Atlas Shrugged

Author: Ayn Rand

Personally, I think Ayn Rand's novels always deserve a top 25 listing because of their progressive thinking and liberally sexual attitudes. Don't agree with me? Have fun with your Sunday church, no coffee or booze, and get married at 18. I know which life Rand and I prefer! There isn't much that scares me more than current American laws, judicial bodies, and politics, but Ayn Rand's dystopian alternate history America is up there. Sometimes when I hear about certain states locking up pregnant women in jail cells so they can't have abortions, I think the world is screwed, but then I think of the amorphous "Head of State" in Rand's Atlas Shrugged, where the judiciary, legislative and executive branches have come together, and I know it could be much worse. Given Rand's deliberate omission of a historical context, you may be wondering how this dystopian novel makes itself on to an alternate history novel list. Objectivist commentator, Richard Lawrence, suggested that the alternate history interpretation of the novel was more plausible than the near history interpretation, due to a historical timeline where certain pieces of technology did not exist, like computers and airplane travel. As mentioned in our Top 25 Dystopian Science Fiction Novel List [link URL],Atlas Shrugged details a dystopian America in an alternate history, where society's most productive citizens refuse to be exploited by taxation and regulations, and go on strike. It shows that a world where people are not free to create is doomed, and that society will collapse when its citizens are slaves to the government.