"But first, let me expose my shoulders."

[james_davis_nicoll]

A condensed Atlas Shrugged

Comments

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

You know, a roommate of mine had a copy of Atlas Shrugged that was always lying around. I tried not to think any less of him because of it.

It just occurred to me that a few weeks after I stopped seeing it on coffee tables, he dropped out of Engineering to move to Vancouver and become an actor.

So he took the right message from it after all!

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

I've actually read it more than once. Despite everything that's wrong with that book -- and that's no small tally -- I find something perversely readable about it.

Although since the first time, I do skip the fifty-page radio speech.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

The third time through, I made myself read the whole goddamn monolog. Sure enough, the writer who thinks so highly of her readers has to spoon feed the information to them over and over and over, just like the previous 500 pages didn't even exist.

Yeah, perversely readable. A guilty pleasure.

But the linked version is so long! I myself reduced the book to seven View-Master captions in Plokta 27 (and I quote):

Surprisingly, some large works adapted quite well for the new medium. Ayn Rand is said to have enjoyed this adaptation of Atlas Shrugged:

1. “I built a railroad by myself.”
2. “Give us your new metal, Rearden!”
3. Grabby second-raters take everything in sight.
4. But where have all the smart guys gone?
5. “Hank! Come with us to a new life.”
6. Eddie can’t make the engine work.
7. “It’s like heaven — with cigarettes!”

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

Re: point 6... in the book Rand envisions the world divided into three classes of people:

1) The geniuses who make everything work
2) The dedicated workers who are content to labor at the geniuses' behest
3) Parasites; also known as "most everyone"

So category (1) goes on strike and category (3) all starves to death or whatever, and all is goodness and light.

But Galt's plan seems pretty hard on the category (2) people, as exemplified by Eddie. His reward for all his dedication, if memory serves, is to be eaten by wolves; and more or less the same is implied for all of the other Eddies out there. They don't get invited to the Capitalist Shangri-La. They just get left out in the dark amid the ruins of a civilization they can't quite manage to keep running themselves.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

The dedicated workers who are content to labor at the geniuses' behest

When did Rand lay out the notion that people who are in anyway altruistic are, because they're going against Man's Twue Nature, not really sentient? Was it before or after Shrugged?

[eyelessgame.livejournal.com]

His reward for all his dedication, if memory serves, is to be eaten by wolves;

I always wondered about a somewhat related story. If Noah's Ark was a big as they say, he needed a lot more than three sons and him to build it, even if they had, what, a century? So all Noah's assistants got treated much like Galt's workers.

(looks around) The topic is stories in books that form the foundations of religions, right?

[avram]

The three-classes setup reminds me of that bit in Hitchhiker's Guide with the spaceship full of phone sanitizers.

Which in turn reminds me of Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons", which I for a moment speculated might have been a reply to Atlas Shrugged, but turns out to have been published six years earlier.

Oh its far worse than that...

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

Because Rand gets genred as Srs Littlechair, stuff like atlas shrugged is what the mundane spec fic guy seems to have wanted mundane spec fiction to one day become.

[maruad.livejournal.com]

I like the short version better.

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

Presumably you have seen this http://angryflower.com/atlass.gif
Actually, I probably saw the link here.

[montrealais.livejournal.com]

Rats, I was going to post this.

[tsm-in-toronto.livejournal.com]

See also Dilbert channelling Ayn Rand, here (http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2006-02-01/) and here (http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2006-02-02/).

There are some flash animation cartoons mocking capitalism, here: http://www.captain-capitalism.com/animation.html.

Stephen Pastis' Pearls before Swine ran a set of strips about "Ego Man" (played by Rat), "Defender of only himself" (effectively mocking the Randites), about a year ago -- alas, the internet archives of that strip don't go back that far.

There's a lot of other cartoons out there mocking the Ayn Rand Groupies.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I was a little perturbed when I saw this, because I wanted to write the sequel to Atlas Shrugged myself, where the gleaming commune turns into a bunch of petty backstabbings amidst decay and starvation until Eddie Willers comes back and kicks their asses. To do justice to the naturalism and realistic nature of the characters, it seemed like it should be a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta.

Had to admit, though, the flower did a damn good job of it.

[(Anonymous)]

Have you seen Brad Hicks on the subject of sequels?

http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/393124.html

Bruce

[malada.livejournal.com]

Brilliant!

-m

[elegantelbow.livejournal.com]

*snerk*

I don't remember Rand being anti-Shakespeare, though.

[doc-lemming.livejournal.com]

I have kept myself pure of Rand except for Anthem (?), which I had to read in high school. However, as explained by an ex-girlfriend after she left to go date an Objectivist, apparently Rand/Objectivism was against any fiction that didn't celebrate the individual and teach Objectivism. Shakespeare would be included in that with (perhaps) certain exceptions.

I got even with her by discussing Nathaniel and Barbara Branden. I vaguely recall some mention of an affair, probably hypothetical.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Doesn't she cross her legs a lot, too?

(Dagny should be played by Sharon Stone from the 80s.)

[editrx.livejournal.com]

I forced myself to read Atlas Shrugged just out of undergrad school. Still don't really know why.

This is a much better version.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

Thought: Atlas Shrugged in the world of Girl Genius. There's a certain similarity, in that in both cases you have a small percentage of geniuses driving the world along; just in one book they're great industrialists and in the other they're mad scientists.