Brave New World

Title: Brave New World
Author: Aldous Huxley
Published: 1932, this Vintage edition is from 2007
Genre: Dystopia
Pages: 229




I've been lazy with updating again, and am now trying to get books read in February up here in February. This one, though, I finished about two hours ago. I've been wanting to read Brave New World for a long while, and a couple of weeks ago I found this and Brave New World Revisited at a second-hand book store. As I bought both, the owner said he'd only just put them on the shelves two days earlier.

This edition has two long introductions which I skipped in favour of jumping straight in to the ideal world. In the far away future, the population of the world is created in bottles, with genetic engineering and conditioning dictating whether you'll be 'born' an intelligent Alpha, a mass-produced drone worker of an Epsilon, or something in between. Everyone belongs to everyone, and everyone is told what to think and buy: everyone is happy, drugged and having sex all around. Well, most everyone. Bernard Marx is a bit of a loner, more interested in one special girl than all of them, and would rather talk than take the drug Soma. He gets a chance to visit a reservation where savages still live like the animals human race was in the days before Ford.

Some of the terms and ideas seem old-fashioned in today's world of crazy technology, but these things were impossible to predict back when Huxley wrote Brave New World. What's scarily accurate is how we're growing as a species into the happy consumers he created. I'm going to have to check out Brave New World Revisited as soon as my brain has mulled this one over. It's not written as a clear sequel to this one: Huxley visits the world he created after some years have passed and compares it to how our world has changed. Gonna have to read those introductions I skipped as well...


   'Charming! But in civilized countries,' said the Controller, 'you can have girls without hoeing for them; and there aren't any flies or mosquitoes to sting you. We got rid of them all centuries ago.'
   The Savage nodded, frowning. 'You got rid of them. Yes, that's just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them . . . But you don't do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It's too easy.'


On a lighter note... there was an amusing similarity with Brave New World and Hot Valley. In HV, one of the main characters ends up working in a theater called Alhambra, where he and a few other men have to put up a secret sex show (they don't really mind!). In BNW, two of the main characters go to a feely at the Alhambra, a movie for all senses, which has pretty much the same sex-filled plot as the show in Hot Valley. I don't know if it was an intentional similarity or not, but it did make me giggle.