amicus
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Sep 28, 2003
- Posts
- 14,812
Ayn Rand & Robert Heinlein
My daughter emailed me yesterday: “Dad, tell me some books to read, I need something to think about…”
No, I didn’t give her Rand and Heinlein, nor even Hemingway or Steinbeck, instead, I suggested Ann McCaffrey, “The Rowan” & “Pern” series, Wilbur Smith and Nevil Shute Norway, perhaps seventy five volumes between them that I have read; should keep her reading for a while.
But somehow, her inquiry touched off a perusal in my mind of the writers that had most influenced my reading over a half century of time and I decided on Rand and Heinlein as the most likely culprits.
For those of you who hate Ayn Rand because your high school teachers and college teachers told you to and have never read her, may I suggest, just for the hell of it, that you read Atlas Shrugged?
When I first read Atlas, well over a thousand pages, I was thrilled to meet the leading characters in the novel, Dagney, Hank and Francisco, as young people and follow their growth and maturation through the pages of the novel, fascinating and greatly impressed that such people ‘could and ought to’ exist.
As I was young, barely eighteen, when I first read it, young and impressionable, I struggled to follow the motivations of the characterization of the ‘good guys and the bad guys’, so easy to determine in my Superman comics, or Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, like I said, young and dumb.
But I could not put it down; I stayed up two whole days and nights at my much slower reading speed then and read the whole damned thing in one sitting, with much coffee and cigarettes, aboard the USS Greer County, underway in the Pacific.
I was never quite the same afterwards.
Heinlein is a different story. If I was intellectually challenged by John Galt, my masculine ego was massaged by Heinlein.
I think it was Lazarus Long, in “Time enough for Love”, a man who lived 2500 years, that kept me smiling throughout the book. Heinlein wrote characters that were a, ‘man’s man’, a capable, strong, competent, moral and mean son-of-a-bitch, that would protect your back in a fight and seduce your wife if you turned your head. I liked his characters.
So, yes, were I to be asked to name the two most influential writers I have read, it would be Rand and Heinlein.
Amicus, (I am on point and you Pussies better keep up!)
My daughter emailed me yesterday: “Dad, tell me some books to read, I need something to think about…”
No, I didn’t give her Rand and Heinlein, nor even Hemingway or Steinbeck, instead, I suggested Ann McCaffrey, “The Rowan” & “Pern” series, Wilbur Smith and Nevil Shute Norway, perhaps seventy five volumes between them that I have read; should keep her reading for a while.
But somehow, her inquiry touched off a perusal in my mind of the writers that had most influenced my reading over a half century of time and I decided on Rand and Heinlein as the most likely culprits.
For those of you who hate Ayn Rand because your high school teachers and college teachers told you to and have never read her, may I suggest, just for the hell of it, that you read Atlas Shrugged?
When I first read Atlas, well over a thousand pages, I was thrilled to meet the leading characters in the novel, Dagney, Hank and Francisco, as young people and follow their growth and maturation through the pages of the novel, fascinating and greatly impressed that such people ‘could and ought to’ exist.
As I was young, barely eighteen, when I first read it, young and impressionable, I struggled to follow the motivations of the characterization of the ‘good guys and the bad guys’, so easy to determine in my Superman comics, or Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, like I said, young and dumb.
But I could not put it down; I stayed up two whole days and nights at my much slower reading speed then and read the whole damned thing in one sitting, with much coffee and cigarettes, aboard the USS Greer County, underway in the Pacific.
I was never quite the same afterwards.
Heinlein is a different story. If I was intellectually challenged by John Galt, my masculine ego was massaged by Heinlein.
I think it was Lazarus Long, in “Time enough for Love”, a man who lived 2500 years, that kept me smiling throughout the book. Heinlein wrote characters that were a, ‘man’s man’, a capable, strong, competent, moral and mean son-of-a-bitch, that would protect your back in a fight and seduce your wife if you turned your head. I liked his characters.
So, yes, were I to be asked to name the two most influential writers I have read, it would be Rand and Heinlein.
Amicus, (I am on point and you Pussies better keep up!)
) but had not concretized in such explicit terms.
