It’s sort of like what I hear Atlas Shrugged is like, but with a different political viewpoint. Speeches/lectures by its fictional hero about how Peak Oil is coming, inevitable, and how no technology at all can stop it. A story about how “neo-cons,” led by Dick Cheney, orchestrated 9/11 (or let it happen, I forget which) for the oil and, in the future of the plot, a suitcase nuke attack in LA. Many epigrams quoting 911truth.org. An approving back cover quote from Cynthia McKinney.
Oh, and in the end (spoilers juuuuust in case, and because I can’t stand to have them open, even with a book like this), after a nerve gas attack on Iran, we have our first Green party President who’s gonna save us all with wind energy.
Just flipping through it and seeing what was being written and claimed was a weird experience. Like I said, just… wow.
Really? Because after actually reading Atlas Shrugged it seems to be absolutely nothing like the book you described.
Regardless whether you actually ascribe to Ayn Rand’s political and economic beliefs, most people seem to not actually get (or in your case, have even read) Atlas Shrugged. Rand was a big believer in economic freedom. Employers should be free to hire the best employees they can find and fire the incompetant ones. Companies should not be punished for competetive advantages or rewarded for poor performance. Performance should dictate whether people or companies survive and success, not connections. In the book, successful businessmen and their companies are punished in the name of “fairness” so that corrupt and incompetant but well connected companies be protected.
Simpleminded people seem to interpret Rand or Atlas Shrugged to be a glorious celebration of selfishness. That is not the case. It is a thought experiment in what happens if all the smart, ambitious, enterprising and productive people who are constantly berated for being “greed” or “selfish” or “unfair” and are considered fair game for wealth redistribution scheme up and decide to stop producing and leave all the entitled mooches of the world to their own devices.
I wish someone would write a horror/scifi novel about big, corrupt corporations that rape the US taxpayer by getting trillion dollar bailouts from the corrupt US government. It would take Stephen King to write that kind of fantastical fiction.
No, it’s a revenge fantasy for those that feel unappreciated. “I’m going to take my ball, ermmm. super steel and go home, errr to my secret lair in the mountains! Then you’ll be sorry! And then after you’re sorry I’ll come back and get the credit I so richly deserve!”
It’s crap. If you want an indictment of redistribution, read Orwell. If you want self aggrandizing twaddle read Rand.
Yes. I meant that the two reminded me of each other in their purposes and general style of presenting their opinions (speeches out of the mouths of main characters).
It seems to me that pedantic wordsmithing and spellmanship is largely considered assholeish behavior on the SDMB.
There are plenty of highly political novels. I guess the OP just found the one he felt most pandered to the left-wing types here as an antithesis of good literature. Admittedly Atlas Shrugged is an arduous read.
Do you read the same book I did? Because it really wasn’t about “credit”.
A better analogy would be if you liked playing the guitar. And because you liked playing the guitar, everyone thought that they could just make demands on you to come over and play whenever they needed a guitar player.
That was actually a major theme in Atlas Shrugged.
Atlas Shrugged is crap. It’s a tome of quasi-religousness. The damn thing even ends with the rapture - just Rand’s version.
The chosen people are removed from the world, and the world suffers tribulation. It is only then, with the good whisked away, that mankind realizes its mistake. Then there’s seventy some odd pages of her philosophy, only to end with her vision of heaven, Utopia, or whatever she calls her poorly thought out perfect world.
It’s not well written and her “philosophy” is poorly thought out.
Orwell had a point, and a very good one. Rand is for those who think that they are more equal than others… but aren’t. What Twilight is to self delusional 14 year old girls, Atlas Shrugged is to intellectually lazy conservatives.