Brave New World
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4.8 • 16 Ratings
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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
We are already there
It is happening, has happened and will happen: the utopic dystopian events that lead to the death of free thinking.
This book as been a fantabulous (in a grim way) and well-articulated eye opener for me, as I myself have experimented with psychedelics and have the reached the same conclusion that swimming in a sea of irrelevance is no better than drowning in pain caused by war and suffering. Pleasure, convenience and distractions as just as effective tools of control as surveillance, repression and propaganda. I’ve read 1984 and I believe that the Western society is much closer to Huxley’s anti-utopia.
Huxleyan society eliminates agency and responsibility. The populace is essentially treated like infants, dependent on their parents and unable to develop into fully realised people capable of experiencing all the highs and lows of maturity.
Even though it would seem alluring to some to go back to their carefree childhood years when no one seemed to worry about anything and someone else handled all the "burdens" behind the scenes, that sounds like an absolute nightmare to me.
People have to be given a happy drug by the state to keep them in this kind of static, unchanging, and ultimately miserable existence; otherwise, they wouldn't be content to be coddled like children for generations on end, with little to no real control over the course of their own lives. A prison cell will always remain a prison cell no matter how much beautiful sunlight streams in through the window.
Brave New World's ambiguity is one of its main creative elements. Is this hell or heaven? Its greatest significance to me stemmed from its questioning of the pursuit of happiness. Huxley depicts a world in which everyone is content despite the lack of human rights and numerous moral transgressions. Is happiness sufficient in and of itself to make a good life, or is there more to it? Indeed there is given that happiness becomes transient and artificial without the presence of individuality and the power to choose. The latter, in turn, contributes to dilemmas and suffering in life and like the Ouroboros or the vicious cycle of death and rebirth aka suffering and experiencing joy, life sustains meaning.