Technologically, it was a bit odd to look at a book supposed to be set around 500 years into the future, and they still don’t have computers/Internet/mobile phones/genetic engineering/nanotechnology/cloning/GPS/antibiotics/IVF/(and as the author later admits) nuclear power … … I mean, of course they didn’t if the first edition was written in 1932, clearly not the author’s fault for missing these,after all, science fiction writers are not infallible soothsayers,but it takes quite an imagination for somebody who has grown up with these things to picture a future without them.

What was more interesting than the technology (although his concept of a form of conception and gestation that is something like a mix of cloning, IVF, and incubating chickens under a heat lamp was intriguing), were his social ideas, with the societies in his book playing the roles of experimental groups. as with the technological predictions, socially we also had to suspend disbelief …they haven’t had a sexual revolution, a civil rights movement, the global spread of AIDS, a fear of over population and China’s one child policy, an awareness of global warming. Interesting, though, that his ideas on uninhibited sexuality came to happen in the 1960s and 1970s.

I had trouble understanding sometimes which side he was on morally. In the foreword of later editions, he expresses remorse for the fact that he had been a proponent of eugenics which he later decried after the Holocaust and the Nazi eugenics research. I did seem to detect a theme that most of the higher caste people seem to be European, and there were an awful lot of Africans in the lower caste groups (and he seems to have something against redheads as well). It seems as if for the most part he was saying that he thought it was great if we could segregate society according to predetermined roles without any room for social mobility. The only people that suffered were the odd exceptions who didn’t quite fit the mould. Then at the end, the lines blurred a bit, but he’s still holding on to this idea that social engineering is perfectly reasonable and achievable.

And then we have the famous soma, which has permeated into popular culture and I have certainly heard of before reading this book. I knew that Huxley had read about the soma of the Vedas, the hallucinogenic substance used for spiritual sacrifices to gods in the ancient Indo-Aryan religious texts. I was expecting there to be more of a moral judgement against using drugs for mind control to make society compliant. I almost wondered whether perhaps he actually thought that it was a good idea? Again, there was only really one character out of the entire society who suffered from soma, and that was only after she had been completely ostracised from society and irreparably depressed. I wonder if perhaps it is damaging tto portray such a wide scale use of such a powerful drug as so benign. Surely there were other people who suffered? Not that he should have to point the finger and say ‘drugs R bad’, but surely there could be issues of tolerance, dependence, a black market to get larger quantities, etc.

Overall I did quite like this book, but I think I came to it with too many preconceived notions about its content.

Not the best utopia book I’ve ever read, and at times it was a bit hard to follow, but it had a very interesting concept behind it. Enjoyable for the most part.

Perhaps each deserves to be considered on its own merits, but the comparison between Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four is inevitable. I found Orwell’s work to be the more engrossing, but Huxley paints a much more frighteningly realistic picture.

Apparently Orwell reviewed Brave New World in 1940 and claimed that it “probably cast no light on the future” (with the unspoken implication that his own work did). During the Battle Of Britain this was a very reasonable belief, but now that fascism has fallen out of favor and societal fear and deprivation are virtually unknown in the West the slow, pleasant decay of Brave New World seems much more probable. (That is not to say that there are not ways in which modern society distrubingly mirrors Oceania. Winston Smith would find the perpetual Wars on Terror and Drugs entirely familiar.)

The World State worships stability and happiness, which are certainly among the causes du jure in the United States currently. One of the principal purposes of people in Brave New World is to consume, and Americans seemingly have become consumers first, labor second, and citizens a distant third in the mindsets of corporate managers. People who lived in the shadow of Stalin may find Nineteen Eighty-Four realistic, but it is the Brave New World that is strikingly similar to my experiences.

There are times when it seems Huxley could use a dash of sublety. For example, the second chapter of Brave New World describes the Pavlovian conditioning of lower-caste toddlers that makes it quite obvious what a horrific process is occurring. Orwell, I think, would have written about the scene from the perspective of one of his characters who finds it perfectly benign, making the reader all the more disturbed when he begins to grasp what is truly happening. In other cases, Huxley uses this same technique quite effectively, as in the frequent emphatic statements that Bernard Marx is very different from the rest of the population while the reader sees by his actions that he is well conditioned indeed.

Unlike most of the books that I have been reviewing, I had previously read Brave New World 8 years ago. Although that is not a very long time, I found that I had completely forgotten the characters and plot of the book, and only found them very vaguely familiar as I read through the is a second time. I had very vivid and accurate memories, however, about the setting of A. F. 632 and the society of The World State. I suspect this is indicative of the contribution of the work: the saga of Bernard and the Savage are simply a vehicle for the social commentary and warning.

As an aside, my attempts to understand John’s allusions made me aware that my knowledge of Shakespeare has similarly atrophied. I know Hamlet well and have at least a fair memory of Macbeth and Romeo And Juliet, but I can only remember a single thing about A Midsummer Night’s Dream: that one of the characters is a fairy named Puck.