The novelist Bob places at the far end of a dystopian succession he has just read about: Huxley and Orwell, then a gap, then Ballard and Philip K. Dick. The critical claim Bob relays is that Lewis's Human Age fills the gap — which is what gives Ballard his function here. He is not discussed as a writer but used as a fixed point, the later term whose distance from Orwell measures what Lewis was doing in between. New to it — start with dialogue 70.
Across the dialogues
Enters as the far terminus of a dystopian lineage — the later writer whose existence is what makes the gap before him visible, and so what gives Lewis's trilogy a place in the canon
The lineage is stated as a jump, and the jump is the argument — the canon's own shape is what implies a missing book.
"he says the missing link is you have Aldous Huxley. Brave New World, Orwell, 1948, 1984, and then you jump to the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and you've got J.G. Ballard and some other guy I didn't really recognize, forget his name."
Lewis is placed both before and beyond Orwell at once — the source Orwell drew on, and the writer who went past him toward what Ballard would later occupy.
"he wrote a science fiction novel that goes further than Orwell, who was inspired by Lewis and Aldous Huxley, but doesn't quite get to the postmodern, whatever you call Ballard and those guys."
The canonical revision Bob wants, and the reason the session keeps returning to Lewis's obscurity — the trilogy's absence from the list is what keeps its argument unavailable.
"This needs to be part of the great dystopias, I guess you'd call it. Brave New World and Orwell first, and then Lewis, and then these later guys, J.G. Ballard."
Connections
In the critical claim Bob relays, Lewis's trilogy is the missing link between Huxley and Orwell on one side and Ballard on the other.
Bob measures Lewis against Ballard's postmodernism — the register Orwell does not quite reach and Lewis is said to approach.