aggressive and restless extrovert who conducts his life at a shout and his fiction at a scream. Teenage gang-leader turned Hollywood screen-writer [and] polemicist …, Ellison is one of the most interesting and talented sf writers to appear since Ray Bradbury. (pp. 405-06)

[Approaching Oblivion] has all the visceral and paranoid obsessions that run through [his] anthologies…. However lurid, the stories have a relentless imaginative drive, suggesting that Ellison may be the first of a new kind of sf writer, completely uninterested in science but attracted to the medium by the ample opportunities which New Wave sf offers for exploiting the most sensational emotional mixes. (p. 406)

J. G. Ballard, in New Statesman...