ABSTRACT
The future has been moving too quickly into the present for the most radical science fiction to surprise the contemporary reader as science or fiction. Even those, however, reflect certain of the innovations in others which mark off virtually a new genre—a revision of the neat structural closures of the conventional essay into the looser but more adhesive representations of fictional prose; they effect, in the end, an original conjunction of literary means. The state of affairs reconstructed in the writing, furthermore, has been previously determined by him and framed with a conclusion to which the reconstruction points: an experience leaves an impression; the work of another writer strikes a chord. The democratic appearance is too constant a feature to be accidental; elliptically, it recalls the reference of our title to the principle of decency as an item first and more openly of Orwell’s politics—second and more fundamentally, of Orwell’s art.
