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I was exposed to Ayn Rand at an impressionable age due to being a fan of Rush. I am "the radical left" that the trolls of the internet speak of, so obviously I'm not a fan of her overall schtick; I am using Naomi Klein's shorthand here, where a Leftist is a person who has a problem with the fact that about 150 white dudes run the world, whereas a Liberal is a person who wants half of those people to be women and POC.

Now I don't recommend you read this book, and if you must, prepare yourself for the last third, in which you will wish she was alive to go and strangle. The book's final act is the worst harlequin romance you ever read.

But it doesn't start out quite so abysmal, and IMO some of her descriptions of industrial landscapes, railroads, the things that were icons of human enterprise in her age, you can feel the reverence she had for these wonders of the world when she wrote about the objects themselves. They are as beautiful to her as a forest or a summer field, smokestacks and all. If you've been to New York and looked up at those buildings from the Art Deco age when steel pierced the sky, and considered they had no computers, you can get a taste of the drug she was on.

But what is interesting to me is that the mob of villains in this book are the same mob of villains afflicting us all as I type this; a monied elite who seek to legislate perpetual control over society, with no way for the brilliant and inventive to get ahead without letting the elite dip their beaks. These villains at one point seek to rename Rearden Steel, the secret sauce invented at the start of the book, to Miracle Metal; not simply enough to steal the work of the genius, but the genius himself must be erased alike.

And as one who fled Communist Russia, who sat in America and watched Stalin murder generations and invent photoshopping decades before anyone invented photoshop, it's understandable that her literary villains would want to obliterate history in this way; there was a living example in the world. And one doesn't become a public figure by speaking a language nobody understands, so it's understandable, I suppose, that she would go on tv and call herself a "capitalist radical" to keep herself in America.

But does she understand that her villains are the people who have money and want to stay in charge and get more money simply because they have money, and that this is the definition of capitalism? I wonder, given that most people just take it for granted that capitalism is what "we" do and communism is what "they" do; she certainly did not comment on this emperor's wardrobe, whatever the case.

I have no quarrel with her defense of the artist's right to their art and the engineer's right to their engineering, and indeed, if we could reduce Ayn Rand to only her opinions about art and artists I would probably be a big fan, but unfortunately she does not respect the labourer's right to their labour; for some reason she has a blind spot there.

Maybe I'll write a book about a fake writer named Oyn Rind who hires a ghostwriter to write an ideological epic, but the writer demands a raise 2/3 of the way through, so Oyn has to finish the book herself. The result would be not at all unlike Atlas Shrugged.

A formative but problematic novel for me. If you read this knowing nothing about Heinlein you might see him as sort of a hippie. In reality he was quite a vehement conservative. I heard a rumour once that there was an aneurysm the preceded his sudden shift to this sort of sex-crazed middle/old age in his writings; I never actually got too close to very much biographical information after reading one of his speeches, which did not enthuse me.

There was much once to recommend Heinlein, in past ages, which shared the same problematic aspects as him. In this age, the incredibly heterosexual "liberation" of his characters will read as cringey to most. RAH was not a hippie, but clearly he wanted to be. I don't know if he and Richard Feynman were friends but I would not be surprised.

I'm not touching too much on the book itself, and this comment is mostly for the curious who have 2023 sensibilities and want to check out what absolutely is a centrally important Science Fiction novel from a centrally important figure. Whatever his problematic aspects may be, Heinlein is like a Phil Spector or a DW Griffith - as horrific as their lives or art might be, they all changed things in ways that history has decreed, for good or ill, we will not ignore.