Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

 

You can buy Brave New World...Here

You can find out about Aldous Huxley...Here

288 Pages

• The Blurb...

Welcome to New London. Everybody is happy here. Our perfect society achieved peace and stability through the prohibition of monogamy, privacy, money, family and history itself. Now everyone belongs.

You can be happy too. All you need to do is take your Soma pills.

Discover the brave new world of Aldous Huxley's classic novel, written in 1932, which prophesied a society which expects maximum pleasure and accepts complete surveillance - no matter what the cost.

• Our Review...

Compelling glimpse of the future set in what would be the year 2540 AD. The novel was written in 1932. So now in 2022, we are in 90 years into a 608 year journey i.e. 15% of the way there. And you can definitely see traits developing in our society that could end up in a Brave New World. 

I think Huxley would be amazed at how far along we are with regards to things like IVF, mass medication, paypal/bitcoin, fake news, Tinder and rampant capitalism. When you take it all into consideration its a bit scary how far down the line we are.

In reality this book is an extreme thought experiment. What would happen if you mixed the theory of mass production. (ala Henry Ford motor cars) which was still relatively new during Huxley's time and the theory of Pavlov's Dogs (link here) applying it to humans and then taking it to the extreme. We don't need AI to destroy our humanity, we can do it ourselves with bio-engineering.

The title Brave New World is taken from Shakespeare's Tempest where Miranda meets outsiders for the first time in her life and says. ‘Oh wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! Oh brave new world, That has such people in’t.’

The book follows a small cast of characters. Bernard and Helmholtz are both Alphas in the caste system but both are not quite right, not quite totally docile. Lenina a bog standard Delta and John aka The Savage, a man born in the old fashioned way not involving test tubes and jars and who was brought up on a reservation of wild indigenous tribes.

Humans are mass produced in labs. They are kept happy and content by programming and drugs. There is a constant flat-line of life. There are no wars, disasters, plagues, poverty or unemployment. All great you may say but there must be balance, so there is no love, no individualism, no self-reliance, no great artistic or cultural progress. Even scientific progress is highly restricted. Is the prize worth the cost? I think that would depend on who you ask. I think those in the lower strata of society may well conclude that the basics of life plus a lack of want are well worth missing out on opera, Shakespeare and quantum entanglement theory. But I think Love would be the big loss. The Love not just of a partner but of family too. Imagine no wife or husband, no mother, no father, no siblings, no grandparents. Is life worth living without Love? 

It is a short and easy read.

Really enjoyed the concepts presented. Only two points irritated. One of the main characters constantly quoted Shakespeare. Which in part was ironic in Huxley's society he was classed as a savage.  In addition I thought the end could have been more developed. But all in all hell of a book, one that will stay with me forever.

At some point I may do a compare and contrast 1984, A Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 and Blind Faith. 

• Selected Quotes...

"on the low floors were the presses and offices of the three great Lodon newspapers- The Hourly Radio, an upper- caste sheet, the pale green Gamma Gazette, and, on khaki paper and in words exclusively of one syllable, The Delta Mirror."

"Words can be like X- rays, if you use them properly- they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced."

"A man can smile and smile and be a villain. Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain."

"The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there's soma."

• If You Liked This Then You May Like...

1984 by George Orwell. Click our review...Here

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Click our review...Here

Blind Faith by Ben Elton. Click our review...Here

• About The Author

Aldous Huxley, in full Aldous Leonard Huxley, (born July 26, 1894, Godalming, Surrey, England—died November 22, 1963, LA. , U.S.), English novelist and critic gifted with an acute and far-ranging intelligence whose works are notable for their wit and pessimistic satire. He remains best known for one novel, Brave New World(1932), a model for much dystopian Science Fiction that followed. Aldous Huxley was a grandson of the prominent biologist Thomas Henry Huxley and was the third child of the biographer and man of letters Leonard Huxley; his brothers included physiologist Andrew Fielding Huxley and biologist Julian Huxley. He was educated at Eton, during which time he became partially blind because of Keratitis. He retained enough eyesight to read with difficulty, and he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1916. He published his first book in 1916 and worked on the periodical Athenaeum from 1919 to 1921. Thereafter he devoted himself largely to his own writing and spent much of his time in Italy until the late 1930s, when he settled in California. (from Brittania.com)