Brave New World
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4.1 • 34 Ratings
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- $0.99
Publisher Description
Brave New World is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by only a single individual: the story's protagonist. Huxley followed this book with a reassessment in essay form, Brave New World Revisited (1958), and with his final novel, Island (1962), the utopian counterpart. The novel is often compared to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Brave New World at number 5 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 2003, Robert McCrum, writing for The Observer, included Brave New World chronologically at number 53 in "the top 100 greatest novels of all time", and the novel was listed at number 87 on The Big Read survey by the BBC.
Customer Reviews
What is happiness??
You find in this dystopian society that it is not the same as pleasure, you can only be happy if you also have the choice to be unhappy. Am divided, if given the choice I would want to live in their civilized world, stability seems so nice, but I know I would end up like Bernard, or helmholzt (my favorite character) too self conscious, too much of an individual to be stable, I would end up miserable. Maybe if I was perfectly conditioned, than it would work. happiness is found in being satisfied with what you have, who you are, true. Meaning is found in progress, knowing and striving to be better, there is suffering in striving to be better. Yet, I don’t want to suffer, (me and this book can agree on this), and without it there is no meaning and in the absence of meaning there is no happiness, art, beauty or god but there can be pleasure and stability. So is it worth it? Maybe not for Mr.Savage, who is self conscious of what he must sacrifice for stability, maybe not for Bernard and Helmholtz who are self-conscious of an emptiness soma can’t hide. But maybe it’s worth it if you didn’t know what you were sacrificing, without self-consciousness happiness is pleasure.