Ayn Rand is a problematic figure in the cultural landscape.

Her virulent anti-theism and repellent egoism, the foundations of her thinking, place her at odds with mainstream Judeo-Christian culture, making attempts by her admirers to soft-pedal her philosophy to Main Street America largely a fruitless endeavor. Supermen without foibles, her favorite Promethean character-types, are extremely difficult to identify with.

Yet over time, through her fiction, Rand did consistently convey essential economic truths about government and its persistent interference with human freedom that cannot be emphasized enough. In that beneficial respect, at least, Rand was ahead of her time.

Much as Ray Bradbury strove through his fiction to prevent the unhappy futures he posited, so did Ayn Rand.

By now many have heard of Atlas Shrugged (1957) and its hero, John Galt, an egoistic superman whose self-interested actions coincidentally keep the world running—but whose withdrawal from social participation could conceivably bring world culture down in ruins.

In Anthem (1938), however, Rand’s starting point is a world that has already been ruined. In fact, so thoroughly has it been destroyed that a John Galt-style rebellion is rendered virtually impossible. Only in a post-nuclear holocaust narrative could there be any bleaker outlook for the future than Rand posits here. Anthem is, therefore, a prime example of the dystopian novel:

[One] distinctive feature of Anthem is the impoverished, nearly primitive nature of the society it depicts — one where the candle is a relatively recent discovery, the inventors of which (a committee, of course) are immortalized in paint on the walls of the Council of Scholars. In most dystopian novels — whether those that preceded Anthem, such as Zamyatin’s We and Huxley’s Brave New World, or those that came later, such as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 — the totalitarian regime is depicted as commanding a vast array of high-tech tools for surveillance and manipulation.

But for Rand, the functioning of industrial civilization requires individual initiative and free exchange; any society that suppresses these as thoroughly as the one in Anthem does would pay the price of backwardness, and she depicts this result accordingly. — Roderick Long, “Rand’s Dystopian Masterpiece”, The Daily Reckoning, October 12, 2012

Rand’s quarrel in Anthem is with both the present AND the past:

… contemporary ideologies were not Rand’s only target. Rand was a dedicated Aristotelian and a lifelong critic of Plato, and many of the features of Anthem’s dystopia, such as government assignment of professions, state regulation of breeding and reproduction, and abolition of private property and the family, seem drawn from the recommendations in Plato’s Republic. The prohibition of the word “I” in favor of “we” is likewise a natural development of Plato’s dictum in the Republic that all citizens should say “mine” and “not mine” about the same things — a proposal criticized by Aristotle, who warns in his Politics that the attempt to give a community the same degree of unity as a single individual is doomed to disaster.

Moreover, [the character] Equality 7-2521’s journey down into an abandoned subway tunnel to discover an artificial light source turns on its head Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which the wise man ascends from the cave of physical reality, lit by the artificial light of the senses, to discover the “real” world of abstract Forms, lit by a sun of pure ineffable intellect. By reversing Plato’s parable, Rand, in Aristotelian fashion, reorients the pursuit of knowledge away from the supernatural and back to this world, to empirical reality. — Ibid.

Internet resources:

You can read Long’s article here.
A spoiler-laden discussion of Anthem is on Wikipedia.
And you can purchase Anthem from Amazon.com here.
Buy We here.
Brave New World here.
Atlas Shrugged here.
Nineteen Eighty-Four here.
And Fahrenheit 451 here.