I seem to have made an extraordinary discovery. It may well be applicable only to this clutch of books, but it might be interesting to try it on other works in other categories. It is this: The better the writer, and the better his writing, the less lofty seem to be the philosophical aspirations he exemplifies.
Id est: Spinrad, who in this example falls in that great 90 per cent of all fiction (and indeed all things) which gives good fiction (and things) something on which to stand and be noticeable, arduously peels layer after onionskin layer of revelation in the course of his narrative, each revealing a higher degree of nobility, courage, honor and self-sacrifice, until at the end we contemplate a shining sliver of Godlike goodness, wisdom and hope. Hoyle, of whom I once remarked that he tools fiction as if he were holding his pen with his elbows, shows us a world of the future in which cultural refinement seems to have replaced survival as a basic urge, and it no longer urges anything. Big-gle, who has become a topflight journeyman with frequent excursions into master territory, founds his tightly- knit structure on the value of lying, which, it seems, we Terrans have developed to a degree unimagined by the rest of the universe. And finally Heinlein, with his extraordinarily realistic and believable fable of revolutionary colonials, complete with eloquent inclusions of Freedom. Patriotism, and Self-determination, the justice of . . . really on whose pragmatic right it is to make the buck.
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