A new anthology reveals the perils and rewards of philosophical fiction.
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Blending fiction and philosophy is more akin to chemistry than art: It involves creating a synthetic element that rarely occurs in nature in stable form. Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, and Ursula Le Guin have successfully married the two disciplines, but like many lab-created chemicals, works of philosophical fiction are often volatile and downright toxic. An extreme example can be found in the work of Ayn Rand, whose Objectivist novels can be considered a kind of radioactive waste a hazardous substance that nevertheless glows irresistibly in the eyes of the uninitiated. That is to say, when philosophical fiction is bad, it’s really bad.