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I would add Anthem to that list. It predates 1984 by 11 years, and Orwell likely borrowed a lot of concepts from it.

As much as I disagree with her politics, the Ayn Rand novel Anthem somewhat explores an extreme version of this idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_(novella)

Things by Palahniuk and Rand can have a ton of intellectual value. Anthem is a good story, and everything I've read by Palahnuik has been well written. They make you think, and even if you don't come to the same conclusions as the author wants you to, at least you can see how they got there.

Blink 182 - Anthem Part Two.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ltx7_jjv8OE

Takes me back to being 15, not revising for my GCSE's and programming instead. I think I listed to the whole album (Take of your pants and jacket) on loop for about a month straight.

You may be confusing Apex Legends (published by EA, made by the same people who did Titanfall) which is a rival to Fortnite & PUBG, and Anthem (published by EA, made by Bioware) which is a rival to Destiny.

Great suggestion. This is one of my favorite books, and I enjoyed it more than Atlas Shrugged because I found it a bit more subtle.

Rand has a very distinct philosophy and is quite black-and-white, but even if you don't agree with everything hopefully you can appreciate the writing and storytelling in The Fountainhead (and others). It seems that a lot of the discussion about Rand is focused on her philosophy and if it's right or wrong. This is probably justified but also obscures the fact that she was a master at writing.

I read this book in my early 20s and loved it. Even though I've become much more liberal on many issues (proponent of universal healthcare, tax-payer paid higher ed, etc.) I can still appreciate the themes in her work.

Also just finished Anthem last night- I recommend checking it out. Super short but really gripping read.

I'm also finishing Atlas Shrugged finally this week, having just finished The Fountainhead. Next on my list is Anthem, then I think I'll go back to some non-fiction for the next couple books... like Outliers and Capital and Freedom.

I really want to know why people dislike Rand's work. I read Atlas Shrugged and Anthem a few weeks back, and I really liked both of them. Am I missing something, or is it just a matter of opinion?

I'd also like a clear refutation of that book. I've only read two Rand books: Anthem and Capitalism. I loved Anthem in spite of its anti-government bullshit because of my libertarian side but my socialist side overrides all of it and that's where my criticism of her lies.

I'm sorry I can't offer anything with regard to Atlas since I haven't read it but it's clearly rooted in her ridiculous philosophy of capitalist moralism. It doesn't stand up to even the most elementary scrutiny and once you apply any of it to real life you find that society would collapse in less than a year.

Great quote.

Leonard Cohen's Anthem is about something similar:

Ah, the wars they will be fought again /
The holy dove, she will be caught again /
Bought and sold, and bought again /
The dove is never free

Ring the bells that still can ring /
Forget your perfect offering. /
There is a crack, a crack in everything /
That's how the light gets

George Martin quotes a William Faulkner all the time about fictional subject matter.
“The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.”

It's why his fantasy stories have that gritty realism. The knights of Gondor riding against the evil horde of Sauron meme becomes parody. Good and evil is more subtle, cuts through the heart of every human being... regularly. The fantasy element is just about scale. It might be a choice between being kinda jerky and nice. Most people can be both. Novels get into a character's head. Stories where good and evil is a conflict within that head feel more real, because that's what it's like inside our heads.

There's a lot of cartoonish hubristic crap in Rand's books, and she only really has one philosophical point to make, which is that self reliance and being unafraid of naysayers is good. Which is true.

Basing your entire philosophy on a cartoon is a mistake, but bashing an author when you haven't read any of their work is a grosser mistake.

Her one good book in my opinion is "we the living" - oh, and Anthem was an interesting novella - think she inspired Tom Disch's 334

This list is somewhat dated. After looking through the editor's top 100, many of these are indeed very good. However, a cursory glance through the 'Readers' list reveals some strange/unexpected list members, that might suggest strange/skewed sample population.

Things that immediately stood out as different:

- 3 Rand books in the top 6? Really?

- 2 Scientology / Anti Psychology books near the top (#2, #11)

A look at the fiction list reveals the same bias:

Top 10 from the 'Novels List'

  ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand
  THE FOUNTAINHEAD by Ayn Rand
  BATTLEFIELD EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard
  THE LORD OF THE RINGS by J.R.R. Tolkien
  TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee
  1984 by George Orwell
  ANTHEM by Ayn Rand
  WE THE LIVING by Ayn Rand
  MISSION EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard
  FEAR by L. Ron Hubbard

There are still gems in these lists, I'm just surprised that many of these made the list, especially some of the high ranking ones. Something seems off.

I honestly think it's a terrible book that happened to retain its popularity because it got shoved in as a classic that you need to read.

There are works that I genuinely enjoy, like Anthem by Ayn Rand, even though it's moralistic propaganda.

