Author: Aldous Huxley · Published: 1932 · Genre: Dystopian fiction, Science fiction
Brave New World imagines a future where nobody has to be forced into obedience because everyone is too comfortable to object. Its ideas about pleasure, consumerism and engineered happiness feel more current now than when it was written. The novel wrapped around those ideas is weaker, with thin characters, a stop-start plot and a long debate near the end. Read it for the ideas.
What it’s about
The setting is London in the year 632 After Ford, a calendar counted from the launch of Henry Ford’s Model T. Humans are no longer born but grown in bottles at hatcheries and sorted into castes, from Alphas at the top down to Epsilons. Lower castes are produced in batches of identical twins and deliberately stunted. Everyone is conditioned from infancy, including through lessons played while they sleep, to love their place. Sex is casual, the words mother and father are considered obscene, and any bad mood is fixed with a drug called soma.
Bernard Marx, an Alpha who feels out of place, takes Lenina Crowne, a popular worker at the hatchery, on a trip to a Savage Reservation in New Mexico. There they meet John, a young man raised outside the World State who has learned most of what he knows about life from an old volume of Shakespeare. Bernard brings John back to London, and the novel turns into a study of what happens when someone who was never conditioned meets a society that has been.
What works
- The central insight. Huxley’s state controls people through pleasure rather than pain. Citizens are kept busy with entertainment, shopping, sex and soma, and they choose their own chains. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death built a whole argument on the contrast between Huxley’s vision and Orwell’s in 1984.
- The opening chapters. The tour of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre is chilling. Infants are taught to fear books and flowers with loud alarms and electric shocks, because a love of nature doesn’t make anyone buy anything.
- Mustapha Mond. The World Controller is not a cartoon tyrant. He has read the forbidden books, understands exactly what was given up, and argues that stability was worth the price. His case is unsettlingly persuasive.
- John’s Shakespeare. The title comes from The Tempest, and John uses Shakespeare’s language to measure a world that has no use for tragedy, poetry or strong feeling. The clash gives the second half its energy.
What doesn’t
The characters are mostly mouthpieces. Bernard is petty and resentful, Lenina is more a symbol than a person, and Helmholtz Watson, Bernard’s more gifted friend, barely develops. The plot stalls in the final third, where long conversations with Mond turn the novel into a debate club.
The portrayal of the reservation’s Native American inhabitants is crude and stereotyped, and it has not aged well. Huxley presents them mainly as dirty and primitive, a foil for the sterile World State rather than people in their own right.
The book has also been a regular target of censors. It was banned in Ireland in 1932, and it has been challenged repeatedly in American schools, usually over its sexual content and its treatment of religion and the family. Huxley later returned to his predictions in Brave New World Revisited, a nonfiction follow-up published in 1958, and concluded that some were arriving sooner than he expected.
Who should read it
Anyone interested in technology, consumer culture or politics, and anyone who has read 1984 and wants the other half of the argument. Readers who need strong characters and a gripping plot may find it a slog.
Rating: 4/5
Photo credits — Featured image: Photo by owenfinn16 via Flickr, CC BY 2.0, cropped. In-article photo: Photo by topgold via Flickr, CC BY 2.0, cropped.
