Brave New World

Perhaps you read this one in school, but most haven’t revisited the work since. I urge you to do so! People passionate about innovation need to keep humans foremost in their minds, not the machines (of any sort) that they create.

Huxley’s tale is famous because it’s both simple and profound. It’s also remarkably prophetic. As we focus intently on creating the new, this book reminds us of the bigger picture and calls into question the overall endeavor.

Early in my career, I was responsible for one of the world’s first smartphones. It was a wonderful achievement. But this book… show more.

Does this book qualify today as non-fiction? Everything about this tale is eye-opening and applicable to our present. Written during the Great Depression, this is a must-read for anyone who has a feeling that not everything is what it seems.

I adore the gripping narrative, notable arcs, and subtle humor, which give this stark tale some needed levity. I always come away from this book with a lot of questions: How can we as a civilization do better? How did Aldous Huxley so accurately portray life in the 21st century? If I had to build a bookshelf of must-reads for… show more.

The world Huxley describes in his 1932 novel is neither brave nor new. People are classified according to their intelligence, and fed into a system governed by a strict hierarchy. Sound familiar?

Not as bleak as some books set in dystopian worlds, but just as chilling for the brutish, sterile existence even the most favoured enjoy within the World State. Written as totalitarian movements were gaining strength around the world, this story of the struggle for individuality and the value of freedom is perhaps even more relevant today.

Reading the first pages of Brave New World is like falling down an elevator shaft. Once you begin, you cannot stop.

The people readers meet in Brave New World are, so to speak, content, fat, and happy. Enter John, someone who grew up outside the dystopian utopia and is not happy. Instead, he is disturbed by the swarm of narcissists that surrounds him. He feels loss. Loss of nature. Loss of simple kindness.

Like all the movie adaptions of this great work, he sees prolific vacuousness. Huxley uses John to illuminate the dark places of a future that uses technological… show more.

Brave New World really captures the societal risks associated with a technologically enhanced world. 

While Orwell describes the authoritarian risks of technology, Huxley looks at the disturbing ways that consumerism and capitalist culture can drive social control enhanced by technology. Hyper-sexualisation, pointless consumerism, eugenics, and drug fuelled hedonism, the world Huxley paints flags risks with our current tech-driven world in ways we cannot ignore. 

Like 1984, the resonance of Brave New World in modern society was deeply troubling and particularly poignant examples pepper my own book.

I read Brave New World when I was in college, and I was struck with the methods of controlling the masses through environmental conditioning and with the drug soma.

Huxley’s Brave New World has a caste system with everyone’s lane defined. Those who question the status quo are to be punished. Brave New World is considered by many to be one of the classic works of fiction. It will leave you with a fundamental question, could that ever happen to us? I believe the answer is yes!

When our English teacher explained the opposing worlds in this book, we were supposed to take a side.

I do not know about Mr. Huxley’s intentions upon writing this marvelous and entertaining work, but the title itself is sarcasm on the world to come. A society where people are genetically designed to belong to a class and perform according tasks in full enjoyment.

The upper classes waste time, having fun and sex driven by a drug, while who knows who or where, technology, goods, and food are produced and supplied.

In our world today, metaverse and virtual reality are that… show more.

Brave New World is both frightening and enticing at the same time. It confronts the reader with a perfectly managed society that is orderly and fine-tuned in so many ways so as to give a perfect superficial paradise-like veneer. The only problem is that when you look more closely at it as the “savage” did with the woman who is so willing to give up her body so freely to him, it’s cheap, inhuman, and hollow to the core. The society has no human value or substance.

Brave New World is a relatively well-known British novel, lazily classified as science-fiction. Instead, it is actually a dystopian novel that offers a view of the future that is not grim or tyrannical, like 1984, but passive and disheartening. Nobody is in pain in Brave New World, everyone is happy and acquiescing, enjoying the pleasure of the senses. I loved it for its satirical hints to Ford’s assembly line and for its prediction of what genetic engineering may do to society decades before the discovery of the DNA. It is a novel that creates a possible future from real… show more.

Another favorite novel of mine, Brave New World takes place in a near-future dystopian society where an authoritative government uses a drug called Soma to induce feelings of calm contentment in its own citizens. The highly addictive (and readily available) drug is meant to keep the populace happy and also to keep them from rebellion against a regime that dictates almost every aspect of daily life. When the main character, Bernard, takes a trip to a far-off “savage” village, he witnesses what people are like living entirely free from the constructs of “civilized” society – and from Soma. Loosely based… show more.