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There are a few key differences between Rand's heroes and Nietzche's, but the most important is cosmology.
The basic mechanism behind Nietzche is the concept of the Eternal Return; and while there are plenty of situations where philosophy has buggered up science, this is one where a scientific theory has buggered up philosophy.
The Eternal Return is an ultimate theory of the Universe; that if it is infinite, everything must, at some point, repeat exactly; and also eternally. It's an idea that was around from Ancient Greece, but found new life as an implication of Newton's theories, and, along with the Heat Death scenario, became the worm in the apple of 19th C optimism. After all, it destroyed the idea of true progress at a stroke - it appeared that the Universe was, at worst, a brief flicker, doomed to be extinguished; or at best, an elaborate puppet show, playing the same matinee over for eternity.
Nietzche took all this rather hard, understandably; it lead him to ultimately reject science - for what use is that in an irrational universe? - along with society, God, ethics and everything else. Ultimately, all that left him was his ego, with which, like a thermonuclear version of Oscar Wilde, he attempted to dynamite the vast joke of the cosmos.
Fortunately, Rand must have been away the day they were handing out the Eternal Return assignments. Her heroes, though they pick up more than a few notes from Nietzche, lack such a cosmology entirely, and replace it with a very general idea that the universe is benevolent (using life itself as evidence). Indeed, if people are ends in themselves, then life is an end in itself, then a cosmology as such is probably beside the point anyway. Hence Howard Roark may blow up a building, and John Galt let a corrupt society slide into the abyss, but there seems little doubt that unlike Nietzche's "blonde beasts", they prefer to leave the universe intact.
- Daniel
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