Is Satan evil?

[thesummerqueen]

When Rand got up to give a lecture on Objectivism, that was a lecture. If she worked a lot of those same theories into the book, then she did what many other authors have done...albeit in a stunningly boring fashion...and it was still a novel exploring (in a rather biased and cumbersome way) her ideas on morality.

I'm not sure what you were reading, but I've given lectures (only to classmates, but still) and I've read a plethora of books. Atlas Shrugged remains a book.

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I'm still not sure where the argument about this is. She took her principles and placed them in a (shitty but still defined) plot. This wasn't a point by point analysis of what she thought, but a poor attempt at using fiction to describe her thoughts, ideas and values. Because she was less subtle than the rather unsubtle Tolkien, or C.S. Lewis...or Stephanie Meyer...is no reason to say that she isn't exploring her values in a fictional setting, nor is the fact that she concludes right back where she started. The good thing is that just like discussing the motives of Sauron and how we feel about them, we can discuss the motives of Dagny, Hank, and all the other characters and why we don't agree with them. Even better, we can discuss how the author treated both characters and the themes in the story, because even bad authors conjure up distinctive character personalities whom we might feel deserved a better "mother" or "father" - which is how I often feel about Rand's novels.

If you have a problem with how it's done, please defer your complaints to the "Rand is a shitty writer" hotline. Meanwhile, please make note that she had a plotline, she had protagonists whose values and ideas were challenged by other characters, and she had a fictional setting. Seems like a novel exploring her whacked out ideas to me.