Scalzi on Rand

An odd bit of link-jumping led me to John Scalzi's thoughts on Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

I'm jealous of anyone who can write like this:

The fact that apparently a very large number of people don’t recognize Galt as the genocidal prick he is suggests a) Rand’s skill at stacking the story-telling deck is not to be discounted, and b) as with any audience with a large number of nerds in it, a non-trivial number of Atlas Shrugged readers are possibly far enough along the Asperger spectrum that they don’t recognize humanity does not in fact easily suss out into Randian capitalist superheroes on one side and craven socialist losers on the other, or that Rand’s neatly-stacked deck doesn’t mirror the world as it is, or (if one gives it any sort of genuine reflection) model it as it should be.

Scalzi, though you might not have guessed it from the foregoing, is a fan of the novel. Not so I.

Somewhat to my surprise, I was angry when I finished reading -- but not by the political philosophy: I couldn't take the book seriously enough for that. No, what left me completely pissed about Atlas Shrugged was its unrelenting dullness. The limp story was hardly worth the telling, for starters, but Rand went further by devising a uniquely overwrought, yet lifeless, style, and sustaining it for hundreds of pages beyond what even a dedicated word-padder like Dickens would have dared. I had been promised a life-changing novel: I got a pointless, joyless screed. I was angry that I had lost time to it, and I wanted that time back.