Science Fiction Book Review: Anthem by Ayn Rand

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Some readers may already be familiar with Ayn Rand, but for those who aren't, she was a Russian of Jewish descent but athiestic outlook who emigrated to America after the Bolshevik revolution and eventually became a full-time writer. She's known for being the founder of an individualistic philosophy called Objectivism, which emphasises the use of reason and personal responsibility to act in one's rational self-interest. Her early work was as a writer of fiction, but even before she developed Objectivism, her stories had an individualist, pro-freedom emphasis. Rand had four novels published in ther lifetime: "We The Living", which is set in post-civil war Russian, "The Fountainhead", which is set in contemporary America, "Atlas Shrugged", which is set in near-future American with some science fiction elements, and "Anthem", which has a very different style from the romantic-realist style of Rand's other fiction. "Anthem" was first published in1937, and is set in some indefinite future time, centuries or maybe thousands of years after our time. Our civilisation is long gone, replaced by an extremely collectivised society that relies on primitive technology - they've only recently (about a century before the time the novel is set) re-invented the candle. These people are so primitive they even think that the Earth is flat. One of the interesting things about science fiction is that it can enable the reader to see things from the point of view of a character who has been brought up with a completely different set of beliefs. The story is told in the first person, in the form of a journal being kept by the hero, whose name is Equality 7-2521. This is how it starts: "It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think, and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. It is base and evil. It is as if we were speaking alone to no ears but our own. And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone. We have broken the laws. The laws say that men may not write unless the Council of Vocations bid them so. May we be forgiven!" You can see Equality's problem, can't you? Not once does he refer to himself as "I", it's always "we". And from that you can infer how messed up his society is. The whole population has been indoctrinated to think in terms of the group, and never the individual. The word "I" has been eliminated from the language. And at the start of the book, Equality sees nothing wrong with this - he's a product of the society he was brought up in, so he think's he's the problem and not the system. In this future society, there are no families - children are brought up in the equivalent of orphanages, and subjected to constant indoctrination to eliminate any concept of the individual. Equality 7-2521 has always been a bit of a misfit, more intelligent than his teachers and asking too many questions, which earns him frequent punishments. He has an enquiring mind, and his ambition is to be a "scholar" (scientist) when he leaves school. But in this society, you don't choose your own career - at age 15, the Council of Vocations tells you what you're job is going to be, and Equality is assigned to be a street sweeper. After he's been working as a street sweeper for a couple of years, Equality accidentally finds an ancient railway tunnel that no-one else knows about. This gives him a private place of his own for the first time in his life, and he starts sneaking off to the tunnel during his spare time and gathering documents and equipment that he steals from the Home of the Scholars (where the scientists live), studying nature and carrying out experiments. While he's doing this, he also meets and falls in love with a girl called Liberty 5-3000, who works on a farm adjacent to one of the roads that Equality sweeps. This is another "sin", since people aren't supposed to form individual friendships, let alone fall in love. It's a nightmare society where everything is centrally planned by committees. Even sex is regulated by the Council of Eugenics. After some time experimenting in his tunnel, Equality stumbles on a discovery previously unknown to his society - electricity. He manages to construct a simple battery which generates enough power to make a length of wire glow. Although he doesn't fully understand the nature of what he's discovered, he realises that - properly developed - this new power could revolutionise his society. Naively expecting the authorities to welcome this new discovery and forgive his "transgressions", Equality 7-2521 plans to present it to the Council of Scholars, with a plea to let him join them and help to develop it. You can imagine their reaction. This is only a short novel, and the problem with writing a review like this is running the risk of giving too much of the plot away. Suffice it to say that this is not the end of the story, and Equality 7-2521 embarks on a journey that results in him re-discovering the "cursed word" (according to the evil society that brought him up), also known as the "sacred word". It's the story of how he comes to understand his own value as an individual, and therefore the value of other individuals, and the virtue of being able to choose solitude or voluntary cooperation over coerced association. In the end, it's a story of hope and rebirth.