alt Hacker News> Atlas Shrugged has horrific writing, separate from what I feel about the politics.
Following the tangent: I read the book "blind", when I was mind-numbling bored for a couple pre-dialup weeks at a relative's house. Eventually I decided to finish it purely out of spite so that I could confidently denounce it as trash in the future. (And today it pays off?)
In short, it's a book of incredible hypocrisy which also disrespects the reader's intelligence and time.
Hypocrisy, because Rand asserts that certain appeals to emotion or outcome are evil tools of fictional villains, while simultaneously doing the exact same thing in the real world to the audience. The difference is that instead of "think of the starving children", it's "think of the Marty Stu [0] corporate executive üermenschen", the characters the author has been playing up for a couple hundred pages already.
This is compounded by the manifesto chapter where Marty Stu does nothing but monologue. The jarring transition reveals how the story was really just an afterthought, a kind of necessary deceit to get people ready to swallow a pompous diatribe without looking at it too closely.
> certain appeals to emotion or outcome are evil tools of fictional villains, while simultaneously doing the exact same thing
You would be correct if that were the whole truth about Atlas Shrugged: defending protagonists on emotional grounds.
But it’s not the whole truth. The very monologue that you dismiss is the tool that provides the emotion with the principle. You know the characters’ reasons for holding their emotions.
Ayn Rand never said that one shouldn’t feel or express one’s emotions. On the contrary, “. . . emotions are not his enemies, they are his means of enjoying life” [1].
In fact, every emotional appeal used in the novel is supported by argument, sooner or later. You cannot say, for example, that the dismissal of James Taggart or Robert Stadler is purely emotional.
> The jarring transition reveals how the story was really just an afterthought
Your claim would be valid if the jarring transition were not Galt’s speech but some other nonfiction. The case is the opposite: the story and speech are very much integral.
The pause of events as such is a neutral tool, with precedents (The Battle of Waterloo in Les Miserables).
[1]: https://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/emotions.html