Last week I read a short science fiction book called The Unending Night by a guy called George Smith. It was a used book store find and was apparently written in 1964. However, there is no copyright date in the book itself. The story concerns two scientist brothers who develop a technique for building massive nuclear fusion generators able to provide all the energy that Earth and the newly settled Mars could ever need. The one brother, Lee, is concerned about the strength of the magnetic fields required to keep the super hot plasma away from the containers of radioactive material. The other brother, Lance is completely believes Lee to be a needless worry-wart and insists that the schedule to fire up the generators be maintained. Lance is a believer in the necessity of the great thinkers and producers to lead the rest of humanity to greater things at the expense of those lesser folk (like his brother) who stand in the way of progress. He is supported and encouraged by a tall, beautiful, blonde writer whose opinion of the "regular folk" is even more degenerate.
In the course of reading this narrative I couldn't help thinking of some of the characters in Ayn Rand's novels, especially The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Smith portrays Kristy Konrad as his version of Rand's Dagny Taggert and Lance seems to be modeled after Howard Roark. However, they are far from protagonists. In fact it is due to Lance's hubris (with full support from Kristy) that the fusion plant on Mars explodes and sends the planet hurtling towards Earth. This made me wonder if Smith specifically wrote these characters as a rejection of the quasi-Nietzschean supermen that populate Rand's novels.
I say this as one who went through a Libertarian phase and for a time enjoyed reading Ayn Rand's novels and essays. I still believe in the ideal that government should interfere as little as possible in our lives, especially regarding civil liberties. However, my support for the Libertarian economic philosophy ultimately collapsed. Corporate oppression is just as problematic as oppression by the government, especially given the identity of personhood granted to corporate entities and the recent SCOTUS "Citizens United" decision that rejected limits to corporate spending on political campaigns. This will foster the continuing increase of corporate control over our lives. A control that has been manifest by the oppressive use of advertising and its encouragement of mindless consumerism and will now likely assert total control over the one antidote the people had available in the past: the political system.
Anyhow, The Unending Night is an enjoyable and fast read. Smith is certainly no Ray Bradbury but on the other hand he is (was?) no Ayn Rand either, exhibiting a pointed brevity and fast pace instead of a turgid narrative beholden to a questionable philosophy.
