Eh, it wasn’t bad as a revenge fantasy. You might like it if you enjoy thinking about how all the people who don’t appreciate you would be screwed if you just left. The political philosophy being proposed won’t be too offensive if you already lean libertarian.
My main objection to the book (other than the infamous speech, which I admit I couldn’t read all the way through) is that it’s a sort of morality play with with exaggerated good and bad and no shades of gray, but it keeps denying this and insisting that the real world really is that black and white. The reader ought to take it with more than a little pinch of salt.
Oh, and that Ayn Rand’s self-insert has a BDSM fetish I really would have preferred not to know about. (Why do authors keep inserting their kinks into books? I’m looking at you, Robert Jordan. And especially at you, Piers Anthony.)
You might like it if you enjoy thinking about how all the people who don’t appreciate you would be screwed if you just left.
I see you have read my dream journal.
You really can’t win. If you people are dependent on you it means more work if/when you take time off. If people don’t need you, they don’t need you and this world is just that colder.
My main objection i similar to our but broader in scope. None of the main characters feel like real people. They are Platonic Ideals of Ayn Rand’s fantasy lifestyle, full stop
That always annoys the shit out of me when not one well. It can be done well, but it takes a significantly better author.
I think author-kinks are a bit misrepresented (especially with Jordan, who I read more as commentary on power dynamics) but the point is not invalid at all.
None of the main characters feel like real people.
Apparently she did that on purpose. From Wikipedia:
She wanted her fiction to present the world “as it could be and should be”, rather than as it was. This approach led her to create highly stylized situations and characters.
I consider that to be a wishful revisionism on her part. The truth is shes just a bad writer.
The charactors in her first book “Anthem” are exactly as wooden and fake as the charactors in “Atlas shrugged.” She never developed any finesse or depth because real people aren’t as shallow as the imaginary people she dreamt about.
Ugh, Piers Anthony. I remember absolutely LOVING Piers Anthony’s books as a kid; I went back a while back to reread them as an adult (and read the ones I hadn’t read before) and good god, but I could not do it. Even beyond the terrible puns (not as fun when you’re not like ten years old) and the really regressive ideas of gender roles, after the third book with a young teen girl seducing a virtuous middle-aged man because he was the only one who truly loved her, I was just staring at my old books in horror.
(A few years back someone linked me to his Hi Piers newsletter, which moved to the Internet a while back. I got as far as seeing him talking about the sexual attractiveness of girls at menarche - their first period, which can be as young as 9 - and I had to stop because of the full-body shudders.)
What the heck, really? I just remember him always mentioning it in his author’s notes at the end of his books (and for a while there I think there was also a 1-800-HI-PIERS phone number or something?). I remember as a kid wanting to subscribe to the newsletter, but I’m glad in retrospect I didn’t, yikes.
Really. It was bizarre to me as a non-fan that an author would go to that length. And yes, the 800-number was featured. I tried to find it on YouTube, but it appears to have gone down the memory hole. I think he only advertised on cable, but it still couldn’t have been cheap. Did that really translate into money for him?
EDIT: Also, it was just him sitting in a chair, talking. No fantasy scenes or even artwork.
Since everyone else is talking about Ayn, let me tell you about Dorothy Parker.
You know that movie, “A Star Is Born?” She wrote the original version. She was a famous writer, known for her devastating insults. She was also an early Anti-Fascist and supporter of Martin Luther King, JR.
Totally underappreciated and far more deserving of fame than Ms. Rand.
Also famously an early lgbt ally. Before the term gay existed in the 20s and 30s the polite way of asking if a man was homosexual was if they were a friend of Dorothy.
Let’s be honest though… there’s been a time in your life that you’ve gone into a public restroom and wished that you had your own toilet seat with you.
Goddamn it. I knew my Tardis was malfunctioning after that last crash into the #BBC. Apologies everyone - gotta flush the quantum improbability matrix again before I untangle the timelines. By the way, if anyone happens to spot a thylacine with a spiked collar roaming around London, please let me know. He answers to the name of Cryptodile Dundee and likes kangaroo niblets.
Hand all the way to the right has 5 fingers and a base of a thumb visible.
Ugh the more I look at this, the more unnerving the details are. The little girl has a Zoidberg claw for a right hand, and alien behind on the right has a spaghetti finger.
Explain to me why Americans can’t have single payer because “ToO eXpENsIve”
But we can fund Israel’s single payer no problem.
This is why I wish “America First” wasn’t a racist dogwhistle.
I would be onboard with a platform where America stops getting involved in other nations bullshit for War Profiteering reasons and just took care of its own people.
Money is substitutable. It’s laughable when politicians earmark funds for only a specific purpose or only provide supplies and equipment.
If those are things that the recipient would otherwise spend money to buy, then you’re supporting whatever other things they end up spending the money to buy.
That’s just nonsense. Everything originally came from somewhere else, including humans themselves. Italians invented new uses for those two things and thus established a near-peerless culinary heritage.
I still cannot believe a novel this terrible inspired a successful movement that was thoroughly endorsed by presidents.
If I had a time machine I would go back in time and publish it, but make sure that it only had a limited release. Never got super big just big enough so that some people had heard of it, and then I would sue Ayn Rand when she published her version. Win easily and announce that I wrote it as a parody, mocking people who think that being overly self reliant and rejecting community is a good way to live, for they are like house cats… overly dependent on others yet thoroughly convinced of their own independence. “As Ms. Rand demonstrated by stealing my book and claiming it as her own.”
Then I’d put a time capsule with the fucking source code to Bioshock 1, 2, and Infinite somewhere to preserve those games in the timeline.
Really elaborate plan that will probably end up failing because the book, and its author, only got big because it gave greedy bastards an excuse to be so unashamedly greedy. If not this trash then another work of trash.
Not only that, but satanism, and I don’t mean edgy atheists pretending to worship the devil in order to troll right leaning judges, but actual honest-to-Dog satanists, actually cite Ayn Rand is a major source of inspiration, and someone to look up to in terms of how to be a good person.
No I know that the satanists who Worship in the way that I’m speaking, Anton LaVey and his alike do not literally worship satan. But they are still very evil people who do terrible things.
I mean their book literally says that it is foolish for one to give up the world, only to gain their own soul. Lot of very strong, “Are we the baddies?” Energy
Win easily and announce that I wrote it as a parody, mocking people
Then watch it backfire horribly. Conservatives (including those who call themselves libertarian) are blind to satire. You might remember that the_donald was satirical at the start. So was the game Monopoly.
In 1955 the society told everyone don’t do shit to change anything. It was a time of restraint and repression.
In 2005 society was in a revolutionary mode and told everyone to question and disrupt everything.
So to tell people to challenge what was allowed in 1955 actulally was a good and vital thing to change society. In 2005 challenging what was allowed was mostly done for personal gain, exploiting the system.
If you’re talking about the Bible. Religious texts typically require historians and theologians to figure out the meaning of… lots of hard to understand passages requiring a context not easily understood in the modern age.
It’s not like Ayn Rand which was an incomprehensible mess from its inception.
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