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Originally Posted by ApK
You do realize the point of an analogy is to make things EASIER to understand, right?
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Your defensiveness after having missed a non-sequitur joke says more about you than any vain appeal to the hivemind will ever say about anyone else. Everyone misses a joke from time to time. Only the humorless go after the person who happened to make it.
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Show of hands from the crowd, please: Who got that?
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Show of minds: Why would that ever matter to anyone but an anti-intellectual evangelist in the mood for a public burning?
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Anythewho, on the point of authors and their politics, I'm guessing Ayn Rand would have preferred that the folks who reviewed "Atlas Shrugged" agreed with you.
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Ayn Rand's fiction is overtly about politics, but that's not why it's bad. It's bad in the sense that Objectivist fiction (like the '30s proletariat novel and other sub-genres, such as pornography, when completely subservient to the grid of wish fulfillment) is not well written so long as its simplistic aim dictates all content (including, in Rand's case, the hilariously stilted dialog).
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I can state with certainty that a writer's politics IS often reflected in their fiction, overtly or not.
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You're looking for true confessions in an art which is intended to explore the subtleties of an artificial world.
The personality of the writer always does find ways in, political and otherwise -- but that has nothing to do with the
merits of said fiction, which is all that matters unless the aim is propaganda.
Even then, when the writer is gifted, their chops can subvert whatever agenda they intended to pursue.
And then, of course, there's this:
