At 01:27 AM 1/23/01 -0500, dmolnar wrote:
This suggests a tangent - If we look at works of fiction which were politically or socially influential in their day, how many were entertaining? how many were "good stories"? A lot of polemics end up seeming transparent and thin today (I'm thinking in particular of Bellamy's _Looking Backward_, but there are probably other examples). They had to capture their audience somehow, which seems to say something about the audience of the time (or maybe just about the tendency people have to overlook faults in a book which agrees with them).
There's always Ayn Rand - "The Fountainhead" has at least some depth of characters, as opposed to her later and more polemic <fnord>"Telemachus Sneezed", with the 600-page speech by John Guilt</fnord> "Atlas Shrugged", with its much thinner characters and increased preachiness. On the other hand, a lot of Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings haven't passed the physical tests of time, and I gather geodesic domes tend to leak even if they're not built as badly as those that Some Local Cypherpunks are living in - we'll see how geodesic economies do... Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639