I supposed I could reread the work again to see how I feel about it, but there are million of other works I could read.

i think that Anthem by Ayn Rand also deserves an honorable mention in this list

When I was in High School I wanted to like her books so badly. At the time, I was very much a libertarian and I had heard so many good things about them from that crowd.

Her writing style just isn't very good. It seems like hours and hours of fictional context to set up a big political rant that is supposed to be self-evidently correct within said context.

I only finished Anthem for required reading. I really didn't like it. The Rush album based on it (2112) is sooo much better.

I think the critics of Rand ignore the speculative nature of her works and focus too much on the ad hominem.

Anthem was a really good work about the dangers to an individual of a collectivist utilitarian society. I think it should be regarded up there with 1984 and Brave New World. Atlas Shrugged was a bad work of art with a keen idea. In a lot of ways, I don't think Rand had any idea what she was writing about and fetishized her own works into this strange hypercapitalist ideal. The idea that society could be abandoned by "the one percent" and left to languish has become a common theme of modern science fiction, especially in young adult fiction and anime.

Capitalism will still work from the perspective of human progress, but the progress is becoming less and less shared. Spreading out the wealth curve will logically increase human development as those with potential receive more opportunity.

Anthem by Ayn Rand. It’s really short and a tad trite but really made me rethink things. Still the only book I have read in a single sitting.

The Art of UNIX Programming. 10 years ago me really could have used it, feel like I wasted way too much time figuring out things this would have explained. Honestly I don’t know if I had been ready to hear it though.

There's a manga called Monster by Naoki Urasawa. It's considered one of the best ever written both in and outside of Japan. Guillermo del Toro at one point tried to produce a film for it. It's a post-Cold War psychological thriller set in Germany and Czechoslovakia. It tackles quite a number of questions regarding the nature of evil. I believe it has a full English translation. If not, there's probably a comparable scanlation for it using some Google-fu.

There's a light novel series by the name of Spice and Wolf. It's fully translated in English. It's about a trader, a wolf goddess, and their adventures in capitalism-related escapades as they make their way across medieval Europe.

Both of them also have anime adaptations that are close to its source material in case your kids get bored (although Spice and Wolf's is incomplete).

And, while it's not a comic book, Anthem is a novella by Ayn Rand that depicts a world set in the future without the word "I" and how , in spite of this, one man rediscovers individuality.

The subject matter for all three of these works is thought-provoking enough and appropriately challenging for 13 year-olds

Yeah. It ticks me off that Rand is associated with anarcho-capitalism (I think that's the phrase to describe people that want to replace government with corporations, no?). She isn't. She's all for government, but she has it restricted to three primary functions: depending people physically (with police), depending people morally (with law), and defending the nation (with a military). However, she says that these functions should be kept as minimal as possible, so as to give people maximum freedom.

It bugs me, because the Anthem argument ignores so much to make a snarky point (and Anthem is a terribly-written book, both Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are better-writ). It goes by this vision of Rand as a near-Nazi who wants conformity to her Galtian standard. She doesn't, and she says this repeatedly. Rather, she wants Galt to be the bringer of the message that you ought to do things using your own abilities, primarily for yourself.

She's fine with charity, as long as you give what you want to and not what you feel compelled to. She's fine with tax, as long as you're only being taxed for the services that directly apply to you. She's entirely fine with people disagreeing with her, provided they disagree based on their own moral convictions rather than on the convictions they read of others. (I thought that made the OP a bit ironic.) This all gets ignored for the blind Rand-hate that exists solely to counteract all the blind Rand-love. It's frustrating.

"To suggest that anyone -not- read them (for the sake of brevity, no less) is to suggest a reader not experience great, life-changing literature."

Brevity is one of the virtues of great literature. You'll probably learn that as you grow older and time becomes more valuable to you. Certainly, great literature can be long (Middlesex is perhaps the best novel of the past 20 years, and it weighs in at a pretty hefty 556 pages...this is still significantly shorter than Atlas), but Atlas Shrugged, as art, suffers under the weight of the philosophical treatise that it's carrying around on its back (much like the mythic Atlas, and yes, I believe he should shrug off all that extra weight).

The Fountainhead is somewhat less marred by needless words, but only Anthem is actually free of cruft, in my opinion.

"Her objectivist philosophy may be a bit overt in the latter, but never for a second could I sleep well knowing I'd proposed that others -skip- these books."

People who like what they find in the shorter Rand books will go on to read the others. People who get stuck in the mud of Galt's speech will never pickup another Rand book. That speech is simply terrible literature. It might be good philosophy, but it's not good art.

Cool taxonomy, but are there really only four types? Let's try with some examples.

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut - imagines a future where mechanical automation and IQ-optimized hiring leads to mass unemployment, but extensive welfare systems keeps the mediocre masses well-fed, just demoralized and without dignity. Combination of Huxleyan with Kafkaesque?

The Handmaid's Tale - Orwellian with a pronounced patriarchal-religious emphasis

Anthem by Ayn Rand - generic Orwellian with a primitivist/preindustrial Luddite version of Phildickian.

