As a sign of the political tenor of the times, "The God of the Machine" was published in the same year as Rand's novel "The Fountainhead" and Rose Wilder Lane's "The Discovery of Freedom". Writer Albert Jay Nock wrote that Lane's and Paterson's nonfiction books were "the only intelligible books on the philosophy of individualism that have been written in America this century." The two women had "shown the male world of this period how to think fundamentally... They don't fumble and fiddle around – every shot goes straight to the centre." Journalist John Chamberlain credits Paterson, Lane and Rand with his final "conversion" from socialism to what he called "an older American philosophy" of libertarian and conservative ideas. Jim Powell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, considers Paterson, Lane, and Rand to be the three most important women of modern American libertarianism.