Arthur D. Hlavaty

When Ayn Rand was a little girl, her parents took all her toys away to give to the "less fortunate." Perhaps the memory of that bit of abuse was triggered when people advocated altruism, and that's why she was like that.

When I was a little boy, public school told me that understanding the stuff the first time was (as we would now say) a privilege, and Equality required that I STFU and not act out while they kept repeating things for the slow kids and nothing was offered for me. When people advocate egalitarianism, I try not to be like Ayn Rand, but I don't always succeed.

I think I was shunted into the wrong science fiction. When I was a child, I was sure that I was in the early chapters of the sf in which machines did the maintenance. Just as someday there would be small cheap machines that could do arithmetic faster and better than people could and there would be social progress such that all over the country people of all colors could drink from the same water fountains, so I expected to live in a world where the Robot Maid cleaned up and we threw the garbage in the Oubliette. But something happened, and now I'm in a world where we are all supposed to be the color of envy and nausea (but at least someone wrote a song called "It's not easy being green").

In the world of Connie Willis's "Even the Queen" (which, alas, we haven't reached either), there are still people loyal to the old ways, known as Cyclists. In my world there would be Recyclists, those who unnecessarily processed the garbage themselves. There would be Nacirema-like satires of them, treating them as worshipers of the matter that they washed, sorted, and gift-wrapped, but there would also be a more compassionate view: These people were traumatized by being born in the pretechnological days when they were trapped in a Huis Clos where you couldn't throw anything away because there was no Away, and so they developed a kind of Stockholm Syndrome towards the material world because there are psychic rewards in deciding that you love what you have to submit to anyway.

I don't think I'm the only exile from that world. Another aspect of my sf was the Robot Car, which would drive itself, so the person in the driver's seat would not have to be present, and while "driving" could safely talk on the telephone or even write letters. That would be nice, but I know I don't live in that reality.