Brave New World

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.

This book has been constantly toted as one of the best books to read. Ever. And there is a reason for that. It is that good. Brave New World follows a man named Huxley who lives in a dystopian futuristic society where it follows three main rules: no privacy, no family, no monogamy. The caste system involves Alphas, who reigned supreme, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, who are noted as the father of science fiction. In this world, no one is born. They are all created, and when they are created into their caste systems, they are fed these rules… show more.

Aldous Huxley mistrusted human nature, fearing that our drive to find the path of least resistance would ultimately make gods out of our pleasures and desires. Tiktok and Netflix are numbing the masses with trash TV while YouTube shorts and the latest Marvel blockbuster distract us from meaningful connections with those around us. Huxley feared no one would want to read books and that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance, which is exactly how his novel is written. In Brave New World people were controlled by pleasure which ultimately led to their demise. 

One of these is not like the other. While this isn’t driven by a shaky narrator suffering from burnout or insomnia, addicted to drugs, or contemplating murder, this book was life-changing for me. I started reading it while commuting between California to New York City for work and it was the first time I’d ever felt compelled to write in a book. I can hear people gasping in disapproval, but I whipped out my pen and began to underline passages and comment in the margins on how the words applied to my life. There is so much profundity in a… show more.

I grew up in the 60’s & 70’s (though some people say I never grew up). Drugs and sex were seen as panaceas to most of what ails the world. “Make love, not war,” would bring an era of peace and prosperity, a messianic wonderland. Uh-uh. Brave New World raised a red flag: is such a utopia possible? In our present reality “free love” has diminished the idea of obligation. Recreational drugs have led to terrible addictions. In the novel unlimited sex and always-available drugs made for a dystopian world. Freedom unfettered by responsibility became an oppressive weapon. There are… show more.

Brave New World is a fascinating story that illustrates a dichotomy of a pleasure-seeking progressive society pitted against a rustic and rigid fundamentalist society. It’s the tale of McWorld and Jihad, of tyrannical Chaos and Order. I found myself haunted by the illustrations we see in this book, of how far society might break down social norms for the sake of being “advanced” as well as the image of a cloistered society that slowly loses its own grounding and civility as it clings to “the old way”. This was perhaps the hardest read of this selection, not a feel-good at… show more.

The grandfather of the dystopian novel, Brave New World presented us with a homogenized, mass-produced, sterile world where everyone speaks the same language, has the same beliefs, and are all born from the same artificial wombs. Whereas most dystopian fiction seemed centered around fears of knowledge being banned and removed, Huxley showed us a world filled with people with no desire to attain this knowledge in the first place, people content to fill their time self-soothing themselves with the happiness-inducing drug Soma. Well, Huxley showed us that and orgies, lots of orgies.