[Ask the Gulch] Why is Atlas Shrugged usually labeled as science fiction when it is obviously social and economic commentary?
Posted by ProfChuck 8 years, 10 months ago to Ask the Gulch
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And right after I wrote that, I really did laugh.
If you don't need money, then you certainly don't need mine.
https://youtu.be/Wx5I7uEEEYo?t=4s
I do not agree that calling AS "science fiction" works to discredit it in a society that cannot get enough Star Trek. As has been pointed out by others, in all my years since 1966, I have never seen it shelved with other science fiction.
Anyone with insight and knowledge could have crafted a position for Paul Ryan to articulate. He apparently had no such intellectual acumen of his own.
Let me offer this: "Yes, Ayn Rand was an atheist and I am a Roman Catholic. Rand had a lot of respect for the Catholic scholastic tradition and praised St. Thomas Aquinas. But she chose not to believe in God, which is a consequence of the free will that God gave her. It has no bearing on the correctness of her ideas in other areas, especially social, political, and economic matters."
I could write much more on that. Do you know about Ayn Rand's letter to the Reverend Dudley? You can still view it on eBay here:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/ws/eBayISAPI....
It is discussed on Objectivist Living here:
http://www.objectivistliving.com/foru...
And Rebirth of Reason here:
http://rebirthofreason.com/cgi-bin/SH...
And Christian Egoist here:
http://www.thechristianegoist.com/201...
I am only pointing out that Paul Ryan could have talked his way out of the problem. Politicians are supposed to be good at that. I believe that his real self came out: he was just using Ayn Rand (and her admirers) for political purposes of his own.
The question of which books ARE science fiction and which are not has occupied the minds of sf fans for decades.
Referring to Rand's works as (mere) science fiction is one of the many methods of disparagement applied by her detractors over the decades. Rand herself did not care for the sf genre, according to remarks that I heard her make in answer to questions about sf. She often bristled at attempts to classify her style into some literary compartment, but I recollect hearing her say that "Anthem" was a poem.
In the vast library of the MIT Science Fiction Society ("We're not fans, we just read the stuff.) the Bible was at one time shelved under Anthologies, G.
Let's check the catalogue:
http://mitsfs.mit.edu/pinkdex/index?t...
author(s) . . . title(s)
GOD . . . . HOLY BIBLE, THE (GIDEON)
Let's see if they have anything by Ayn Rand:
http://mitsfs.mit.edu/pinkdex/index?t...
author(s) . . . title(s)
RAND, AYN . . . ANTHEM
RAND, AYN . . . ATLAS SHRUGGED
RAND, AYN . . . FOUNTAINHEAD, THE
The MITSFS library is missing, according to the aforementioned Pinkdex, a notable work (a cookbook) by sf author Anne McCaffrey: "Cooking Out Of This World." Someone should donate a copy to them.
https://www.amazon.com/Cooking-This-W...
Or perhaps not. The MITSFS Library is running out of shelf space. Perhaps someone would like to donate them a building.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Sci...
More to the point, most science fiction is social commentary, and a huge amount of social commentary is SF. Frankenstein, 1984, Soylent Green all were written primarily as social commentary, but all are considered SF. So too most of the works of Heinlein, and Asimov before him.
I only know of two authors who ever actually tried to get the SF label removed from their stories. One was Harlan Ellison, who thought it hurt his story sales. (It's hard to judge whether he was right, since he published very little new material after that time.) The other was L. Ron Hubbard, who actually said in an interview that he intended to start a religion in order to get rich, and did so. He decided it would hurt his recruiting if his prospects knew he had been an SF author.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_S...
The predictions of the dimensions of quantum foam are that the mean value is several orders of magnitude smaller than that of a proton. However, the quantity of these fluctuations is so large that their presence can inferred by several different experiments including the Casimir effect. The problem is that according to special relativity any energy represented by QF should also produce a space-time curvature which has never been observed. This space-time curvature would manifest its self as an observable cosmological constant. Recent astronomical observations suggest that a positive cosmological constant may be present because the observed rate of expansion of the universe is inconsistent with both Newtonian and Einsteinian mechanics. It has been suggested that QF consists of complementary pairs of particles not of matter and antimatter but of positive and negative gravitation. While this possibility is not part of the standard model of quantum mechanics there is a mathematical formalism that extends general relativity to include it. This is found in the deSitter space equations. Based on some (reasonable?) assumptions the energy available from quantum foam is about 20 orders of magnitude greater than that from matter-antimatter annihilation reactions of an equal volume of space. In other words the vacuum energy contained in one cubic centimeter of empty space is greater than the mass-energy equivalent of the entire solar system! Harvesting even a tiny fraction of this would more than fuel Galts motor. Releasing much more than that would be incredibly destructive.
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