Ayn Rand

Name:	Ayn Rand
Also Known As:	Alice O'Connor, Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
Occupation:	author
Medium:	Books
Works:	The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged
Official Website(s):
Fan Website(s):
On Fanlore:	Related pages

Ayn Rand is a controversial Russian-born American novelist and screenwriter.

Her works include Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged.

Out of The Fountainhead she eventually developed an ideological system called Objectivism, to which she dedicated several non-fiction books and which is central to the plot of Atlas Shrugged. The Objectivist movement started out as a group of fans of The Fountainhead.

Ayn Rand and Canon

Steve Ditko was a fan of her works and ideology, and this was reflected in his solo comics as well as his work on Spider-Man. Another literary fan is Terry Goodkind, whose increasing focus on Randian themes in later novels led to fan backlash.

BioShock is a series of first-person shooter video games set in dystopian societies. The first two games, BioShock (2007) and BioShock 2 (2010), take place in the underwater city of Rapture, where society is based on the Objectivist principles of Ayn Rand.

Ayn Rand and Fandom

As an influential philosopher and public figure of the 20th century, Ayn Rand has left her impact on fandom as well. There's a few dozen fanworks for her books on AO3 and FFN, but a number of works for other fandoms may be influence by her ideas or considered in conversation with Objectivism.

Star Trek

Sondra Marshak, an early and influential Star Trek: TOS fan, was an avowed Objectivist and a devotee of Ayn Rand from the age of thirteen. Marshak believed that "Star Trek" advanced Objectivist ideals. She explained these ideals at several points in Star Trek Lives!.

Two years after that book was published, James Wolcott of "The Village Voice" wrote an essay called Big Brother is Trekking You in which he was disparaging about many things, including Star Trek: TOS itself, as well as female sexuality:

Remember the movie version of "The Fountainhead"? Patricia Neal visits the quarry where a" sweaty, muscular Gary Cooper is drilling away. The shots jump from his drilling to the aroused reaction of Neal to his drilling. A cigar, said Freud, may just be a cigar but a movie drill, say I, is not just a drill. In Ayn Rand novels the women find their fulfillment after submitting to the sexual sovereignty of phallic heroes like John Galt and Howard Roark. (Together, Ayn Rand and Una Wert-Muller could rule the world.) So I began to get suspicious when the triad printed lush encomiums in "Star Trek Lives!" to Ayn Rand's philosophy, for it suggested that beneath the Optimism Effect was a vulgarized Nietzscheanism — the will-to-power banalized in the stud-adventurer. Captain Kirk. After all, the vast majority of fan writers — i.e., those who publish stories in fan publications based upon the Trek characters — are women, and their stories (at least the ones referred to in "Star Trek Lives!") are sexually charged-up. What are they responding to? Aside from the mastery of power, and the sexual attractiveness of the comically handsome William Shatner (Kirk) and the imperturbable Leonard Nimoy (Spock), what we have here, bless Leslie Fiedler, is the return of runaway boys on the biggest damn raft you can imagine — the U.S.S. Enterprise. Male readers have always been drawn to the story of two men venturing out together, but "Star Trek" also hooks the women by the sexual tension beneath that buddy-buddiness — a sci-fi variation of Newman and Redford.

Marshak's admiration of Rand influenced her and co-writer's 1982 Star Trek pro novel, The Prometheus Design. One fan wrote about "The Prometheus Design" and said: "There are some superb descriptive passages in the book, but for the most part they are eclipsed by a style that has all the humorless drive of an Ayn Rand with none of its power."

In 2014, a fan commented that Gene Roddenberry did not share this vision with Marshak and her co-writers:

I went to a Star Trek convention in Maryland when some of the fans (all female) were touting these novels as finally following the ideas and wishes of the fan community. I objected that the novels were written as if Roddenberry had built Star Trek around Ayn Rand philosophy, which was obviously not the case. Their response was that Shatner had read the books and liked them, which seemed to me at the time (and still) to be more a matter of Shatner’s philosophy and even more his love of being the sole active agent at the center of any story.

Example Fanworks

• Atlas Plugged, ^{Archived version}, a Tumblr blog by ms-demeanor for discussing Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged (including a live-blog/read through currently in progress)

"Marjorie," a Darkover character portrayed in the zine Jumeaux, the artist is Pyracantha: "Ayn Rand! The notorious capitalist champion's grandiose and technocratic output filled the fantasy of at least one Darkover fan who created a Rand-esque character to bring the Rand aesthetic to the world of the Red Sun.... Black ink on illustration board, 8" x 10", 1982."

• the Inception Alpha/Beta/Omega AU by the ragnarok was described by the author in 2011: "...at some point all the economic/political articles I've been reading over the summer have filtered in, and I've been reading a lot; as well as some experiences from attending protests. ... So this is a mish-mash of Id-based indulgence and political wankery. Basically not unlike a cheesy romance novel written by a cheap socialist Ayn Rand knock off. With porn.".

Archives & Resources

Official links:

• Ayn Rand on the IMDb
• Wikipedia: Ayn Rand
• Ayn Rand entry at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• The Ayn Rand Insitute website

Fannish Links:

• AO3: Ayn Rand (character tag), Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand (fandom tag), The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand (fandom tag), Anthem - Ayn Rand (fandom tag), We The Living - Ayn Rand (fandom tag), Other Ayn Rand Tags
• Tumblr: #Ayn Rand
• Fandom.com wikis: Ayn Rand at The Atlas Shrugged Wiki, The Libertarianism Wiki, The Literature Wiki
• Ayn Rand Rewrites