Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
1932
Around 310 pages
This is the novel that Aldous Huxley was born to write; Antic Hay and Crome Yellow were clearly practice. I feel like most people have read this novel: either you were forced to read it in high school, or you were a rebel who would never read assigned novels, choosing to read subversive authors like Huxley and Thompson instead. So is it overrated? Let's see!
The novel takes place in the distant future, where citizens are engineered by artificial wombs and kept in a stupor with the drug Soma. Bernard Marx is a sleep specialist and a noncomformist. He's attracted to Lenina, a popular and sexually liberated hatchery worker. They take a holiday together to a reservation in New Mexico, where they experience a great deal of culture shock. They meet Linda, a former citizen of World State, and her natural born son. They take the pair back to London. Think Pocahontas 2, with less sexual tension.
A brilliant novel that fills me with a strong sense of doom. Is Huxley a soothsayer? I don't think we've had a dystopian/sci fi writer get it so right. I know we would have disappointed H.G. Wells with our lack of time machines in 2022. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to take my anti-depressants and get on with my day.
Oh, I'll admit it, I like 1984 better.
RATING: *****
Interesting Facts:
Title is taken from Shakespeare's The Tempest. Spoken by Miranda, who is an idiot...I mean, innocent:
"O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't."
Huxley took the name for the drug after the Vedic ritual drink Soma.
Has been banned at one time or another in China, Ireland, USA, and India.
UP NEXT: The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
1 comment:
We read this at school for GCSE. The teacher let the class decide by vote which one of three books we would study. No one really knew much about any of them so didn't really know what to say. In the silence while we considered how to address this problem, she added that Brave New World had a lot of sex so we probably shouldn't vote for it if we were easily shocked. The vote was unanimous.
Apparently after George Orwell published 1984, Aldous Huxley wrote him a long letter telling him what a good book it was but as a vision of the future it was far inferior to Brave New World and explained why at some length. Honestly, the ego of these people!
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