(Actually, we run into a convergence there. Isn't Orwellian thought control simply the overt forcible version of Phildickian thought control, the latter is more indirect, subtle, and possibly not even enforced by the state but private actors and individuals? Both involve rewriting your mind to reject liberty.)

Fahrenheit 451 - similar Phildickian rewriting of reality through both Orwellian (the firemen, the unspecified war in the background) and Huxleyan (parlor walls, overload of useless factoids) means.

Atlas Shrugged - world/U.S. in the beginning is not totalitarian, but a generic degenerate socialist bureaucratic state in decline. Whether or not Galt's Gulch is totalitarian, and what type it is, can be left as an exercise to the reader.

Neuromancer, Snow Crash, other classic cyberpunk works- not totalitarian, but heavy on the Huxleyan decadent consumerist society coupled with Phildickian distortion of reality themes.

Brazil by Terry Gilliam - perfectly Kafkaesque.

Would appreciate classification of some other classic dystopian totalitarian works, such as We by Zamyatin or even Animal Farm. Do any of them express totalitarianism in a way that breaks the four-type classification system?

"because... they're lazy... they steal... they're incompetent"

What about being trapped in a political system and/or culture that makes it impossible to live the life they imagine?

Every one of her novels touches (EDIT: focuses) on this. Anthem, We The Living, and Atlas Shrugged dealt more with the political, exhibiting characters who were unable to achieve their potential because of the political systems they had to endure. In The Fountainhead Roark spent decades suffering professionally and personally for living in a culture that values subjugation of the self to the interests of the crowd.

Also, Rand never promised that in her ideal society every individual would necessarily achieve whatever life they might imagine. Consistent with America's Declaration of Independence, it was the right to pursue happiness that she argued for.

Talk to more people that disagree with you, I'm sure you can find someone that can present you with an objectivist-flavored ethical dilemma.

Also, you should examine your axioms. There are many self-consistent moral systems starting with different axioms that produce different results. None of these systems is better than the others. Rather, each of these axioms represent something that humans value. They produce contradictory results, but this is not unexpected for reasons previously stated.

For what it's worth, I bought pretty much everything Rand ever wrote and quite a few things by Peikoff. I used to hand out copies of Anthem to friends. It was ideas such as I stated above that lead me away from objectivism. Roughly, I have a different idea of what kind of a beast a human is, and what kind of structure morality is.

Also, I think what the average person feels is right is very pertinent to the discussion of ethics. Attempts to find an objective standard of moral value beyond what humans actually value are usually flimsy and involve a lot of purposeful ignoring of flaws.

"Wow, we're definitely on opposite sides of this one."

Not sure where you got that. All of my posts on this topic should make clear that I'm a very big Rand fan, and have read all of her books (really, all of them). I would never call myself a SOME-PERSONS-NAMEian of any sort, so perhaps that's the difference. I do sometimes refer to myself as an anarcho-capitalist, so, philosophically, your Rothbardian views and mine probably coincide more than they differ. ;-)

I actually did enjoy Atlas Shrugged. But the speech is too much, the book too long (by about half), and the characters are weak (for such a long book). When I first started reading Rand, I wanted to share her books with everybody. So I recommended Atlas, her opus, to everybody I knew. None of them made it through the book. All got bogged down in the speech, and either gave up, or skimmed the rest of it. Even people who were reasonably heavy readers (though mostly pulp) still couldn't stomach the whole thing. I started recommending Anthem after that, and everybody made it through...everybody enjoyed it...and some went on to read other Rand books (I recommend The Fountainhead next).

I still believe that intelligent people can get everything they really need to know about Rand's philosophy from Anthem. And, of course, dumb folks can actually read Anthem, understand it, and enjoy it.

But, you're definitely weird to think "Catcher in the Rye" is shallow. Perhaps you like a lot of words in your stories. I don't. Word of advice: Stay away from Hemingway, you won't like it.

So why did Timeline make the list?

I was thinking about leaving it off because it is really, really bad for anyone who actually reads Sci-Fi. I put it on the list because despite the fact that it's almost completely unreadable because the Wal*Mart set needs their Sci-Fi too. I wanted the list to cover as broad a spectrum of sci-fi as I could without making it 100 items long.

I left off a lot of greats including:

Vernor Vinge Dan Simmons Arthur C Clarke Iain M. Banks

and other works by Stross and a few others

Why is Rand on this list? Well, besides the Bible (go figure) Atlas Shrugged is apparently the most influential book ever written. Do I agree with the whole Objectivist shtick? Not hardly but it is still worth mentioning.

The Giver? Like Anthem it's Sci-Fi for grade schoolers, worth mentioning because a lot of people were introduced to Sci-Fi with books like this.

Leave suggestions, as many as you want. If you don't see it on the list it probably would have been there if I had remembered it while I was compiling.