1. Dragnie Tagbord◦– Beautiful, brilliant, stylish, bold, fit, flirty, ‘n’ fabulous. She inherited Tagbord Rail from her grandfather, Old Man Pop Gramps “Professor” Zayde Poppa Tagbord, who built the transcontinental railroad empire single-handedly, with his bare hands, in the snow.
2. John Glatt◦– Handsome, brilliant, enigmatic, a genius engineer who becomes disgusted with society and goes into hiding, thus acquiring the stature of a messianic leader.
3. Hunk Rawbone◦– Handsome, brilliant, founder and sole owner and operator of Rawbone Metal. Rawbone invents Rawbonium, a miracle metal that “will save the entire U.S. economy.” Turn-ons: watching “heats” and “pours” of steel. Turn-offs: mean people, nice people, poor people, rich people, and his wife.
4. Sanfrancisco Nabisco Alcoa D’Lightful D’Lovely Desoto◦– Handsome, brilliant, a childhood chum of Dragnie while the two were growing up in different hemispheres. Heir to the Desoto Talc Mines in Chile, “World Capital of The Powder of Babies.” Spends all his time pursuing empty hedonism as a feckless playboy, which is the worst kind.
5. Regnad Daghammarskjold◦– Handsome, beautiful, attractive, brilliant, drop-dead gorgeous, tall and tan and young and lovely, a (naturally) blond Swedish pirate.
The plot of Atlas Slugged is lengthy and convoluted, but can be summarized thus: The U.S.—which is not exactly the U.S., as its government seems to have no Executive, Legislative, or Judicial branches—is run by “Mr. Thomas,” who has no first name. He is surrounded by a coterie of spineless bureaucrats, self-seeking careerists, hypocritical moralists, and contemptible weaklings. These men share a secret knowledge: that, all over the country, persons of achievement (businessmen, entrepreneurs, tycoons, moguls, big shots, etc.) are “disappearing.” One day they simply stop coming to work and utterly vanish, sending the national economy into a tailspin.
Meanwhile, every other country in the world (except, by the end, Goa) has succumbed to the urge to collectivize, and declared itself a “People’s State of the People.”
Throughout it all, Dragnie and Hunk Rawbone struggle to run their businesses, Desoto displays a seemingly callous indifference to the talc industry, Daghammarskjold rampages all over the bounding main… and everyone wonders aloud, “Who is John Glatt?”
Eventually it is revealed that Glatt has been constructing, in a secret valley in Wyoming, a hideaway for tycoons. Dubbed “Glatt’s Gorge,” it is there that the “disappearing” moguls have gone—a Meritocratic Retirement Community™ where rich men pursue their hobbies, artists-in-residence live for free and explore their vision, and the cares and vexations of the outside world (society, history, politics, poverty, children, race, disease, natural calamity, competition for resources, crime, corruption, pollution, hunger, terrorism, religious conflict, etc.) are forbidden by law.
Glatt’s Gorge is a combination Shangri-La, Brigadoon, and Camelot, and all—from the gold coins the community mints as its private currency to the custom-made cigarettes stamped with the Glatt’s Gorge symbol of the dollar sign and the exclamation mark—sustained in its concealment from the rest of the world by a sort of “lens” that projects a disguising image over its valley, to hide it from prying eyes. (Like another 1950’s novelist-philosopher, L. Ron Hubbard, Annyn Rant was unafraid to make use of the crowd-pleasing genre conventions of science fiction.)
Glatt’s scheme is to demonstrate to society what happens when its productive members, who philosophically object to labor unions and collective bargaining, decided to “go on strike,” to withhold their abilities and talents until the “leeches,” “moochers,” and “parasites” that comprise most of American society (and essentially all of humanity) show sufficient appreciation for the strikers. As the climax nears, the national economy deteriorates; Mr. Thomas and the fawning courtiers around him become increasingly desperate; and drastic measures are employed to persuade John Glatt to rescue the nation and demonstrate, to all mankind, the benefits of having a reclusive engineer control an entire nation’s economy.
It is a vast, winner-take-all epic set against an immense, brawling tapestry about a wild, untamed continent as passionate and sweeping as turbulent America herself. But it is more than that. It is also a love story, one in which both Hunk Rawbone and John Glatt love, and therefore desire, and therefore despise, Dragnie. She, in turn, loves and despises them.
The entire saga reaches its thrilling climax in a speech given by John Glatt. Commandeering a radio broadcast, Glatt (who has cannily concealed his true intent by behaving for most of the book like a monosyllabic, sulky child) expounds on his theory of existence, life, human nature, morality, creation, productivity, art, economics, virtue, ethics and the self. A masterpiece of high indignation and elevated rhetoric, Glatt’s oration is a forthright attack on those who preach that “Man has no mind.” He openly mocks those who would assert that “the Mind is impotent.” He explicitly refutes those who believe that “the individual self is worthless.”
The address is famous—or notorious—for its length. It has been estimated that, if read verbatim on an actual radio broadcast, Glatt’s Speech would take three hours to deliver and, since almost all people who listen to radio do so while driving, would so thrill, inspire, terrify, bore, outrage, or baffle listeners as to result in two hundred and forty-five traffic accidents and at least thirty-seven fatalities during a non-rush-hour time period.
The novel ends in a thriller-like flurry of imprisonment, torture, rescue, escape, and triumph. That it was, from its original publication in 1957 up until today, a best seller, should surprise no one. Half again as long as Ulysses and second in influence only to the Bible, Atlas Slugged is a titanic, sprawling epic set in a politically-imaginary America surrounded by a world that never existed, replete with science fiction devices and impossible technology, and all in the service of a 643,000-word treatise on “reality.” Small wonder tens of thousands of readers have, for more than fifty years, clamored for a sequel.
And yet it was not to be. Once written, Atlas Slugged AGAIN was blocked from publication, not only by its publisher, but by its author. As alluded to by my mysterious correspondent, the sequel’s character of “Nathan A. Banden” was thought by many (including Fandom House’s legal counsel) to be too clearly and obviously modeled on a real-life figure—a man with whom Annyn Rant engaged in an extramarital affair in the early 1960s, begun when she was age 50 and he (her protégé, acolyte, and business partner) was 25.
Conducted with the knowledge and consent of their respective spouses, the relationship ended four years later amid accusations of betrayal and disloyalty, and scenes of shouting, slapping, and banishment. Rant, who had dedicated AS both to her husband and to her young lover, removed the latter’s name from subsequent editions and repudiated much of his work with her.
Thus, rescued from oblivion, Atlas Slugged AGAIN arrives with a dual identity: as a perhaps too-rash reply to a faithless lover from a woman scorned, and as the inspiring sequel to one of the most inspirational, if controversial, novels of all time.
PART I
That That Is, Is;
That That Is Not, Is Not;
That That Is Is Not That That Is Not.
Is Not That It?
It Is.
Chapter 1
Where Eagles Dare to Gather