Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Description

Huxley's bleak future prophesized in Brave New World was a capitalist civilization which had been reconstituted through scientific and psychological engineering, a world in which people are genetically designed to be passive and useful to the ruling class. Satirical and disturbing, Brave New World is set some 600 years ahead, in “this year of stability, A.F. 632”–the A.F. standing for After Ford, meaning the godlike Henry Ford. “Community, Identity, Stability,” is the motto. Reproduction is controlled through genetic engineering, and people are bred into a rigid class system. As they mature, they are conditioned to be happy with the roles that society has created for them. The rest of their lives are devoted to the pursuit of pleasure through sex, recreational sports, the getting and having of material possessions, and taking a drug called Soma. Concepts such as family, freedom, love, and culture are considered grotesque.

Against this backdrop, a young man known as John the Savage is brought to London from the remote desert of New Mexico. What he sees in the new civilization a “brave new world” (quoting Shakespeare’s The Tempest). However, ultimately, John challenges the basic premise of this society in an act that threatens and fascinates its citizens.

Huxley uses his entire prowess to throw the idea of utopia into reverse, presenting us what is known as the “dystopian” novel. When Brave New World was written (1931), neither Hitler nor Stalin had risen to power. Huxley saw the enduring threat to society from the dark side of scientific and social progress, and mankind's increasing appetite for simple amusement. Brave New World is a work that indicts the idea of progress for progress sake and is backed up with force and reason.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was an extraordinary man who brought to his work a strong sense of the world into which he was born (amid the rarefied privilege of a distinguished English family), his own probing intelligence, and a restless soul. Huxley's grandfather was the eminent biologist and writer Thomas Huxley, who helped Darwin realize his theory of evolution, and his mother was the niece of poet Matthew Arnold (Huxley's brother Julian also became an esteemed writer and their half-brother Andrew won a 1963 Nobel Prize in physiology).

Success came early to Huxley, and he enjoyed poking fun at society's pretensions in some of his satirical novels like Crome Yellow and Antic Hay. The publication of Brave New World in 1932 marked a sea-change for Huxley. Growing maturity had brought him interest in political, philosophical, as well as spiritual matters that form the root of some of his other novels such as Eyeless in Gaza, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan and Time Must Have a Stop.

Editorial Review

“Community, Identity, Stability” is the motto of Aldous Huxley's utopian World State. Here everyone consumes daily grams of soma, to fight depression, babies are born in laboratories, and the most popular form of entertainment is a “Feelie,” a movie that stimulates the senses of sight, hearing, and touch. Though there is no violence and everyone is provided for, Bernard Marx feels something is missing and senses his relationship with a young women has the potential to be much more than the confines of their existence allow. Huxley foreshadowed many of the practices and gadgets we take for granted today–let's hope the sterility and absence of individuality he predicted aren't yet to come.