Atlas Shrugged and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
SPOILERS AHEAD!!!
I've heard about Atlas Shrugged, at least I've heard the title, but I didn't know what the book is about until I checked over at Wikipedia. The geniuses of the world go on strike, and run off and disappear?
The moment I read that, it reminded me of Douglas Adams' more elegant solution to the same problem, found in both the novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and the television series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. There, instead of the geniuses running away, they admitted that their society was made up of three components: first, the brains of the operations (themselves); second, the people who actually got the work done; and third, everyone else - the market researchers, hair stylists, public telephone sanitizers, that sort of stuff. And, since so much was being wasted on the third group, the third group was blasted off on a colonizing ship, convinced that they were to settle a new home planet in preparation for the other two groups that would follow in two other ships (they never did, of course, and never had intended to, but were instead wiped out by a plague that was caught from an unsanitized public telephone). The planet that the third group eventually colonized was, of course, Earth.
None of this is to be found in the film version of Hitchhiker's Guide, which was mainly notable for it's creation of a race of villainous aliens that all looked remarkably like Charles Laughton.