re: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

As a novel, I found it very interesting, especially the parts about railways and metal works. There’s a great description of a train crossing a bridge.

But remember that this book is half a century old, and shows it, especially in the technology.
The description of railways has diesels as the latest improvement, but steam trains still very much in use.
(Ever been through a tunnel in a steam train? I often did. What a mad scramble to get the window closed, as smoke and smuts fill the compartment!)

Computers were not in widespread use. Their absence in the book seems rather odd today.
Electrical torture too has come a long way in fifty years. But the machine in the book wouldn’t have been invented then.

Project X is pure fiction and perhaps may never be invented.

The love interest would have been considered rather daring. Today, we would say ‘So what?”
(But no porn, gentle reader).

And John Galt’s very long radio speech would be on TV now.
I wonder how many people would still be listening by the time it finished, and how many could follow the argument in the first part.
“Change the station!”

The gradual disintegration of just about everything as the “motor of the world” is stopped is very relevant today, with our present economic crisis. I kept seeing parallels.

In some ways I was reminded of Britain under the Labour government after the war, and all the “reforms” they were trying to bring in.
The labour laws reminded me of Britain’s “Direction of Labour”.

The philosophical ideas seem very dated now. But if one can suspend disbelief and treat it just as science fiction, it works well.

But it would seem some people still take it seriously!



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Well there are a few comments, but the copy I had was a library book, with little time to read it.
I didn’t have university lecturers telling me what I was supposed to think of it. Those are my own thoughts. Whether they are the conventional ones remains to be seen.

Now I will follow it up on Google and see what others have thought of it.