He can keep his hands off my stash too. LOL!
And right after I wrote that, I really did laugh.

Because "social and economic commentary" is not a category? I haven't found that section of the library yet..

"Think Star Trek"
If you don't need money, then you certainly don't need mine.
https://youtu.be/Wx5I7uEEEYo?t=4s

I just picked up these two issues on eBay, $12.45 for both. Not in very good shape, but I'm only interested in the articles so that's okay.

Campbell's "[T]his is a book to start on Friday evening. You won't be much good to anyone else until you've been allowed to finish it." rings true. Begun on the 4-hour ride to start college. Finished before sleep the next day.

Agreed. Which is why I at first took the change to reflect Rand's ignorance of American civics, and of the English language. Recall: in The Fountainhead, she used the word "dipsomania" to stand for the disease we all know as alcoholism.

I didn’t know that. The change in titles did involve a trade-off. It was probably easier for a reader to accept a generic legislature and head of state doing the evil things they did, than it would be to believe that a near-future Congress and President would do so. But by altering a fundamental feature of the U.S. political system, the change also weakened the link in the reader’s mind between the America that they knew in 1957 and America as it might exist a few decades later.

Actually, it is a love story. Ayn Rand said: "That's all it ever was." If you read the other comments and follow the link provided by CBJ https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post... you will see that John W. Campbell identified the fact that the story starts with individuals and their families.

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.

Thanks! That was interesting. I do collect a bit. I have some of the magazines in which William Gibson's works first appeared. I also have Neuromancer and others in first edition hard back. So, I will keep an eye own for those two issues of Astounding when I am in the mood to acquire.

Paul Ryan is a coward. He curried favor with Objectivists, speaking at an Atlas Society dinner, for example. He was done in by his nomination to run for the vice presidency in Mitt Romney's campaign. That thrust Paul Ryan into the national spotlight. He retreated.

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.

Someone mentioned that fact to her shortly after publication, and she said, "Yes, I know."

Positive and negative gravitation, did you say? Why, you now have the basis for total gravity manipulation--the dream of the flight sciences.

Any form of energy must have a certain destructive potential in order to be even "peaceably" useful. Petroleum-based fuels are not only flammable but also, under the right circumstances, explosive. The atomic bomb decided the Second World War at great cost in injury and damage before someone harnessed atomic power to fuel the ships of the United States Navy and supply power to many of the world's cities. Quantum foam would be no different. Indeed a simplified Atlas Shrugged dramatization would make quantum foam the real basis of Project X, not the relatively poorly understood sound effect.

In the dark past of Science Fiction, the Future (at least the way the future was supposed to be) belonged to technocrats, progressives and socialists. In a sort of Hegelian antithesis and synthesis, some sf writers, including Bob Heinlein, produced stories that were anti-progressive or anti-socialist.

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...

All true enough. But did you know that Rand found distasteful the idea of a Congress and President of the United States behaving so shamefully? She changed those titles for that specific reason, and said so publicly when someone asked about it.

About Elron, Sprague DeCamp said, "I knew Ron Hubbard when he was just a small-time crook."

The social planners are always trying to discredit Ayn's work in hopes that it will not be read. When I first heard of Ayn Rand I was told that she was interested in witchcraft and her books were based on that theme. I avoided her books until a friend of mine read one and told me that the previous report was erroneous and I would find her work very interesting. I am thankful someone I trusted had referred me to her work, I devoured everything I could find of hers after reading one book.

All sides label. But we hear the collectivists' labels more because the media lean that way.

This is somewhat arguable in the case of AS, since every element of the "Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog Law" was already law in the US before AS was published. Rand probably just didn't notice.

You beat me to it.

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.

My understanding is that alternate history involves changing one or more events in the past. Atlas Shrugged and 1984 would qualify as alternate history now, since the "events" in both novels take place prior to 2016, but they were not alternate history at the time they were written.

From Wikipedia: “Atlas Shrugged includes elements of science fiction, mystery, and romance, and it contains Rand's most extensive statement of Objectivism in any of her works of fiction.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_S...

I see the unicameral legislature and “head of state” as a device to simplify the plot and reduce the political situation to essentials, especially the statist mentality, range-of-the-moment pragmatism and lust for power that infected both political parties even back in Ayn Rand’s day. By then, quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial bodies in the form of regulatory agencies already had sweeping powers – that aspect of Atlas Shrugged was not futuristic at all.

Old dino approves of this appendage.

I am not sure if this is appropriate in an objectivist post but it may shed some light on a possible mechanism for Galts motor.
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.