It certainly seems likely. He was a high achiever in technology, and a lot of them are Aspies.

On the other hand, AR felt that art, which included her work, should omit people's blemishes as a distraction from what it was trying to convey. So even had she understood psychology, she probably would not have given him that flaw, or at least would have tried to keep it unnoticed.

..."Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea."
- (Kent Lansing in The Fountainhead)

Ayn Rand left men with a philosophical guideline as to what are good ideas to stand by - the mixed system you live in causes trauma and these resultant syndromes.
Although not 100% structurally integrated then, they are now, and into a motor to boot - come and see it all for yourself in June:

www.GaltsGulchPortal.blogspot.ca

And I mean it.
JohnGalt Iamoura

I did not say it was. Someone else might have, but not I. That scene was the one time we saw John Galt do anything sexual at all.

Thanks, MikeMarotta. I actually looked up to see if there were also a star by the name you typed! It is a tough crowd around the Gulch and I doublecheck before I correct.

EAJ's link (http://musingsofanaspie.com/2013/01/1...) was a pleasure to read, in an "Anthropologist on Mars" sense. It is a good thing that I have dogs, because it means that I have something I can chat with normal people about.

Jan

The tunnel scene was not rape. It was a command performance.

As somebody who knows a lot about the disorder I think it's possible. The rest of us would lets our peckers do our thinking for us, or make some other mistake that would take our focus off of the goal.

Haha...sorry.

Seriously - I won't be surprised if somebody on the spectrum is the one who cures cancer.

A hero must make a life-altering decision in the course of the narrative. A villain sets himself on one course of action, sticks to it, and will be stopped only by death or total, ignominious defeat.

John Galt makes his life-altering decision before the period of the narrative.

The true heroes of AS are Dagny Taggart and Henry Rearden. Each must make life-altering decisions--and decide whether John Galt is as much a villain as Dagny thought he was--before she connected the slang name with the man draining the brains of the world.

The Greek prefix anti- means not only "opposite to" but "substituting for." An "anti-villain" displays all the drive, single-minded purpose, and stopped-only-by-death quality of a villain. But unlike a villain, he serves a just cause, not a venal or nefarious one.

This might go against your grain, I know. You are used to defining a hero as "one serving a just cause" and a villain as "one serving a wicked cause." My experience, in one writers' conference after another, tells me different. Oddly enough, you're closer to the truth than you think. Of course villains have values--rather shortsighted ones, but values nonetheless. Anti-villains value most of the same things you and I do. True villains value only themselves and their own aggrandizement, and do not value other people's lives, liberties, or property, except to the extent they flat-out covet them.

Similarly, anti-heroes make life-altering decisions that lead them to lives of crime or other rebellion against true justice instead of service of just causes. Senator Joseph Harrison Paine (D-Colo.), in Mister Smith Goes to Washington (dir. Frank Capra; with James Stewart, Jean Arthur, and Claude Rains; Columbia Pictures, 1939), is the most instructive example I can cite here. When two conflicting value sets collide, he chooses the unjust one--until his opponent, by refusing to surrender until he literally cannot stand any longer, so pricks his conscience that he first attempts suicide, then makes an almost incoherent confession on the Senate floor.

An Aspie herself, for sure.

Thanks for the link. I took the quiz. I am normal. I mean, I have both neurotypical and neurodiverse traits. For one thing, at my age, I have out-grown many of the problems of ASD. That happens. Also, I have been through enough counseling to know to work at certain functions while in social situations. And, paradoxically, perhaps, I came to understand social functioning as something to be learned and practiced, like an arcane academic subject.

When I found Big Bang Theory on the library shelf in 2010, I brought it home. My wife could not watch it. It was too much like being at work. She got over that and we are collecting a full set of DVDs. We both work in IT (who doesn't?) and for my last job, I actually went out and bought long-sleeved t-shirts so that I could wear short-sleeved Ts over them. Everyone in the office dressed like Sheldon. I would have preferred being more dressed up, but I already know from long experience that is better to blend in... even among weirdos.

You should be careful with anti-concepts.

Lately, I have tried to get away from constructions of un and non- if a positive word exists. The horror in Orwell's 1984 was the contraction of language through Newspeak: ungood.

John Galt was not an anti-villain. I do not know what point you are trying to make by blanking out on the concept of a hero. Moreover, a hero is not an anti-villiain because villains have values, too. Last night I watched GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra. The dastardly villains all had values.

The anti-hero lacks values. Thomas Mann's Felix Krull is one example. The original Thomas Crowne in the 1968 version was another. The 1999 remake was all about values.

I do not usually misspell words. I look them up. That's what the browser is for. Thanks, also, for the story. You are not mundane.

Many who get classified with Asperger's syndrome merely have yet to meet people of sufficient intelligence to have meaningful relationships with. Both my daughter and I were that way before college.

Quite right.

One of my favorite exchanges of all Rand that I've read. There are soaring themes elsewhere but those lines boil it down to a nugget.

Temple Grandin "one of the highest functioning individuals with autism in the world" says in "Emergence: Labeled Autistic" that Simon Baron-Cohen in England "did a study that showed . . . two and a half times as many engineers [compared to norms] in the family histories of people with Asperger's Syndrome."

my sister works with Aspergers kids every day, and
Galt is a notch above, as a brilliant engineer who
convinces others to shrug -- in my humble opinion --
he's just a very selective hugger! -- j
.

Exactly.

Ah yes. The great Leibowitcz. Thanks for a pleasant memory.

Whether it was Dominatrix Dominique or Dominatrix Dagny (gee, is Dagny short for Domme?), Rand had the female as submissive in violent BDSM scenes as distinct from romantic settings of allurement. Several explanations for this come to mind.

Ironic, considering her name was Dominique.

Asperger's syndrome is quite common amongst my students at FIT. We cater to High Tech with a Human Touch.

Makes me ask, how much was Ayn, Dominique and how much was Ayn, Dagny?

They were. But whereas Dominique Francon was "myself in a bad mood" (AR's words), Dagny Taggart was AR at the top of her game. So maybe AR in a bad mood wanted someone to knock her around a bit. AR in a good mood probably wouldn't stand for that.

AE van Vogt's books have not aged well for me - probably due to their being utterly steeped in 1950's gender mindset (often, this does not bother me in older SF, but for van Vogt and Doc Smith it does). I remember reading Slan when I was a kid.

Fortunately, at several schools I attended, they shelved the teachers books in the same library as the kids' books...so I was able to get hold of Canticle for Leibowitcz and some other good stuff.

The term "mundane" has been used a lot: B5 had the PsyCorp apply it to non-telepaths, and the SCA uses it to refer to unimaginative and uninteresting normal people (who do not do reenactment; SciFi and interesting people are exempted, even if they do not do medieval reenactment).

This is all tribalism, but I don't really disapprove. I would rather be a slan.

Jan
"Aldebaran"???